How about that parking?

It's a new academic year at Sidelines and the perfect opportunity to march out an old drum.

Of course, parking is terrible. Presumably by design the situation on campus is simply awful and continues to degrade every semester– lots are systematically closed either entirely or at least to students because I can only imagine that buses aren't cheap and neither was the Rutherford lot. Denial is one of the most basic tactics in an overall strategy of behavioral control because, again, that stuff wasn't cheap and we need to use it, dammit.

That is, I hope that these efforts are the products of a grand scheme to corral the student body to obeisance of administrative will because there's at least some romanticism to the idea of being in conflict with oppressive chess masters as opposed to a loose amalgamation of incompetents who can't coordinate construction schedules, attendance trends or bus routes.

So yes:  hoping for Lex Luthor while secretly fearing that it's Wonderdog.

When I started at the university in 2008, you parked on campus; it was a given. You might have to allow yourself a few minutes to find a space, but it was rare that you couldn't park in the lot most convenient to the building that housed your first class. Don't get me wrong, there was still some need for "sharking" (driving from aisle to aisle patrolling for an open space or someone to follow to their car), but it wasn't the state of aggression and hostile opportunism that it is now, and you didn't need to be primed to go for your tire iron if you got to park instead of someone else because you were coming up the opposite lane.

Regardless, it was a different time, one where you didn't have to arrive at 7 a.m. to consistently find on-campus parking or build an extra hour into your schedule for each bus ride you had to take. And yes, an hour: fifteen minutes for a bus to arrive, twenty for it to make a trip around campus, and another fifteen to get to where you need to be from whatever stop is closest to your destination (as even they are starting to regularly become displaced), with a 10-minute buffer to accommodate something going awry such as the fairly common occurrence of two buses on the same route ending up together.

Not quite the "approximately six minutes" route as promised by Leslie Lynn's article in the December  2010 issue of The Record, but if we could take the official university publication's promises at face value, we would have been using the vaunted parking garage this past semester instead of just now seeing its construction.

Let me reiterate: praying for Doctor Doom, terrified that it's Doctor Bong.

And on the subject of the parking garage, I've come to terms with it, even to the point that I am at peace with the idea that the university wants this testament to excess, irrationality, and despotism to be—according to Debra Sells in former Sidelines editor Michael Stone's article on the structure from April of 2010—a part of my "legacy" as a student. After all, actually becoming an excessive, irrational despot would probably be a good opportunity in this economy, so at least I would have a frame of reference.

No, at this point I only ask for one concession, because I think honesty is important, and I believe that the complete disregard of the student body and its objections to these administratively-engineered problems in support of a fabricated necessity and subsequent compulsory solution should be codified on the icon of that conflict (preferably in bronze), because it will be an important lesson for their continued academic career:

Freedom of consent is a privilege granted, not a right possessed.