By Zach Thomas
Arizona Daily Wildcat
September 18, 1997

Just cuz I'm in the Union doesn't mean I want to talk to you

Arizona Daily Wildcat Zach Thomas

The Memorial Student Union is a credit haven of religious revival by long-distance telephone.

Well, perhaps not in that order, but that is what you're assailed with daily as you try to weave your way to Louie's for a chicken basket of fatty death.

And weaving you are.

Union corridors are often filled by midday with seated students (aka fire hazards), busily writing their personal information in triplicate for submission to an obscure company ostensibly offering free T-shirts.

"Cool," say some. "Rock on for college."

"Stupid," says I. "College isn't supposed to be about shameless promotions. Isn't it about learning?"

And these kids will learn - the hard way. Is a free T-shirt really worth having your personal information (name, address, bust dimensions, etc.) inserted into the plethora of databases snugly situated within America's rabid marketing bureaucracy? So you really want junk mail clouding your mailbox for posterity? Are you really that desperate for mail? I didn't think so.

When I was a freshman, I tried all these things ... and this is what it got me:

• One free T-shirt
• Some overpriced long-distance phone calls.
• A VISA card with a 17.5 percent rate. (For some reason I still have this one.)
• A visit from a BMG collection agent commanding me to pay $15.31 for a CD I mailed back to them a year before.

I also got a complimentary subscription to the Adam & Eve catalog, which features such implements as whips, chains, padded handcuffs and even a "gimp suit" once. "Just like 'Pulp Fiction.' Wow!" my puerile mind nearly exploded.

Suffice it to say I was enthralled with the last, the only problem being each month, the catalog was sent to my parents' house in Phoenix and not my Tucson dorm room of iniquity. My folks weren't nearly so engrossed as I.

Yet what is really disturbing are the messages found on free T-shirts this year. They're no longer shameless promotions of various East-Coast banks like FirstUSA. Now they have messages like, "My life is a healthy life."

I have half a mind to find one of those shirts and walk around campus smoking a cigarette and carrying a suitcase of Schlitz ­ all while taking healthy swigs from a faded flask filled with vodka. Yeah, the college life sure is a healthy life.

All this talk of healthy existence inevitably brings up conventional religion, the quintessential American tag for a government-approved and positive - albeit hygienic - life. The student religious sects are out there right alongside the credit card and long distance vendors recruiting the errant passers-by.

However, the Campus Crusade for Christ doesn't offer free T-shirts.

When I see these groups, I always think of Robert Stack from "Airplane."

"We'd like you to have this flower from the Church of Religious Consciousness, would you care to make a dona­ ... " said the disciple.

THUMP! Capt. Kramer plants a vicious haymaker.

While the UA religious groups are clearly more passive than those who populated airports in the 1970s, why is it necessary to justify worship of any deity with a social organization? Doesn't God come first? Or is my declared agnostic mind missing something here?

I admit I have, by choice, never joined a religious group here or anywhere, as I need no one, let alone my peers, to justify my faith. But as the bake sales and fund-raisers persist, I can't help thinking these groups are just like Greek fraternities - albeit without the associated sin. They are just social groups who need false justification to stick together.

I don't mean to bitch excessively about these things, but they honestly scare me.

It worries me when I see vendors take advantage of naïve students, extracting their social security numbers all in the name of free stuff.

I get freaked out when I see religious groups peddling worship as a way into a social circle.

So you're probably asking yourself, "Surely this guy can't be serious?"

I reply in the vein of Dr. Rumack, "I am serious ... and don't call me Shirley."

Zach Thomas is a junior majoring in journalism.