who's stealing the pro-choice task force board?

i know it's not exactly a masterpiece of public art on the scale of, say, the "swarthmore students advocating life" board -- no pretty colors, no pockets full of handy dandy antichoice propaganda -- but i don't think it deserves destruction. allow me to catalogue the things which have been removed from our board so far this fall: every time the word "pro-choice" appears it has been taken, a total of four times. the contact info three times. most of the fliers, gone. i know this has been a problem for a lot of student groups this year, but the particular fascination with "pro-choice" (whoever they are, they always leave "task force" alone) really bugs me.

the larger question here is, what the hell is going on at swarthmore? now, i know it's common knowledge that college seniors tend to long for the good old days, defining "good old days" as "my freshman year," but several of my friends have been concerned enough about the conventionalization (that may or may not be a word, but it's definitely the concept i want) of the incoming classes in the last few years that they have talked to deans about it. and guess what: the deans see it too. ever since swat became a "name" through the US News rankings (damn them!) its freshman classes have been less and less wacky, idiosyncratic lefties and more and more abercrombie-wearing republican-leaners...just to make one more in my long personal series of underjustified overgeneralizations.

it's true, though. the proportion of real characters in any given class has dropped every year i've been at swat. the classes two and three years above us were full of cross-dressing, naked-sunbathing, nader-voting, sandal-wearing weirdos. and i miss them. and i'm sorry to say that, rational or not, the tendency toward conformity and (at least social) conservatism among swatties is disturbing to me at least in part because of what it seems to mean for pro-choice task force. or at least the public face thereof. (not that i actually believe that the brand name kids are stealing my signs. rather that the current social atmosphere here somehow makes that more OK.)

and it's no use telling me that i should get used to it, that this is the sort of thing that i'm going to face in the real world. i never thought swat was designed to approximate the real world. i never thought it should. i don't think things are necessarily better by virtue of being part of "the real world." people vandalize in the real world, and people are conservative and anti-choice and mean about it. nothing can convince me that that's the sort of "real world" i actually want to occupy.