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Making Activists Work For You

Hippies: Can't live with em', can't make em' get a job. What good are they? Read on.

It's very obvious that the University is full of mindless activists and they aren't going away anytime soon. Now, I could sit here and talk about how senseless their arguments are, but that topic has been covered more than once in the OC. Instead, I am going to give advice on how the normal person can use these sign-waving blowholes to their advantage. On a side note, if you have any feelings of guilt for using someone else's blind ambition for your own unscrupulous whims, remember, you now have to give OSPIRG your money whether you like it or not, so you might as well get your money's worth.

Let's start with how the normal long-haired hippie can be used to make your life easier. One of the truly great things about Eugene is the fact that no one ever needs to separate their recyclables from the rest of the garbage. Just throw out all the glass, aluminum and plastic with the rest of the filth and some young go-getter will dive head-first into your trash looking for the things you were too lazy to take out yourself. This is especially helpful advice in the dorms. A dorm dweller must make two trips to the sweet- smelling trash room to dump off their garbage and then their recyclables. This method will save you a trip down the stairs, and give some mouth-breathing hippie a reason to live.

Hippies can also provide a reasonable investment opportunity. Simply find a place where one of the evil oppressive lumber companies is being held up by hippies nesting in the trees. After a while someone will just give up and they will find another place, and the hippies will feel noble. Wait for a while, then go in, chop down the trees yourself and sell them to the logging company. Make sure to chop down the biggest and the oldest trees first - that way by the time the hippies realize what happened, all the trees they care about will already be gone.

If you have a fireplace at your home, forget about ever needing firewood. Most of these groups produce enough posters, handbills and reports in one month to heat a home from November to March. Copies of the Insurgent are not only good for burning, but are also easy to get in great numbers. The only problem is getting enough handbills and posters from them groups like OSPIRG. Even a group like OSPIRG is perceptive enough to suspect something when anyone makes a request for 1,000 handbills and 20 posters. To get around this, simply feign interest in their pathetic cause long enough to convince them to let you distribute handbills and put up posters. After that you will have all the burnable material you will ever need.

The next couple of suggestions are based on the fact that liberals are so blind in their dealings that they will do anything if they think they are shaking up the system. This can be to your advantage. They will believe anything they are told, as long as it follows three basic rules:

1. It is not based on reason and or logic.

2. It is against the "establishment" who want nothing more than to burn the forests and enslave children.

3. See number 1.

First, you must endear yourself to the self-righteous twits. This isn't that difficult as they already believe that everyone already agrees with them. The only hard part is avoiding brain aneurysms or laughing fits while they explain their views. After that, these mindless drones are yours to abuse. If one deviant sniffs out your impending treachery, the situation can be smoothed over by saying, "Brothers and sisters, I apologize. But we must always be watchful of the corporate machine." Then mutter some more sentences about freedom and oppression, and you will be ready to exploit them again.

One of the great things about Eugene is the variety of small animals for hunting. Especially around campus, the great numbers of small defenseless animals can provide several hours of entertainment. There's not much meat on those little critters, but hunting is not about food, but about the opportunity to blast a small animal with a big gun. Unfortunately, supplies of little furry animals can run short, especially in the spring. To combat this problem, I have found that animal rights groups can come in very handy. All you have to do is convince them that they should break into one of the labs and free all the animals. Convincing them is not as hard as it sounds. Just mutter something about "oppressors" and "the corporate machine" and they will go out and turn the streets into a virtual shooting range.

These professional whiners also comes in handy when you encounter some jerk with an attitude problem in any form of franchise. Simply make some obscure relation to the business of child labor, the exploitation of the lower classes or the raping of mother earth. After lighting the fire under a few caffeine-torqued butts, they will go out and protest in support of your supposed cause. Soon, hundreds will join because they have nothing better to do. In a day or two there will be a friendly mob outside the said franchise and that jerk's day will be made a living hell while dirty, smelly hippies scream at them.

And finally, all these people are a never-ending source of amusement. Let's face it: all you can do about these people is laugh at them. Arguing with them is pointless, and the law prevents you from killing them. So go out of your way to entertain yourself. Attend one of their anti-free trade meetings wearing every form of Nike apparel known to man. Sit down in front of the vegan booth while eating a bacon double cheeseburger. Or go up and ask the person by the poster showing pictures of clear cuts, and ask them where it is saying, "Give me a bulldozer and a flame thrower, and I'll bet I can make that boring square into 50 square mile dollar sign."

Activists: providing you with mindless drones for your own evil whims for over thirty years.

Jeremy Jones, when not following Phish around on tour, is a staff writer for the Oregon Commentator.