Editor,
Like Moses — like Paul Revere — like an enormous friend waving happily in the distance, I have served the people of UNM — like a prophet, you might say — a messenger, a voice of hope and good cheer in these, our times of trial and confusion.
Once, in a letter to this very student newspaper, I warned everyone of the dangers of bronze wolf statues. On another occasion I warned you, and your compatriots and subsidiaries of the dangers of gangs and gang colors. Perhaps at great risk to my physical self, I warned the world — I spoke up — and for that, a lot of people, I bet, now consider me a hero, probably.
“He’s a real hero, that guy,” I assume people say, wiping away tears while looking at a little picture of me. “Remember how he warned us about those statues?”
But, you know, it’s cool. Really, I’m just doing my job. I mean, me? A hero? No. A hero. No. A hero?! Wow. A hero. Maybe I am. I guess I really am. A hero. Me. A hero. Wow.
Many years ago, when another hero was born in a lowly manger, His father, Kal-El, said to him, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and this remains my favorite Bible verse to this day. It’s something I take very seriously.
For that very reason, I come bearing another warning to you today: and that warning is this: there are too many books in Zimmerman Library. There are literally thousands of books in there, most of them just sitting there, most of the time, unused and unread.
They’re dangerous and the shelves are so high that if there was ever an earthquake in there, they would fall on everyone and surely end their lives.
Just think about it: what’s your emergency Zimmerman Library earthquake plan? Exactly. I knew it. You don’t even have one. “Be crushed beneath books.” That might as well be your plan.
Fret not, however, for I have a solution. What if we were to take all the books in the library and stack them up, gluing them together as we go, into an enormous outdoor statue of a friendly friend, waving?
Seriously, hear me out. First of all, it would look really cool.
The books would be glued together so they wouldn’t be such a fall risk, and wherever you stood on campus — or anywhere in the city, because this thing would be seriously huge — you could look up and feel pride. “I helped build that thing,” you could think. You could put your hand on your heart, hum the Pledge of Allegiance, and know, just know, just know for a fact that you had at least one friend. He’d never leave you. He’d never make other friends who were cooler. He’d never dismiss you as being “completely insane” or “unsafe to have around the kids” or “reeking of that gross wet-trash hovel you built behind your dad’s house.” He wouldn’t. And at night, maybe, he’d talk to you with his mind.
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Because of that statue, Albuquerque would become known as Albuquerque: Home of the Giant, Waving, Telepathic Book Statue Friend. People from all around the world would flee the earthquakes of their home countries to stand on Albuquerque’s stable bedrock and allow their minds to be explored by the statue’s telepathic superpowers. It would be a like a massage … but for brains. Wow!
And then, eight times a year, we would gather beneath it, dancing around a maypole in our paper robes, crinkling and leaping and rustling, singing songs of an ancient god who has been reincarnated at last as a friendly waving giant made of books. “He will lead us, he will lead us,” a line of castrated children dressed in taped-together brown-paper lunch bags will sing, as they dance … as they leap … as they skip. “He will fly us to the stars.”
UNM has been a university for more than a hundred years. But in all that time, what has it accomplished, really? It’s time we step up our game. It’s time we move forward from simple diplomas and student union buildings, into the realms of endless possibility. Also, those books in Zimmerman are really not safe.
Mike Smith
UNM student
