The Student Protests

The news has been full of accounts of students setting up tent cities on the grounds of Columbia University and other elite schools around the country.  They are protesting their universities’ failure to stop the Gaza war.  Well, of course that’s ridiculous.  How exactly would Columbia University stop the Israeli Defense Forces?  How many nuclear weapons can Columbia University field?  At last count I think it is still zero.  To be fair to the cretins in tents, what they want is for their university to divest of any Israeli stocks and any stocks of companies that make weapons that the US government provides to Israel.

All of this angst is reminiscent of the student protests in the 1960s and 1970s over the war in Vietnam.  The same tired playbook is being used.  The radicals are disrupting the education process and garnering as much attention in the media as they can and attempting to get the presidential race wrapped into their cause.

You know it’s a funny thing.  When I see these useless people and hear them speak about their confused take on the Gaza War, I despise them and wish that the police would drown them in pepper spray and tase them into submission, tie ropes around their feet and drag them away.

And in the red states that’s more or less what is happening.  In these states they want the colleges to educate their kids and there’s no room or time for Bolshevik Theatrics.  You can watch the state police drag the wannabe antifa players off to jail.  But in the People’s Republic they beg and plead with their toddlers to eat their vegetables and un-occupy the Bursar’s Office, pretty please.  And I guess we’re supposed to be upset if the mental patients are running the asylum.  “Something must be done!”

But when I think about it a little, I say, “Who cares?”  My family doesn’t go to Columbia, Harvard or Berkley.  We couldn’t afford to and we wouldn’t be accepted.  So why should I care that the type of people they do accept wants to put on this silly passion play?  I sure don’t.  In fact, I’d be thrilled if they burned Harvard, Yale, Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League right down to the ground.  I’d buy the DVD and watch it at Christmas.  It would be a job well done.

And why should I care if they lay siege to the Democratic National Convention?  Let them.  Let them occupy all of Chicago if they want (although I wonder if the gang-bangers will be intimidated by the Zoomer protesters).  For all I know this is like the Summer of George Floyd and will allow the Left to consolidate its hold on the youth vote.

But either way, what it makes me think is how little I have in common with these people who inhabit the Left.  The future I care about will not be decided by the students protesting at Columbia.  The uselessness of those students will lead nowhere.  They will not become leaders or anything else.  Most of them won’t even leave children after them.  The women are unlovable and the “men” are feeble children.

The young people I care about are the ones who are looking around themselves and trying to figure out a way to scratch out a normal life.  Learn a skill, get a job, find a wife, raise a family.  Real life.  Not sleeping in a tent on a college quadrangle and pretending to be a revolutionary while your parents pay that university a hundred thousand dollars a year.  Figuring out how to help these young people, in my case, my grandchildren, is the most important consideration any older person can have.

As for the Ivy League Intifada, honestly who cares?