The Onion Bagel is a satirical column for The Statesman.
Some of the more radical members of our student body founded a new club on campus last week.
There are already 400 clubs at Stony Brook, but theirs is the first to represent what they feel is a criminally underserved portion of the student body. This new club, titled the Anti-AirPod Alliance (AAA), is a growing coalition against the adoption of AirPods among students on campus.
The alliance’s mission statement reads simply, “AirPods suck.”
The General Secretary of the Anti-AirPod Alliance, super senior biology major Jonathan Engelstein, laid his views out thusly in an interview that was shortened for brevity.
“AirPods are symbols of the middle class,” Engelstein, whose friends call him Engels, said. “ I find it offensive that people would flaunt their material wealth around this campus. Students already struggle trying to eat, studying for classes and building up a social life for themselves without being reminded of how little they have. The entire college system is built against them and keeps them in an endless cycle of poverty, while others reap the benefits of their hard labor. Do you know how many scholars and professors use their students’ work in their own theses? Aren’t we entitled to the rewards of our own labor? We might as well be running the experiments, research and operations ourselves. Why hasn’t anyone thought of doing this before? Anyway … AirPods are the representation of this tyranny.”
Besides being a tool of bourgeois oppression, Engelstein said, the design of AirPods is fundamentally flawed.
“You can’t spin them around when you’re walking,” he said. “When you’re bored, what else is there to do? Spin some keys?”
I pretty much called it a day after that, but in the hopes of learning some actually relevant information about the club, I decided to canvas more members for some statements.
“OUR NATIONAL ANTHEM IS POST MALONE’S ‘NO OPTION,’” senior political science major and AAA undersecretary, Xavier Richardson Alexios MacDonald, yelled in my face.
I informed him that the club is not a nation-state and therefore cannot qualify for possession of a “national anthem” of any kind. Strong words were exchanged.
When asked why this song was selected to represent the organization, MacDonald replied: “Because it’s a mood.”
After this brief back and forth, MacDonald’s eyes seemed to darken as he took on a more serious tone.
“As we progress into the second decade of the 21st century, something has been made abundantly clear,” he said. “Millenials and Generation Z have been denied opportunities for career advancement and now we are forced to take on debt for degrees in the vague hope of finding a relevant job. By 22, most of us will be in a decades’ worth of debt, with no employment opportunities, made to suffer the pains of late-stage capitalism on a dying planet. I can’t help but feel we, as a society, have lost sight of ourselves in pursuit of the almighty dollar.”
MacDonald raised a finger to silence me as I prepared to interject.
“That’s why we have chosen ‘No Option,’” he continued. “Because we truly have no option other than fighting. We should not be in this situation, but we’re here, and there’s no point complaining about it. The revolution has to start somewhere and we decided to start with AirPods.”
MacDonald glanced across the Staller steps where we spoke and saw a student with AirPods in their ears. Yelling “NEMOHOY MIMYOY,” he bolted to his prey and snatched their right pod, along with their right ear, from their head.
The AAA undersecretary was hauled away by University Police within minutes, but not before a crowd of students gathered to hear his message. Perhaps some of those students will be swayed by his wild-eared beliefs. Change has started from stranger places.
Mark this one as a developing story, folks.
