By Louie Flora
Arizona Daily Wildcat
April 2, 1998

CatCard: bad for UA, city, society

To the Editor:

This gleaming new CatCard that allows me to use banks, telephones, access the defense system, purchase bratwursts, get into my car, talk to god and whatever else a citizen may be inclined to do is at the heart of an American slip-slide toward grater accessibility and lethargy. The craving for having the world at your fingertips is essentially a green light for the orgy of development that steadily warps the valley into a miniature Phoenix. A quick drive west or east of here will prove my point exactly. The same sleazy owner of Circle K, after [whom] one of our fine university buildings is named, has been reaping this lethargy for years and looks like he will keep going across the entire desert to San Diego and points beyond. Just because he dabbles in philanthropy does not exempt him from being a depraved person, it just brings into question philanthropy in general.

Sure, it costs a lot to run a school and they need all the help they can get and probably ten or twenty more mountaintops on which to plop our stargazing equipment. I myself happened to pay a hefty lump sometime around January and hop at least some of it goes to the people I came here to learn from. Classes may as well be held under a pine tree with the weather around here. It's time to shuck the trappings and get down to business. And I don't have in mind the sort of business implied by the corporate job fair held a month ago on the UA lawn, which requires nothing more than a rudimentary education in Nintendo. I mean using the brain as it was intended, as an organ of inquiry. The Nineties vogue of communication is a hoax, we have one billion new ways to say things and nothing new to say. Let's drop the Internet and go for a walk. Drop our accounting pens and go for the rapiers.

As for the CatCard, if it did not allow me access to books, it might have made a quite nice skillet scraper.

Louie Flora
Anthropology Freshman