Politics. Ah, Politics. My first love, and my greatest bane. The very word itself sounds like the gnashing of a Velociraptor’s teeth. It’s angry, aggressive. The long favoured pastime of the backstreet brawlers of the intellectual class.
You will find, if you weren’t already aware, that this university, like almost all universities, is positively infested with Politics. The place is quite literally riven with the stuff; it drips from the walls like cornstarch blood in The Amityville Horror franchise. It’s everywhere. From the deepest recesses of the Computer Science Department to the York Sport changing rooms. For most of us, arriving here from a world where being interested in politics made you a sort of mild curiosity, being asked inane questions at parties about how many members of the cabinet you can name, you’ll find that there is real truth to the expression “It never rains but it pours”, and if you’re not too careful, it’s all too easy to find yourself well out of your depth.
My own career as a political soldier has, I’ll admit, been rather short and uninspiring. When all’s said and done, I just lacked the necessary resolve for the front line. My own idea of a good political discussion is philosophically chatting over a pint in The Courtyard, generally spurning all the soap box rhetoric and general unpleasantness that comes with going toe to toe with the opposition, staring into the whites of their wide, hate filled eyes, as they throw spittle flecked indignation at you.
Similarly, i’ve always been more of a fan of grandiose, slightly wacky visions of how to reinvent the world than the location of the decimal point in an OBR study, the sort of wonkery which is key for doing battle in the activist trenches. It’s not for me. I leave it to the professionals.
But as we, like festival stewards, having seemingly only just cleared the fallout from last year’s proceedings, brace ourselves for the influx of a new first year class and its usual share of would be ideological agitators, I will take a moment to say this.
If, be you a fresh arrival or one of our seasoned gladiators, you decide this year to strap on your sword and buckler and dive into the fighting pit crying hell for leather; then I salute you, may the witty put downs be ever in your favour. But, please, I implore you, do me this small courtesy. Try and remember that the opposition you’re dealing with when it comes to any political schism almost certainly believes in what they do because they, in their heart of hearts, feel that it is right and good.
They may be wrong, but they’re probably not stupid (they go to the same university as you remember) and they’re definitely not, as it seems a worrying number of this university’s political diehards believe, cut from the same mould as moustache twirling, turn of the century, silent movie villains. I can tell you, having met a fair few, that people of a Right Wing bent do not, generally, take pleasure from the misfortune of the poor and the elderly; and similarly that the University Feminist cohort are not, all told, angling towards a world where the male race are domesticated slaves, battery farmed for reproductive purposes like so many chickens.
Ultimately, don’t let your politics rule your life at York, particularly if you’re a fresher. Don’t let it limit your friends and separate the university population for you into geometrically opposed factions like an American High School movie. In the end, I guess my message is this. Let’s try and keep the skirmishes more civilized this year, politer, classier and more dignified.
Let’s behave like the academics that we supposedly are, having spirited, intellectual debates about the big issues of our day and how we should govern ourselves. Not brawling and name calling in the mud like a bunch of pugnacious, cut-throat thugs, or Members of the House of Commons, but I repeat myself.