Opinion: Keep Your Obnoxious Flyers Off Campus

By Mason student Eamonn Rockwell

I am admittedly somewhat anti-social in unfamiliar settings. It’s not that I hate interacting with people; it’s just that I hate making an ass out of myself in front of total strangers. At a school of however many thousands of people Mason has, this is surprisingly easy to avoid, as you tend not to see the same people every day, if ever. Without the distraction of actually having to interact with people in order to make Mason anything other than a huge Matrixesque machine, I can sit around watching “Italian Spiderman” on my laptop in the Johnson Center if I ever find a working outlet. On a side note, go watch “Italian Spiderman” on youtube. It’s brilliant.

However, my fun is usually spoiled when someone hands me a flyer for some lame party in one of the many god-awful DC nightclubs, something about why we shouldn’t eat delicious animals, sketchy coupons nobody in their right minds would want to use (particularly the coupon good for one free rape in the Rape Woods) or some other thing that I don’t care about that is merely an excuse to tear down trees and distribute to students with better things to do.

I suppose this is just beating a dead horse, but I don’t want to be handed a bunch of trash by people on my way to and from classes. I especially don’t want to be handed a bunch of advertisements from kids who don’t understand that they’re nothing but poorly-paid tools for corporate shills. Handing out a bunch of ads gives the Mason campus even more of an atmosphere of caring about nothing but sucking every last penny from students who don’t have better options in life. It makes the camps uglier both physically when people throw these ads in the trash and miss, and spiritually in the sense that it turns the campus into a giant corporate whore willing to do whatever a corporation wants if they have the money, no matter how perverted (mainly the 2 Girls 1 Cup advertisements all over campus).

Although I suppose this is not entirely unexpected. Mason likes to raise tuition without improving things like education, housing (for the few people who can get it), campus life, etc. And don’t give me that “blah blah blah it’s an improving school” BS. They’ve been saying the same thing about Flint, Michigan for years and if I recall correctly, Flint is more terrifying Mordor would be under the leadership of Ed Gein. But this isn’t about how Mason blows (I’m saving that for graduation, if and when I ever graduate); it’s about how much I want to punch people in the face when they try to hand me something as I’m trying to go to class.

But as much as I hate those who hand me paper that could have served everyone better as a tree, at least they stay in one place and can be avoided. Towards the end of last year, I was approached no less than four times by religious organizations when sitting in the third floor of the Johnson Center. Three of those times it was by the same Catholic Korean group that barely spoke English and just tried to shove some flyer in my hand and get money out of me, despite the fact that I had a big sign next to me saying “I DO NOT GIVE MONEY TO CATHOLIC KOREAN ORGANIZATIONS!” written in both English and Korean. The other time was by the Catholic Campus Ministry or whatever they’re called (apparently Catholics have a lot of time to go around and bother me while I’m dicking around on the internet), who proceeded to try and ask me scientific sounding questions that were obviously baited so that one had to either completely accept religion or completely deny it when asked. Furthermore, the two gentlemen also told me about how Islam instructs followers to kill nonbelievers, which I had just learned in my Arabic class that same day was completely untrue. It’s bad enough when I get annoyed and told lies on the way to class, but to get annoyed and lied to while on my leisure time is just unacceptable.

So for those of you who have read this and are missing the underlying message (which is understandable as staying on point is something I generally fail at), it is this: stop handing me stuff when I’m walking around campus. Don’t know what I look like? Assume I’m a male, female or transgender individual between the ages of 10 and 70, and then don’t hand me the stupid flyer, petition, dead baby/mutilated animal picture, Lyndon LaRouche magazine, or anything else you might be handing out. By doing so, you save the environment both by chopping down fewer trees and by making Mason less of a giant soulless billboard and more like something that resembles an institute of higher education.