The vastly entitled “students” currently shutting down some of our elite universities have exposed the generation-long shift from a society that allows youth to suffer the consequences of their actions, to a society that allows children (and these people are absolutely just spoiled little kids) to skate through their first 20 or 25 years without any sense that being jerks might earn them a punch in the nose.
When a group of lawbreaking students takes over a building on campus, then hilariously demands that the university feed them, the time is long overdue for a national discussion about how we have raised a generation of spoiled brats who think that they are not only entitled to all of the benefits of adulthood, they are also entitled to the accommodation that culture makes for children.
The First Amendment of the Constitution is clear. Speech, however vile…however stupid…however ignorant of reality…is legal. Trespassing and destruction of property and kidnapping and assault are not speech, and these effete elitists must learn the difference.
Sadly, the lesson that these “protesters” are learning is that they can break the law with impunity, and their punishment will be: nothing. That teaches them that the hecklers’ veto is alive and well and living on campus and, more destructively, on airport off-ramps and city intersections and lecture halls.
And when these children march off into the real world after graduation (and they will be allowed to graduate!), what will they bring to the work force? Imagine the job interview!
Of course many will do no such demeaning thing like actual work. They will remain at the universities, then slide effortlessly into government or NGOs that are currently being showered with government money. They will be a new generation of parasites in the bureaucratic state and its supporters in the quasi-government organizations that do the government’s bidding when it is inconvenient to act directly. And even worse…in 10 years many of these children will be the vanguard of a new generation of activist professors…molding the mush-brains of a new crop of undergraduates!
I can hardly wait!
I feel comfortable with the prediction that the pendulum will swing the other way, and it will ” get some hair mussed” as it swings.
I hope so. And that needs to start with basic instruction on the difference between free speech (I’m for it!), and freedom of action (I’m against it).