Our student senate just handed ROTC a participation trophy for lawbreaking, breeding the exact kind of softness that makes our modern military look less like "Band of Brothers" and more like "Toddlers & Tiaras."
These campus warriors, who supposedly volunteer for the privilege of protecting our country, decided to throw a tantrum because they can’t park illegally for 10 whole minutes. Senate Bill 117-88, which seemingly passed with as much thought as one can find within a TikTok comment section, demands that parking enforcement wait before ticketing ROTC students’ cars in parking lots.
Apparently, parking in a legal spot like the rest of us plebs is a war crime, and being expected to move your vehicle by the clearly posted 7 a.m. deadline is unreasonable. Oh, the horror!
And, unlike us, these cadets already get free parking for Physical Training — but only until 7 a.m. Us peasants, on the other hand, shell out up to $880 for the privilege of a garage pass to an oft jam-packed garage or feeding the meters dollars on the hour just to attend a lecture.
But that’s not enough for them. The solution for ROTC students wasn’t to wake up 10 minutes earlier and find a legal spot, or better yet, walk — or God forbid, run — to PT. No, their solution is to whine to Student Government like children and play the "support our troops" card if anyone dares question them.
But maybe they have a point — I sure wouldn’t want to walk two miles to and from parking, so let’s look at the geography of this so-called hardship. I took the liberty of checking the route myself. From the nearest legal street parking to the Blatt PE Center is hardly 600 feet — a three-minute walk at a leisurely pace. And even better, those meters don’t even require payment until 9 a.m.
So, to really spell this out — these cadets already have free, legal parking available right now, and they already have closer parking available to them until 7 a.m. But no, that simply is not enough for them. They are fighting to avoid a walk that takes less than two minutes at standard army pace.
Are we really expected to believe that the students who cannot endure a 250-step commute are future defenders of democracy? If a nursing student’s clinical runs late at Prisma Health, does their ticket get forgiven? If an engineering student is stuck in a lab a few minutes late, do the meters magically stop running?
Of course not. The ordinary students who show up, do the work, and follow the rules simply swallow it and pay the fine like adults. But put on a uniform, and suddenly the bureaucracy conjures a special safety net to cover that incompetence.
If you can’t manage your time well enough to avoid a parking ticket, how are you going to manage a squad under fire? If you can’t accept that sometimes you’ll be late due to circumstances beyond your control without demanding a waiver, how will you handle the chaos of actual combat?
The Taliban doesn’t care that your convoy got held up, and the Chinese military surely won’t pause an invasion because you need an extra 10 minutes to tie your shoes. Yet here we are, legislating coddling for children who think punctuality is too high a bar.
But this is more than just unfair to regular students — it is symptomatic of a military-wide pandemic. Just recently, the Army had to revamp its combat fitness test, removing a requirement because too many recruits lacked the core strength to pull their own weight. We lowered the physical bar until everyone passed and are calling it readiness. Now, our student senate is lowering the administrative bar because cadets just don’t have the mental discipline to watch a clock.
We’re watching recruitment plummet nationally, and SBL 117-88 just seems to be the collegiate franchise of that desperation — accommodating the lowest common denominator to keep the numbers up.
Somehow, though, we’ve reached a point where demanding a competent and punctual officer class is branded as disrespectful to our veterans. This is a rhetorical shield made of wet cardboard. A strong military is built on discipline, not exceptions, and the uniform demands excellence.
Shielding future officers from the consequences of their own poor time management isn't respect, it is sabotage. Real respect means treating them like adults and telling them to take a hike if they complain about walking 250 steps. God knows the battlefield certainly won’t be offering grace periods for incompetent planning.
The bill explicitly cites excuses such as rain or cadre running long as a justification. The student senate is not demanding that the ROTC instructors — the cadre — manage their time better. It isn't demanding leadership; instead, it is attacking the parking enforcement officers who are literally just doing their jobs. It is the equivalent of shooting the messenger because you are too scared to tell a Lieutenant Colonel to buy a watch.
Stapling another excuse onto the already-bloated corpus of American comfort culture is telling cadets that rules are negotiable, that inconvenience is oppression and that accountability is optional if you can find a sympathetic bureaucrat. The military doesn’t need more safe spaces; it needs more hard soldiers. And right now, our ROTC is producing neither.
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