by Michael Richards
Welcome back to campus! The first week of the school year here at Evergreen has brought about a lot of drama and distasteful actions as we here hit not only with a pile of homework we didn’t expect and residual COVID anxiety, but a slew of wannabe frat boy YouTubers that have seemingly never felt the touch of another human being and are so pissed off about it they harass anyone that won’t flash them. When I started this article, it was to find out how students were feeling about being back on campus and their thoughts on in-person classes and all things COVID. In a (somewhat) surprising turn of events, most conversations I had around safety on campus quickly turned to something much more sinister; the safety of women and gender non-conforming students on campus. This is a situation that would, according to common sense, draw the attention of our campus police department to take some action and try to assure students that they are here to protect us against any nutjobs that manage to get on the grounds. Instead of doing this, campus police decided to tell concerned students that there was nothing they could do because no laws had explicitly been broken. Multiple student reports referred to the cops saying that these idiots must be “professionals” because they had not done anything noticeably violent.
Great! Cool. Sick. It’s good to know that the only people on campus with the authority to remove someone that is being abusive think that cat-calling, body shaming, and holding a big ol’ sign that says “These Guys Get Pussy” think these actions are okay. These eunuchs aren’t Evergreen students, and they flew up here from Southern California just to make the school look bad. I’m not here to make cops seem like the best way to go about solving issues like this, but if they are going to take the funding and be put in the position to “serve and protect” it would be nice for them to listen to students choosing to approach them.
As a child I feared the woods and Halloween-time because they brought images of ghosts and ghouls and ancient hauntings. But now, it has become obvious that the only ancient thing that haunts this campus is not something supernatural, but the ghosts of misogyny and toxic masculinity the world can’t seem to shake off.
