All We Need is Janet Leigh

It's like a Hitchcock movie. Try to walk across campus in the middle of the school day, and they're there: the birds.

Seagulls. Even though we're ten miles from the ocean, every day hundreds of seagulls descend on the campus at a pre-determined time, ready to scavenge through hundreds upon hundreds of food wrappers, looking for the half-eaten pizza crusts, untouched fruit, and scattered french fries that are to be found in abundance; the flotsam and jetsam left in the wake of uncaring, under-socialized, irresponsible, self-centered students. I've never seen a seagull dig into one of the many, many trash cans placed about every twenty paces around the campus; they don't need to. They can remain fat and happy on what has been thrown away (dropped is a better word) in enough abundance that even flying ten miles one way to get here every day is well worth the smorgasbord that awaits them. There is enough half-eaten, untouched and undiscarded food lying around campus to force our custodial staff to have to come and clean up behind them twice a day to prevent the school from looking like Woodstock the morning after. If the custiodians were to skip just one day, there would certainly be a outcry from the students, who expect to walk through a pristine campus, but who feel no obligation to lift a finger to help create one.

Ironically, the very same students who throw their french fries at each other will shriek and run under the flapping cloud of seagulls over their heads, hoping not to be shat upon with yesterday's french fries. Poetic justice.

The recent edition of the school newspaper had an article noting the rearrangment of the custodial schedule in order to provide more cleaning of the restrooms, an action that was the result of student complaints about their condition. Most students consider this a grass-roots political victory: the populace applying pressure to their leaders to improve living conditions. If students would only throw away their own garbage out on the quad, the bathrooms may have had adequate attention all along, and the host of seagulls that the students have trained to fly in and crap on their heads every day wouldn't exist.

So what lesson have we learned? Be self-centered and blind, and refuse to make a connection between your actions and the results you have created. Be irresponsible, complain, and let the government wipe you.

And they'll be voting in a couple of years.