Most of us marvel at the colossal structures of the ancients: the pyramids of Egypt and South America, the sphinx, the monuments of Rome. They’re all remarkable architectural achievements, given the technology of the times.
I look at such structures with disgust because the “technology of the times” was invariably a hell of a lot of slave labor. Mixed with the mortar holding those stones together is the blood of countless slaves worked to death so some bloated monarch could have a new lawn ornament. Believe it or not, there is a serious effort afoot today to convince people that many of these structures weren’t built by slave laborers at all but by ordinary folk who, in a fit of community pride, chose to lug hundreds of tons of stone uphill for the good of the empire.
People walk through the marbled halls of our Capitol building and marvel at the workplace our “public servants” enjoy. Spiral granite staircases, gold-flecked statues, stained-glass windows illuminating the massive rotunda all make you feel like you’re in a church — a cathedral to government. Then I remember who paid for it. I remember the millions of man-hours of work Wisconsinites endured to pay their taxes to build that marble monument to excess. It makes me want to grab the nearest legislator and scream at him or her, “You should be meeting in a tin shed sitting on folding chairs!”
People who live on the fruits of other people’s labors bristle at the question “What about those who pay for it?” It’s easy to forget when dishing out buckets of cash to your pet projects that someone who works for a living in a job not nearly as pleasant as ours is paying for it all and might argue about the benefits. We brush away such thoughts and convince ourselves it’s worth it. How can it not be? It feels so right. If Joe Sixpack doesn’t agree, then it’s just because he doesn’t understand that we must make him pay for it. He can’t see it from our perspective. We brush off his complaints with glib dismissals and salve our conscience with ethereal virtues like “the good of society” without bothering with cumbersome details. Maybe we chalk up his attitude to apathy, which is just a contrite way of saying, “You don’t care about the things I think you should.” Joe just can’t be left to decide these things for himself. He might not make the “right” decision.
Last week, about 10 percent of the students on this campus shot down an initiative that would have given us all the option of deciding for ourselves if some of the student organizations our seg fees pay for are really worth their rapidly growing price tags. The leaders of this movement said, “You can’t be left to make these decision for yourselves. You might not make the ‘right’ decision,” and people bought it. Twenty-three (out of 659) student organizations would have been subject to one last layer of approval: the individual student. For weeks we heard one emotional plea after another about how central these 23 were to everyone’s education, about how important they were to “the campus as a whole.” This despite the fact that almost no one seems to know who these organizations are or what they do.
But what about Joe College who came here just to study engineering or science or to improve his job prospects and has no interest at all in campus politics or ASM or SSFC or student orgs? What about the student who has to work his way through school and doesn’t have time to attend retreats in Lake Lawn Resort but has to pay for them anyway? Defenders of the seg-fee system dismiss such concerns with the same “You just don’t understand how much this benefits you. We do.” The level of arrogance in the campaign against the opt-out outshone even the level of apathy expressed by the 83 percent of students who didn’t bother to vote. Call it sour grapes, but those of you who shot down the opt-out can go back to enjoying your smug little empire. Gaze upon the edifice of ASM with admiration and pride. Just know that those of us mixed with the mortar may feel something else.
Art Blair ([email protected]) is a graduate student in physics.
