BY KATELYN FECTEAU

COPY EDITOR

Around here, we’ve got a lot of opinions. Everything from international news to the daily dish at the OR is up for scrutiny — and pretty vocally, too. I’ve heard heated debates in the library regarding everything from politics to pizza to pilates. So, why is it every week that the staff of The Maroon scrambles for authentic student voices for its opinion section?

One of Collins Language’s 2016 words of the year was “snowflake generation,” described as “the young adults of the 2010s, viewed as being less resilient and more prone to taking offense than previous generations.” If this is true and we really are the whiny bunch we’re painted to be, why are these complaints nestled safely in unread rants between shared memes and recipe videos on Facebook? Why aren’t we sifting through hundreds of heated emails a week at The Maroon office, written by offended members of the majority “snowflake” Wolf Pack?

We ran a student opinion piece about the — surprising — merits of the Boot Store last week. No opinion is too comical or too serious. It pains me to see so many members of the Loyola community openly share their opinions in class but neglect to expose them to a wider audience. If you really feel that strongly about the line at Starbucks to complain about it to any of your friends that will listen, why haven’t you told us? I’ve heard a few choice words from students about everyone from Tupac to Trump — but I didn’t read them in The Maroon. If this paper is a reflection of campus, apparently our students doesn’t have too much to say.

The Maroon prides itself on its campus-wide content, but it’s missing a major component of this communal interaction: the student body itself. If the only consistent opinions we run are from a couple of outspoken professors, we’re only getting a small slice of campus A right to an opinion doesn’t make an opinion right, but having it published in print does give you a voice that’s a bit louder than that passive-aggressive Instagram caption.

Write about your life. Tell us about your ideologies, your classes, that thing you hate or that moment you love. Make us laugh, make us think — educate us about what it’s like to be you. Here at The Maroon, we are dying to know your opinions. By contributing your thoughts, you’re adding to a wider conversation about the topics you care about and making your school newspaper more relatable. We are listening.

So the next time you angrily type out that 10-tweet manifesto about hook-up culture or the implications of Taylor Swift’s new song, copy us in on it, too — you may end up actually changing something.