Y la lucha sigue...

Here or there, at the virtual offices of the Counter Point Journal (which are often someone’s living room, a study room in the Library, a lounge area on campus, or whenever we run into one another), your humble CxPJ collective propounds stories to report on. As our mandate is to seek out stories of injustice, investigate the agendas of those in power, and to root out the hidden stories that would shock the public if they knew, we find that we never lack potential stories.

Injustice is everywhere. All sorts of parties are engaged in foul play and power plays. Everywhere you look, kindly, upright folk are getting screwed over.

Instead, what we lack is sufficient time and resources to investigate every single wrongdoing. We do what we can with what we have. It’s vital to note, however, that these important stories existed before we published them. Some stories, such as the attack on Last Word Books, have been publicized elsewhere, though not to the extent that we provide here. But for as long as these injutices have existed, there have been people fighting back.

Our hope is not ony to alert you to injustice, but to honor those who fight it, and to connect you with those who have been struggling, whether it’s a couple dozen students demanding to see the proposed Student Code of Conduct or it’s a visitor from another country who has to educate us on the destructive policies of our own government.

Is that a stretch? To connect the protests of a few smelly Greeners to the protest of Miguel Rivera (see page 7), who lost his brother in the anti-mining struggle in El Salvador? Or to “Zoya” (page 6), who lost her parents and who cannot use her real name or be photographed, or else she might be killed herself?

Indeed, it is a stretch. Then again, there’s a reason why Zoya risked her life to speak at Evergreen. There’s a reason why Manuel left his threatened community to address us. What do they know about us that many of us don’t? Perhaps they recognize that we have the power to change this. That our collective voices can be louder than theirs, if we choose to speak out.

In other news, the Counter Point Journal is now a registered student organization (rso). How will this affect our content? It won’t. We intended to challenge authority, inform the public, advocate for the oppressed, and empower the community as before. We will continue to do so as a student group. Based on past experience, we are indeed concerned that outside parties may try to divert us or delegitimize us, and they may try to do so through our new connections with Student Activities. There are, after all, many ways to silence an opposition -- the best ways being indirect. Why run someone down with a car when you can just engage the wheels of bureaucracy to roll over the person, back and forth?

We chose to become a registered student organization in hopes that it would allow us to be more effective in what we do. But we run the risk of becoming mired in bureaucracy, of making compromises that initially seemed innocuous, or else of cozying up to authority and becoming too content with our content, recognizing that the rso status provides us with the kind of stability that can make us complacent. God (or Whoever) knows that has happened before. We will try to prevent that from happening, and we hope that with your help, we will not forget why we exist.