By Nicholas Proch
Who wouldn’t want something to be improved? You want a better car, life, house and so on. If you want to improve your house, you either buy a new one or fix up the one you have. An addition. A pool. You get the idea.
The construction on campus is inconvenient. There’s no getting around that. To get to a class in Maria Sanford from Vance Academic isn’t as easy as it once was. Instead of walking two minutes, students now have to walk all the way around a fence which adds a whopping minute to their trek.
From the way that the student body is reacting, you’d think that they are all of a sudden in need of a sherpa to get them from point A to B. This is just one of the many complaints that the construction on campus gets on a given day. Personally, I don’t get it. Who cares if it takes you an extra few minutes to get to class. Will those additional steps mean anything to you later? Probably not. If you’re blaming your tardiness on a full-sized Tonka truck, stop. You were probably going to be late for that class anyways.
Take a step back and think about why you are actually being inconvenienced. We have to walk those extra steps so that we can make this campus better. It’s a necessary evil. There has to be some trade-off to make things progress forward. That’s how it works. Some will say that it “doesn’t matter, I’m only here another year, I won’t be able to use that building anyways.” That’s just selfish.
If those before us had not built half the buildings on this campus because it was an eye-sore at the time, nothing would be here. You’d be taking class in the woods. For all of you that would like to take class in the woods, go to UConn. How do you know that you’re not going to send your kids to this school or that someone you know might end up going here? You don’t.
The real issue lies in the morale and judgement of the student body, which is a reflection of society. We love to bicker and complain about everything. You can’t have social security without some kind of drawback. How can you expect to make national and state programs work without paying additional taxes? Does this money just come out of nowhere? We can print more money, sure, but that’s not the solution.
We can stand in the rain and freezing cold in Manhattan and complain about the government and what it isn’t doing for us as citizens. We can gripe about banks and how they are raising fees and making it harder for anyone to get ahead. We can do all of these things without looking at ourselves. If we want public services we need to pay for them. These problems aren’t going to go away, but if we learn to bend a little we can certainly help them.
Next time you’re walking on campus from the student center to Diloreto and you have to pass through the fence area where the bulldozer drives, don’t shoot a nasty look at a construction worker or moan about how there’s dirt on the sidewalk. Instead think about what it is that they are actually doing and be thankful that you belong to an institution that is progressing forward while most of the world is taking a step back.
