I do whatever my dead hamster tells me to do. In my junior year of college, I quit a research job and stole a hamster. I named him Isaac. Isaac died shortly after Thanksgiving break; I prefer to think his death was due more to his job at the lab than to my care. Ever since, he has seen fit to visit me every few weeks and give me advice. Yesterday, for instance, he told me to write about my parking tickets.
“But Isaac,” I said, “parking is the last refuge of the State News columnist.”
“Do it, you jerk,” said Isaac’s ghost, “or I’ll tell everybody how you killed me by feeding me.”
So here we go. I have received nine parking tickets in the past week. NINE. I’ve counted them a hundred times as they lay scattered around me like baby seals around their mother.
It is summer, and classes have barely begun. Even those students who are taking classes aren’t actually attending them. The professors aren’t even attending them. Nobody who owns a car at this university is actually driving it, much less parking it at Akers Hall. The empty spaces yawn open before me, aching for my car to fill them. And yet, I, a student who drives only that I might one day heal the sick, am beset with nine tickets. In a week.
There being no rational reason for these tickets, I am forced to conclude I am engaged in some kind of war with the parking police. It is not a matter of protecting spaces for other people. It is a principled and malicious attempt by an organized army to cause me harm.
As in any army, the vanguard of the parking military is composed of killer death robots - parking meters and electric gates. Do not underestimate them. They are waiting to murder you.
The parking meters are atomic-powered pain machines. Their bodies are filled with plastic explosive and Ebola-tipped nails. On top of that, they may well be unconstitutional. I can pay my taxes in pennies and the FBI can’t do anything about it, but if I try to slip anything but a quarter - and an American quarter only - into the meter it kicks me in the testicles with its cold steel foot. I can buy crank, sex and Malaysian child labor with nickels and no parking cop in the world is going to stop me, but if I dare use them to pay for an empty space on the ground I’m wading through a world of hurt.
The parking gates manage to straddle the already hazy line between man and computer. Inside every electric parking gate is the disembodied, pulsing brain of an escaped Nazi, wired to a bar-code reader and hooked up to a constant heroin drip. Insane, drugged and German though they may be, they’re still difficult to fool. After months of research I attempted to trick one, only to find myself trapped inside a lot. Apparently the wily machines can tell the difference between a gate card and a slice of American cheese.
Above the machines in the chain of command are the parking lot attendants. Or maybe they’re below the machines; I’m not sure. I do know I’ve never seen an attendant’s booth very far from an electric gate. They’re always close enough for, say, an intravenous line of heroin to reach them. But I’m not saying more than that.
More difficult for me to figure out are the parking police. Not the real police, who have shotguns and whom I like very, very much; but the parking police - those MSU students who issue parking tickets to other students.
It would be easy to claim they’ve sold us out for the sake of an orange vest and a white Jeep with flashing lights. But it’s more than that: They’ve sold us out for the sake of a faculty pass. And money.
That’s right - they get a faculty pass. A clever maneuver by the administration to make sure those students who do their dirty work will never have to know the suffering of those against whom they are being used.
I can’t really blame them for taking their jobs. In the end, this war comes down to me and my car, and whatever I can do to park it. Just like me, those students who have gone to the other side are looking out for themselves. But this individualist attitude may be standing in the way of our success as a group. If we parkers could simply organize to the extent that our enemy already has - if we could fight back, at once, instead of each suffering alone - perhaps we could win.
So I’m asking for your suggestions. My e-mail address is at the end of this column; send me your ideas on mass protest, civil disobedience, student activism or whatever you can think of that will further our cause. I’ll publish the best ones in two weeks, and maybe we can end this menace before I end up with a 10th ticket.
Rishi Kundi, State News graduate columnist, drives a pink Mary Kay Cadillac with a Free Mumia bumper sticker. He can be reached at kundiris@msu.edu.
