In order to move forward together with anything, anytime, our community has to listen to each other in all things. I disagreed with the Galpin Call-in demonstration because it did not reflect much of the work this campus’ organizations have spent decades fighting for. There are still rules and requirements to fulfill for a protest. To do so effectively takes preparation, planning, participation and direction from everyone supporting it.

Last Wednesday, the students of this campus were given too little to go on, with too little sincerity. Part of the message and all of the power lies in the people and their appearance. Our righteous anger, our pain and sorrow, the heat we feel when faced with our racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic and transphobic community, was not present. We left it at home because it didn’t feel necessary with the few directions we were given. This emotion and experience is what binds us; it is imperative that we never lose it. There can be no union and no solidarity without a holistic understanding of events and demands. It requires a level of trust that is lowered when the head is able to act without the body.

Last week on Thursday, there was a debrief of the demonstration held in the Babcock basement. There were comments, questions and debates living on this campus, all from people who disagreed with this unpopular opinion: that the demonstration was not everything it could have or should have been.

Those people are the reason for this viewpoint, because it is their size and power that is needed to invoke change on a campus that treats us like some social experiment to see how long human beings can go willingly into debt for services and attention that they never receive.

How long can they go with us pretending to care, pretending to act on promises that don’t fit our own priorities? How long will they allow Wooster to go understaffed and underpaid? How long will they stand for watching each other be verbally and physically assaulted simply walking home from class? How long will they take in prospective students for us, so we can exchange one paycheck for another, and subject them to the same treatment?

If you’re a student or faculty or staff, a parent or alumni, and reading this is filling you with anger and sadness and the desire for more and better, I want you to ask yourself whether what you are feeling right now was present last Wednesday or if you were asked to think about this as seriously as you were last week.

This attitude is what is necessary to face administration. If we do not teach them that our pain and discomfort and righteous anger is real and sacred to us, they can never respect it. The only way this can happen is by looking at their own seriousness about maintaining a peace that harms us. We have to look that determination in the face, and together, as a whole, we must give them our answer.

Bird Jackson, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at HJackson18@wooster.edu.