While we are eating our cheeseburgers and fast food Chinese, or drinking our tasty cafe mocha, let’s look at our surroundings.

We see white walls with nifty brown squares and lots of tables and chairs, but then we remember we are still in the Memorial Union, not your local mini-mall.

We haven’t been beamed into the future to find ourselves in a different building, even though the food court resembles nothing like the rest of the Union, or what the Union once resembled.

Our society is increasingly looking toward the future and ignoring or forgetting the past, our history and where we come from. New ideas are welcome and sought, but it is important to remember who we are and what those who came before us have sacrificed and contributed to us.

It is great that students can now hop on over to the Union and grab a quick and cheap bite to eat, but what happened to the beautiful architecture and style of the Union?

If a student walked in the book store entrance and continued on into the food court, would he or she have any idea the building was dedicated to the Iowa State graduates who died in war?

The history and the architecture have been lost in the rush to create a “modern” food court. Is this a way to make progress and serve the needs of the community and still maintain the integrity and tradition the original structure represented?

Hopefully, the lesson learned with the MU will not be repeated with Exhibit Hall or Morrill Hall.