Dinhternet

Hmm… this is my first quote in a while.

So last night, I tagged along with Jane to a ser­vice project — the Win­ter Men­tal Health Din­ner, which was at the Veteran’s Memo­r­ial Center’s recep­tion hall. Towards the end of the night, Mo wan­dered in from nowhere and we found out that she and some oth­ers were on the the­ater side of the Memo­r­ial Cen­ter doing another project — the Fem­i­nist Film Fes­ti­val. Since Les­ley was over there, I decided to just go over after my project was over so I could catch a ride home with her.

Of course, when I went over, I didn’t want to just stand around, so I tried to help out, too. When the fes­ti­val ended for the night, I helped clean up the the­ater seat­ing area, and helped the DJ pack up his stuff into his car. Then I went back to the lobby, and the other vol­un­teers and I stood in a cir­cle and talked for a bit as we waited for our next task. A line of the coör­di­na­tors came along car­ry­ing tables, and I (the only male vol­un­teer) hap­pened to be in the posi­tion of our talking-circle that saw them com­ing first. I walked over to the first coör­di­na­tor in the line, who was also the small­est, and this con­ver­sa­tion ensued:

I was kinda in shock after that. And afraid to offer to help anymore.

I’ve really been try­ing to hold back my opin­ion on the recent scan­dal in Alpha Phi Omega. First, because I’m an SAA, and when I’m chair­ing the meet­ing, I hon­estly try to be as impar­tial as pos­si­ble; sec­ond, because I feel every­one should get noth­ing but the facts and come up with their own solu­tion; and finally, although Will O and I are not the great­est of friends (or friends at all any­more, accord­ing to Face­book), I don’t have any­thing against him per­son­ally, and I didn’t want this to be about per­sonal feel­ings or vendet­tas or witch hunts. That said, after hear­ing yes­ter­day that Brother Mo W was get­ting shit from some mem­bers of the chap­ter and even from advi­sors, I really want to speak my mind.

Will O did wrong, and he should be pun­ished. Some say that oth­ers have done worse and got­ten away with it. I don’t know of any of these cases, but if some­one else in the chap­ter has com­mit­ted a felony, I would want to expel him as well.

Some say that the motion passed this time because we strong armed the chap­ter into sub­mis­sion by imply­ing that we would con­tin­u­ally bring this up until the motion went our way. Believe me, that was con­sid­ered and dis­cussed before the motion was brought up again. If the chap­ter did feel strongly that Will O should be allowed to remain a brother, then I explained the “Objec­tion to Con­sid­er­a­tion” motion in my e-mail and any­one could have made it at the meet­ing, but no one chose to.

Some say that the motion passed this time because Brother Alice C wrote some num­bers on the board, and the total was higher than before. I hope that’s not the case. I hope that there’s no magic amount of money in brother’s heads, and a cor­rupt brother should only be expelled if he takes more than that amount. To me, it doesn’t mat­ter if he emp­tied out our cof­fers or if he took a sin­gle dol­lar. The fact is, we pay dues and raise funds to advance the chap­ter, the fra­ter­nity, and our valu­able pro­grams of ser­vice. We trust our Trea­sur­ers to safe­guard those funds. Will O vio­lated our trust by tak­ing money with­out our per­mis­sion and using it for his own per­sonal gain.

And while I’m on the sub­ject of trust­ing our Trea­sur­ers… some seem to think that Broth­ers Michelle F and Jes­sica C are respon­si­ble for this scan­dal. That is ridicu­lous! First, trans­fer of office (and the bank account) is a duty that falls equally to out­go­ing and incom­ing offi­cers. And sec­ond, there is no rea­son why they should have sus­pected that Will O was going to take funds for per­sonal gain. They trusted him, as we all did. He, and he alone, is respon­si­ble for his actions and his vio­la­tion of our trust.

Some say every­one who was involved in or even knew about what Will O was doing should be expelled. That is stu­pid. First, the Trea­sur­ers were not respon­si­ble, as I said before, and on top of that, they brought this mat­ter to the chapter’s atten­tion. If any­thing, we should praise them! Sec­ond, his house­mates may or may not have known what was going on. It would be impos­si­ble to prove who knew what, and it would be a fool­ish witch-hunt to try to find out. Also, none of them would have been involved if not for his first action to pay rent with chap­ter funds.

Some say that the pun­ish­ment should fit the crime, or ask if there’s any other way to pun­ish him short of expelling him. Pay­ing back the money doesn’t make things right, because the real crime wasn’t tak­ing our money. It was break­ing the solemn trust we had put onto him to act respon­si­bly as our trea­surer, and he broke that trust. There is no way for us to now go break a trust with him. As for other pun­ish­ments, such as a tem­po­rary sus­pen­sion — we have no pro­vi­sion for such a pun­ish­ment. In fact, all Alpha Phi Omega events (other than our rit­u­als) are sup­posed to be open to the pub­lic, so ban­ning Will O could be con­sid­ered a vio­la­tion of that. But tech­ni­cal­i­ties aside, how does a two-, four-, six-month, or “until he pays us back” sus­pen­sion help restore the trust that was bro­ken? Would you want to entrust him with any ExComm or chair posi­tion after this? Do we really want to cre­ate a caste sys­tem of mem­bers? (And yes, I know in a way we do already, but a “pledge” class is unavoid­able, and I don’t really agree with the “asso­ciate” class, either.)

