Thoughts on the week that was.
I didn't watch William and Kate's wedding in real time - I was operating on about 5 hours of sleep in the previous 48.
The good liberal in me wants to scoff at the expense of the whole affair, especially given the budgetary woes which are hampering public services in the UK. Similar constraints are complicating matters all over the US, and since my upcoming job and my mother's salary are made possible by public funds, I'm quite sensitive to arguments against anything that could be considered wasteful or extraneous. After all, my university is a state institution, and it grates on me when the Department of Religion is given the axe while our head football coach is under contract for about $6 million.
Let me repeat that: our head football coach makes about $6 million. Adjunct faculty are lucky to make $1,700 per class per semester. Of course, whenever I try to make arguments against the behemoth that is Alabama football, I am quickly shouted down. Football brings in vast sums of money, people say. It generates more wealth than it costs. Perhaps.
Sometimes, however, the liberal in me surrenders to the romantic. Watching highlights of the wedding day, I was as enamored as anyone else at the spectacle. The coach, the interiors of Westminster, the horse guards and pageantry -- I drank it all in. Kate was graceful and stunningly beautiful, William was poised and handsome. I sighed at their little glances and exchanges, I marveled at how sweet they looked together.
And given that a vicious tornado had just ripped through and leveled part of my city, watching the wedding was a welcome distraction. I gave in to the fantasy of it, if only for a few moments, but for those moments I was enchanted by the beauty of the ceremony and the collective optimism surrounding two impossibly appealing young people restarting their shared journey in the holiness of matrimony.
Was it worth the expense? If you were to ask that of someone whose life has been affected by a government cut to social services, I imagine they would rightly say no. Of course, drawing a line of causality between a terminated program and, say, and the cost of extra barricades around Westminster is complicated -- in the same way, I'm told, that university budgets are.
In the end, Benthamism reigns. It's fitting, I suppose, since utilitarianism was born in Britain and raised in the US. The greatest happiness to the greatest number possible, so the axiom goes. I can't help but think that the wedding, in managing to be something uniquely transporting to storm-weary Southerners thousands of miles from London, satisfied that tenet. I know I have the advantage of not having to bear the cost of the wedding, but it was nice to share in its distracting qualities.
No worries, though. I'm sure the good liberal in me will return with a quickness. ; )
The good liberal in me wants to scoff at the expense of the whole affair, especially given the budgetary woes which are hampering public services in the UK. Similar constraints are complicating matters all over the US, and since my upcoming job and my mother's salary are made possible by public funds, I'm quite sensitive to arguments against anything that could be considered wasteful or extraneous. After all, my university is a state institution, and it grates on me when the Department of Religion is given the axe while our head football coach is under contract for about $6 million.
Let me repeat that: our head football coach makes about $6 million. Adjunct faculty are lucky to make $1,700 per class per semester. Of course, whenever I try to make arguments against the behemoth that is Alabama football, I am quickly shouted down. Football brings in vast sums of money, people say. It generates more wealth than it costs. Perhaps.
Sometimes, however, the liberal in me surrenders to the romantic. Watching highlights of the wedding day, I was as enamored as anyone else at the spectacle. The coach, the interiors of Westminster, the horse guards and pageantry -- I drank it all in. Kate was graceful and stunningly beautiful, William was poised and handsome. I sighed at their little glances and exchanges, I marveled at how sweet they looked together.
And given that a vicious tornado had just ripped through and leveled part of my city, watching the wedding was a welcome distraction. I gave in to the fantasy of it, if only for a few moments, but for those moments I was enchanted by the beauty of the ceremony and the collective optimism surrounding two impossibly appealing young people restarting their shared journey in the holiness of matrimony.
Was it worth the expense? If you were to ask that of someone whose life has been affected by a government cut to social services, I imagine they would rightly say no. Of course, drawing a line of causality between a terminated program and, say, and the cost of extra barricades around Westminster is complicated -- in the same way, I'm told, that university budgets are.
In the end, Benthamism reigns. It's fitting, I suppose, since utilitarianism was born in Britain and raised in the US. The greatest happiness to the greatest number possible, so the axiom goes. I can't help but think that the wedding, in managing to be something uniquely transporting to storm-weary Southerners thousands of miles from London, satisfied that tenet. I know I have the advantage of not having to bear the cost of the wedding, but it was nice to share in its distracting qualities.
No worries, though. I'm sure the good liberal in me will return with a quickness. ; )