With Thursday night’s kick-off event, the annual senatorial and presidential-vice presidential elections for the Government of the Student Body have begun. 

If all goes well, campus will host all kinds of opportunities for students to learn about those running for GSB through campaign flyers, events, signature collections, reminders to vote, debates, letters to the editor, and the obligatory editorials from us weighing the merits and demerits of the candidates.

Key members of GSB, such as the members of the election commission and the members of the Senate’s public relations committee, probably will uphold tradition and precedent by presenting election season as an opportunity for students to learn more about GSB and to get involved.

Certainly, that is true. And with dismal turnouts that hover at approximately 10 percent, students need to get their minds right and put themselves in an attitude where they can, and will, learn more about the process and substance of GSB.

But election season also is a time in which students can learn much about themselves.

Students interact constantly. Starting a conversation with a neighbor before class, at lunch, before some athletic event or lecture series rarely takes more effort than leaning over and saying hello. 

Unlike politicos running for the sexy offices of president, senator, and representative (at the United States level, that is), candidates for GSB are the same age as us, live in the same residence halls as us, eat at the same dining centers as us, pay the same tuition and fees as us, and go to the same football games as us.

Couple that ease of communication with that similarity, and mix it in with the knowledge of an opportunity to make student government work a little better for students. Why wouldn’t we become a hive of conversation?

We suppose that apathy is part of it. When the politics we all hear about in Washington, D.C. are so repulsive, it becomes easy to bury our heads in our iPods, smartphones, Twitter feeds and Facebook posts. 

Ignoring the world “out there” and concentrating on Pint Night and the length of the line at the Super Dog stand means it’s only a matter of time when nothing can get done because the people who are supposed to work together are content only to beat their chests and sling mud at one another.

Such negativity obscures the fact that such “politics as usual” isn’t usual. It’s not even politics. 

Playing off one party against another, pandering to a base of voters who won’t get a chance to vote for another two years, charging that the opposition are guilty of delay and scare tactics, focusing on scandal and intrigue, and offering posts to hangers-on — these are corruption, not politics, which is selfless.

“Politics” is not a dirty word. GSB is a political agency. In keeping with others, GSB can seem petty or trifling, and a waste of students’ time and money — two preciously limited commodities. 

However, as a local organization, GSB and GSB elections are a necessary opportunity for today’s students and the leaders and ordinary citizens of tomorrow to practice putting the interests of the community ahead of the self-serving negativity that has come to define the term “politics.”