Darts & Laurels

You finally make it back to your apartment after what feels like the longest day of your life. Between classes, meetings and your third Study Edge review of the week, you want nothing more than to plop down on the couch with a glass of wine and the fuzziest of fuzzy blankets.

After changing into your oldest and most worn-in sweatpants and the UF class of 2019 shirt you wouldn’t dare wear in public, you plant yourself on the sofa and start scrolling through Netflix. After deciding you’ve already watched everything worth watching, you decide your best option is to rewatch “House of Cards” for the fourth time since its release.

As the opening credits of the pilot episode come to a close, you realize something is a little different. Your dazed mind watches Frank Underwood turn toward the camera in an oh-so-dramatic manner. You expect him to say the same thing he has the three other times you’ve seen this episode, but instead he says:

Darts & Laurels

As we are sure most of you know, the Fall 2017 Student Government election came to a close Wednesday night. Shockingly enough, our first laurel of the week goes to the results of the election.

For the first time in a while, the Student Body elected a bipartisan senate. The final tally left us with 20 senators from Inspire Party and 30 senators from Impact Party (one position was a tie, but since it was between two Impact candidates, Impact will get the seat). Since there are still 50 senators who were elected in Spring, most from Impact, Inspire is still very much outnumbered in Senate. But this can still bring a brighter future to SG. With representation from two parties, senators will hopefully start to work together. At least there will be some debate now and then.

Unfortunately, with most laurels comes a dart, and the SG election this year was no different. Although we saw a slight increase in voter turnout by 1,206 votes, that still means only 8,599 ballots were cast over the course of two days of voting. On a campus of more than 52,000 students, this means that only about 16.5 percent of UF students voted.

Our question is: Why? We are lucky enough to get the opportunity to have a say in the future of our campus and our school, so why not put that privilege to good use? The unimpressive voter turnout this year was not unexpected, but it was still disappointing. We would like to believe that more people would vote if an online system were put in place without being rescinded a few months later by the Supreme Court, but we digress. Regardless, we award the low voter turnout our first dart of the week.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rico has been hit with constant darts over the past few weeks due to Hurricane Maria. As of Thursday, millions were still without power and almost half of the island didn’t have running water. Most of the hospitals on the island aren’t up and running, and citizens are struggling to get by with limited resources. The impact of yet another hurricane on Puerto Rico and the slow response from the U.S. government receive our next dart.

Our last laurel is really out of this world (sorry, we had to). It was released Wednesday that the U.S. and Russia have agreed to team up to complete a NASA-led program to build the first lunar space station. The station is part of a long-term project to send people to Mars. Are we getting closer to a “The Jetsons”-style future? Only time will tell. Either way, the prospect of sending people to Mars in the near future is definitely worthy of a laurel.