The Living Wage protesters are now entering day five of their hunger strike. These protesters are demanding equitable pay for our least paid workers. The protestors have proven, in every regard, to be honorable and courageous citizens of our community, collectively demanding that our University act in a way which allows the hardest working employees to earn a wage ensuring the basic necessities of life are affordable. These students are consequently beacons of hope for equality and justice. Because of their profound level of social activism, these individuals will be leaders in the future, remembered by generations to come for changing, or perhaps demolishing, systems of inequality which force men and women into states or conditions of dire poverty.
These students, to reiterate, did and continue to sacrifice their physical bodies for a cause that is morally and socially responsible. It appears as if they have pondered over the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who once noted, "There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right."
Conscience, my friends, is something that is innate. It is our morality, integrity and ethics. It is something that holds us all together. It is the moral fiber of our society which prevents us from returning to a state of barbarity, backwardness and incivility. I'm afraid we have forgotten that, as conscious human beings, we have the moral responsibility to assist those who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy. We have become politically apathetic and have allowed the Board of Visitors and administrative officials to act in ways which are immoral, particularly in terms of their failure to guarantee a living wage.
More emphatically, and perhaps just as importantly, we have neglected to hold our student leaders accountable. I went to yesterday's Student Council meeting, at which Council was asked to vote on a measure which would have shown the Board, which is meeting tomorrow, that the student body has united with the strikers in support of a living wage. Our morally irresponsible leaders insisted they could not vote on the measure because they did not know enough information.
As a result of such an insistence, it becomes necessary to ponder the following questions: Are our elected officials caught up on current University affairs? Are they merely trying to boost their r
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