The annual cost to attend the University is approximately $85,000 a year. That’s over $7,000 a month, $1.7k a week, about $250 a day, $10 an hour, or 17 cents a minute. Unsurprisingly, these are all numbers higher than what I would ever give to the UR parking office.
Since my freshman year, I have engaged in a proxy holy war against the agency which I feel is the greatest accelerant toward fascism here on the University’s campus: the campus parking office. My first tirade against them began just when I obtained a car to drive on campus the fall of my freshman year, as I realized rather quickly that you couldn’t just park anywhere on campus for free.
To park within the bounds of River Campus, a commuter student must first pay about $300. Not only are commuter students allowed to have a car their freshman year, they pay a much cheaper rate than their stationary counterparts — almost as if, to mock us, to spit on our face and claim we should be thankful it wasn’t acid. I swore I would never bend the knee — no matter what, I would never pay that price.
As commuters, we are the lowest priority on the totem pole of students. We don’t pay for housing. We don’t use the dining halls. We’re not required to succumb to the bread and circuses offered at Hillside when we know that Wegmans exists. We come to this campus without housing, and we freeload on the land, knowing there’s not enough space for the students with housing.
We are the most undesirable, yet it is without us that the fabric of campus society begins to unravel. And thus it is us that the fascists choose to target first: by taxing the land we park on.
When I would first get parking tickets, I had an unlikely specialist in my brigade: my mom. I would give the tickets to my mommy, and then she would call the enemy parking office in a thick accent and pretend she didn’t know where to park. Unbeknownst to the enemy, immigrants actually do know how to drive. This tactic helped me until the employees working the phone lines began to realize they did. Thanks, though, Mom. It was good while it lasted.
I began strategically positioning my car in ways that would both evade the enemy and gather more intel as to their whereabouts and movement patterns. I knew the times they would monitor. I knew who worked when and where. I knew their technology. Their patterns. Their behavior. I allowed my predator to believe I was prey — let them roam the jungle, beat their chest, and act like they could never be defeated.
I began to parallel park in tight spaces, preventing the enemy from easily scanning my license plate, as I discerned this was their primary method of identifying violators. As I began to frequent the lot, I noticed the “legally parked” cars were tagged so as to provide a layer of visual protection against the system’s monitoring — and in an act of revolution, I reverse engineered the IDs and photoshopped one of my own to place on my car. The insects would never get me. I fly higher than they ever could imagine.
My parking passes began to fool the workers and reduce the number of parking tickets I would receive: until the capitalists caught on to that, too. I received three tickets in the span of one week. I knew who did it. I knew this was assault.
Mao killed the landlords. Yet I knew I was just a lowly commuter — that individual power never compared to the potential a collectivist society would bring. I had been exploited, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Today, I still proudly fight my crusade knowing the blade of the enemy rests firm upon my throat. My mommy ended up buying me a parking pass — but it’s still too far from campus. My resistance now means choosing where I get to legally park.
When I still get tickets and the mean, soulless lady at the office tells me there’s nothing she can do about it, despite everything I know telling me that she can, I don’t get mad anymore. I don’t plot my vengeance. I don’t fantasize about driving into the office full speed with my car. I smile, write an angry letter, and continue to park how I want.
This is how I resist. This is what makes me Meliora.
