q1592684838_9225Ah the beauty of blogging! If I can’t get anyone else to tell my story then I can always do it myself. So here it goes:
I recently applied for a Senate position with my school’s Associated Student Organization (ASO).  I was called back to interview and I got the run around.  The person who would be conducting the interview was James Butler Zatino. He is the current president of ASO and does wield considerable influence in the process.  After playing phone tag, after trying to track him down I finally get an interview.  The interview goes pretty well, with my nervousness I do fumble a little but I recover overall. He asks me if the position I wanted was not open would I be willing to accept another one. I tell him yes. So I hear back from him and he says,  these are the positions available and for me to pick one.  He tells me to come back later that day at about 1 to let him know what position I picked. I get there and he is not there.  So I leave a message telling him what position I picked.  I run into him later and let him know I want the Senator at large position and that is when it all falls apart.
I am asked straight out, what is my political position? I tell him that I amasologoconservative and he winces as if I actually stabbed him or committed some other violent act against him.  He asks me how to conservative, so I jokingly tell him “I make Rush Limbaugh look like a flaming liberal.”  He then tells me, “Well you are going to have to represent all the students.” I tell him, “I don’t have a problem with that but though I will represent the liberal students I will not tell the conservative students who come to me that I am not going to listen to them or that their voice can’t be heard as well.” Well that doesn’t fly with him.
cornerI was supposed to be appointed the following week. He doesn’t show up and no one can find my paper work so it is going to have to wait until the following week. Then yesterday right before I was to get appointed I get two calls. One tells me appointments are being postponed and then the other telling me they have gone with someone else.
It was then that I went to the Dean of Student Life at Los Angeles City College and filed a complaint.  I am also in the process of talking to http://www.campusreform.org about the situation. I will also be heading to my school paper to let them know what is going on.  This should not be tolerated.
The thing is I don’t have embrace liberal ideology to be able to represent the students as a whole in the Senate.  Just like they don’t have to embrace my conservative ideology.  The thing is that they want a yes man, someone will just go along for the ride and not make any waves. Well they are not going to get that in me. I can represent all students because  I will listen to all students and take the best ideas from them and run with them.  But they just want a liberal parrot.  I wasn’t going to lie or downplay my conservatism. I feel they should know exactly who they are they getting  and if this was a club on campus like the Liberal Lions or some other club that pretty much catered to only liberal minded students then that is one thing. But you can’t say you represent the student population when you clearly do not!
This is not also the first time something like this has happened to me.  I was up for an internship during August. It was a paid internship. I would be helping to recruit students and organizing events. To show my experience in organizing political events-though truth be told they were small-I told them about my work with Silent No More Awareness Campaign and the male professor on the committee who is a political science professor-laid into me. “Well we are pretty far left do you think you could promote our agenda?”  He went from “pretty far left” to “extremely left” to trying to bait me about my abortion views. He was antagonistic and all in pretty obnoxious and I was glad I wouldn’t have to be working with this man. With his hostile attitude I thought they might be staging a coup d’etat or something. The fellow student I would’ve been working with was nice,  friendly and even if he was “extremely left” he had the common decency not to display any such obnoxious and unprofessional behavior! He was definitely a class act which is more than I can say for that professor! I don’t remember his last name but his first name was Zack and I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to work with him, I think we could’ve learned a lot from each other.
Things need to change at LACC and while I don’t think I am entitled to any position, I do think  it is unfair to be offered the position and then have it withdrawn, for no other reason then they don’t like my politics.  Well you know what ASO and Professor Hateful, I don’t like yours either! And if you think you are going to get away with treating students so abominably-you got another think coming!