I love paper.
Let me correct myself: I love recycling paper. I particularly enjoy the sound of crinkling white page corners being tossed into a large colored bin. But besides that, paper is a horrid waste of space.
Despite my best efforts, pamphlets, brochures and lecture notes are impractical for someone as unorganized and spatially dysfunctional as me, and they make my room look like a pigsty.
Yet here I am, 15 brochures in hand — none of which I’ll read — provided lovingly by Free Speech Plaza to make me feel like a guilty, unproductive waste of space.
Yes, I would love to join your club and listen to your speech, but if I was actually captivated by your group’s mission, I wouldn’t be rushing by, taking your papers out of courtesy rather than necessity. I would be at your booth interacting with your members.
After bearing witness to an hour of the hustle and bustle that is Free Speech Plaza, I came to the best conclusion I could — people love free stuff like magnets and cups, but they hate free paper.
The majority of the students I spoke with told me that of all the material they’re handed in Free Speech Plaza, they only read about 10 percent of it, meaning it either gets thrown away immediately or shoved in a booksack and forgotten forever.
It’s a cold world out there for paper, becoming a pariah to modern day society.
But it’s a far worse existence with unnecessary amounts of paper than it is without it.
As landfills across the world continuously expand and toxic materials are dumped ruthlessly in other countries, the least we can ask of our campus is to stop using paper as a means of supposedly maintaining and voicing our First Amendment rights.
In terms of free speech, paper isn’t of enough importance to people to make a difference. In the end, it’s just another sad excuse for progress and complete misuse of the pure product.
I love free speech, but words on paper don’t speak to me the way the members of a student organization should.
I need, as many other students do, a direct interaction to know that this is where I belong.
I don’t see paper as a way to introduce myself to a group. I see it as an obligation or a reading assignment.
Hannah Paul, pre-veterinary sophomore, said, “I would much rather be handed an item I could actually use, like the people who handed out gum packets with their information on