Pat Proxy Post: Student Senate Stupidity

This April 2008 column by Pat in his "The Right Stuff" feature, is a good one. Pat's criticism of his Student Senate throughout college led him to eventually join the senate and try to change it from within. I will encourage him to write a post specifically on his student senate experiences when he returns from Army OCS March 21st according to a letter received this past week. With further delay:

Angels, terror, thunder, drums. A kingdom come and a will finally done. The heavenly dictatorship will reign triumphantly “when the man comes around,” the Man in Black sang. Pascal’s wager was already seducing, and then Johnny Cash sang about it and set my credulous mind reeling. The house has the odds on you in this wager, though. Someone, somewhere, believes that Zeldamorph the killer cockroach will gnaw on you eternally if you don’t do ten daily jumping-jacks donning a hat made from aborted lamb fetus. Pascal’s wager advises you to do the Zeldamorph workout, just to be safe. I suggest you play the odds spare your dignity.

The enviro-jihad offers us a similar wager, albeit allegedly science-based: maybe Al Gore is right that the world is on pace to self-destruct in eight years, maybe not, but why not be safe and play your part in the sustainability game?

So the Luther College Student Senate voted to remove trays from the cafeteria under the pretext of being sustainable. Less convenience carrying food means less food consumed, means less carbon-spewing food-miles traveled, means less global warming. Perhaps a hungry track runner entering the cafeteria at 6:55 pm would object to the premise of the Senate’s wager. But if the Senate is right, maybe we will help stem global warming and next year April 12th won’t be the only track meet date canceled on account of the frigidity, rendering the track-lobby moot.

Student Senate is like a bad case of gingivitis. You didn’t know you had it, you don’t even know what it means, but one day you find out that it’s rotting the flesh of your upper gum line. If I really thought I could save the planet by reducing tray use, I wouldn’t wait for a Student Senate resolution to abolish trays. I would independently go “trayless” and lead by example.

But what does the individual know that the Senate doesn’t know better, anyway? The Senate declared last March (against my sole dissent) that it knows better than individuals how to solve smoking-station complaints outside the library and Marty’s: remove them. I contend that students who cannot bare two seconds of smoke are cunning enough to devise a plan of negotiation with smokers in their path on a case-by-case basis.

Senate has long admired action over results. Years ago the Senate voted to amend Luther’s sexual consent policy to require a verbal “yes” from both parties. So does that mean…? Yes, rape is (I’d venture) comme il faut at Luther. Last year Senate voted to add “perceived trans-gender differences” to the list of factors against which discrimination is forbidden. “Suspected sports team affiliation” has yet to be added.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a prophet if there ever was one, wrote in 1849 that the American experiment depended on the idea that “each man is the best judge of his own interest and the best able to satisfy his private needs,” non-smokers included. When people assume the government knows more than the individual, you have the tragedy of the Frenchman: “His detachment from his own fate goes so far that if his own safety or that of his children is in danger, instead of trying to ward the peril off, he crosses his arms and waits for the whole nation to come to his aid.”

And here’s where I’d offer you a different wager. If Senate knows best on your diet and your feeble negotiating abilities, if the Minnesota legislature knows best what type of light bulbs you should use, if Hilary Clinton knows best how to provide you with healthcare, if the US congress knows best that 20 year-old Iraq war veterans should not drink, if Barack Obama knows better than the taxpayer how to spend social security savings, then what will become of the individual’s survivor instinct? The socialist Spaniards shrugged and voted for appeasement when terrorists blew up their trains in 2004. I’d wager that the self-reliance of individuals like those on Flight 93 on 9/11 are our nation’s best defense against nuclear terrorism, a disaster that would be more environmentally devastating than 1,000 years of trays in the cafeteria.

The man’s not coming around and Zeldamorph’s not going to gnaw on you eternally. Whether global warming or nuclear terrorism will have wrought more damage on America by 2016, however, depends on the individual.