I cannot help but sympathize with those students who recently claimed they do not care about any issue at Iowa State except for education. You may think that I am being sarcastic, but this attitude only reveals why the student body has become so disenchanted with activism.

Iowa State is a house whose walls are bulging with the pregnancy of a growing larval mass. All who are not a part of this mass have been squeezed out the windows, but this is a joyful exile!

The larvae will do nothing but feed, and as they grow there is no room in the house for anyone else. We should stop trying to claim our places in the house and instead devote ourselves to the children.

Their hungry apathy cannot be satisfied; their appetites are enormous. As they feed they grow, and as they grow they strain against the confines of the house.

Someday Iowa State’s pregnancy will end. Someday the house will explode. Protect the children!

The student body understands these things at a gestational level, at an instinctual level.

Activists would have the students fear the possibility of death. They would animate students with the death-shock that life is short and may end at any moment. Life is precious and must be well-spent.

But students cannot hear these warnings, for students are too sensitive. Students hear only the music that plays everywhere on campus. They laugh and throw popcorn at the corpses that waltz on the quad. They push bodies out of seats; they play with grinning skulls. Students know that death is no escape, and so no threat either.

You, the students, know that waiting is all there is. You know that you will come here always.

When you graduate you will enroll here.

When you graduated from high school you graduated from Iowa State.

You always have been here, waiting to remember, cowering under the shadow of the great god Bush-wa, the snake who holds the bulging house together with the soft caress of coils.

Now some may be disoriented by all of this. To activists it might seem strange that so many students could be so passionate about, say, keeping the name of Catt Hall the same.

After all, what do students care? In high school, those who unflinchingly supported the authoritarian overseer were called geeks; now they are called greeks, etc. Meanwhile the administration chuckles, secure in the knowledge that students are well in hand.

But even the great god Bush-wa is waiting for the moment. Her eyes hold the students hypnotized as the food keeps pouring in, but even she is amused by all of this. Sometimes her eyes sparkle. Sometimes she cannot help it. And every time her eyes sparkle, some of you start to yawn. One day, one of you will sneeze, and the house will explode and Bush-wa will be no more.

One day you will awake with ants in your pants. You will yawn in the morning and you will be a revolutionary. Suddenly you will realize that you do not have to keep on going to Iowa State. One day the music will become deafening, and you will realize it has been laughter all along.

Like a transvestite gone clubbing without his or her wig, you will laugh at a night just begun. But we’re with you white middle-class heterosexual transvestites of Iowa State; we’re laughing with you and not at you.

And as we laugh, we will shake the house apart. And as we laugh our laughter will consume the chuckles of administrators, who will quickly see that they have much more to worry about than the name of Catt Hall.

But for now we wait. Like Bush-wa, the students are focused on the moment. They will not be distracted from their hunger. They will not do anything but feed.

Iowa State is pregnant with laughter.

The moment approaches.

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Brian Johnson is a junior in English and philosophy from Amarillo, Texas.