Maybe if it was a one-time thing when he was really des­per­ate, and he paid it back as soon as he could, I could for­give him. But it was sev­eral times span­ning sev­eral months, down to an ATM with­drawal of $20 because he was “just short on cash that day.” And if he could pay $1000 off his bal­ance within a week of his trial, why couldn’t he have just paid that back before the trial came up?

Maybe if he had shown some remorse, I could for­give him. But he said him­self that he does not value mem­ber­ship in our fra­ter­nity. When asked about his actions in e-mail form by the inves­ti­gat­ing com­mit­tee and in front of the rest of ExComm, he tried to joke it off.

… and that is why I feel we had to expel Will O.

(Part 2 next.)

I should be try­ing to make up for sleep I missed last night, but I couldn’t resist jump­ing on the com­puter to check my e-mail and a cou­ple of other things, so here I am now, writ­ing up another update.

Yes­ter­day… woke up at 9 again. Show­ered and stuff, but Drew and Peggy were still passed out, so I wrote a post. Drew got up and rushed his teeth and stuff and turned on the TV. We watched How To Boil Water on Food Net­work and mocked the “dumb” co-host. Drew’s the­ory is that she actu­ally can cook, because she’s done sev­eral of these shows, but she just keeps act­ing like an idiot to make the “teacher” seem bet­ter in comparison.

Peggy woke up and we all had break­fast of bagels and fruit. Aaron L’s mom was super­vis­ing as Aaron L’s brother Michael and his girl­friend Katie were prep­ping some glass bot­tles for beer/root beer fer­men­ta­tion. Katie told us a nice story about how glass bot­tles can explode vio­lently if they become over-pressurized while fer­ment­ing. Appar­ently she tried long ago with her dad, and they had fif­teen or twenty bot­tles sit­ting in their base­ment. One day, they were just sit­ting around in the liv­ing room when they heard a “thunk,” and thought to them­selves, “Uh-oh. That can’t be good.” Turns out they were right. Her dad went down to the base­ment to find glass shards embed­ded in the walls from the explo­sion. He put on his full gear (he was a fire mar­shal), and went about care­fully dis­arm­ing all the bottles.

Any­way, after break­fast, packed up and said our good-byes before head­ing to down­town Santa Cruz. Win­dow shopped for a while. There was also an Antique Street Fair. No big pur­chases… just a cou­ple of gags and poten­tial LB gifts. We were sup­posed to meet up with Aaron L for lunch, but he had to stay late because his replace­ment at work never showed up at the end of his shift. By the time he got out, we had to leave to make it to Merced on time, so we did.

The drive was pretty dull. We got there just a lit­tle bit late. Only three UCM peo­ple showed up, though. I guess Ali­cia is now “Pres­i­dent,” Ali­son is “Fellowship/Membership/PR,” and Tina is “Ser­vice.” Oh, and I sup­pos­edly scared Tina when I said ser­vice was “tough.” Appar­ently, every­one else inter­preted that to mean, “Being Ser­vice makes Lovecraft’s Hell look like a tea party.” No, I actu­ally don’t see it being that bad as long as they have enough peo­ple to do stuff (a full car­load would be nice), because Bruce (The Librar­ian, and basi­cally God of UCM), is on their side and has con­tacts and con­nec­tions into every­thing in town.

After the meet­ing, we (the Iota Phi crew, because the UCM folks scat­ter to the winds after every meet­ing) rolled to a Thai restau­rant because Peggy wanted to have noo­dles. She really wanted udon, but Lo S didn’t know of any place that served that. So any­way, we played “Black Magic” while we waited for the food. Minh T, Peggy, Mo W, and Mommy Van don’t know the game. Then quote hap­pened as our food came out. Minh T and I were sit­ting next to each other; he had ordered pineap­ple fried rice, and I had got­ten the house spe­cial fried rice.

Good thing Minh T had just eaten Carl Jr.‘s and wasn’t really hun­gry, so he didn’t mind. In fact, he gave away more of “Dinh’s rice.”

After that, we rolled over to Oh Wow!, the Merced ver­sion of Nickel City, but Peggy wanted to go home, because she had chalk­ing and an early class in the morn­ing, so I took her, Drew, and Mo W back to Davis.

When we got home, worked on some more Ser­vice Fair stuff with Drew, talked with Will for a bit and did some ser­vice busi­ness, set up the new Merced mail­ing list, and then passed out.