Homage To The 60’s
March 5th, 2010
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You have to read the entire piece to get a feel for just how disconnected these people are from reality:
“…Students, faculty, staff and workers protested the budget cuts, fee hikes and furloughs in public education, chanting slogans, waving signs and playing loud music as they walked down Telegraph Avenue…”
Amusingly, the protest tradition is so advanced in Berkeley that they even have a ceremonial dance:
“…A few Latino students got up to do a symbolic dance not far away from the Subway shop that had its windows smashed a week ago…”
You know your protest has rich history and tradition if it has its own dance. From another student who was arrested for no reason by the police while inciting a riot:
“Thursday night I went to this dance party and I was unjustly arrested on Telegraph and Dwight,” said Goodrich, a senior in American Studies. “I was struck by a baton which caused my nose to bleed. I was struck all over my body when I was only exercising my right to free speech. My experience was intensely painful and angry. But I am not the first they have attempted to silence and I will not be the last. Every bone in my body is a sign of their attempts to silence us. But we are not afraid … Man, today we are not going to be silenced. We are fighting for the future.”
Somebody’s watching too many films from the 60’s. This guy obviously has career potential with the Al Sharpton gang or at the very least as an acting coach teaching the Hyperbole method. Ostensibly, this is a protest against government cutbacks in funding to universities, which can be a sympathetic cause. Sympathetic until you look at the headlines dominating the papers about a little issue the State of California has been wrestling with recently. A little thing called bankruptcy. It’s not only ironic but galling that university aged students and teachers have not been reading about the severe financial crisis gripping their state. It’s as if they are on a sinking cruise ship with water pouring in on all sides and they’re worried about a shortage of shrimp at the buffet table.
Extrapolate this mentality to when they become real people and make political decisions and you have an explanation for the plight of America today. Big issue problems that affect everyone are ignored in favor of the pressing wants of the individual or small, vocal groups. Though students notionally pass through an education of enlightenment, they still manage to come out the other side with adolescent entitlement thinking firmly entrenched.
No solutions are proposed as to how to address budget issues, apart from dancing ceremonially. Students who think rioting and destroying property will correlate with funding should get big ‘F’s on their grades upon resumption of school. Either that, or in the future, students then will break the glass on their businesses when the big karma boomerang comes around.
Not surprisingly, another angle is introduced into the protests. All of sudden, racism is at play.
“…Latin American Studies sophomore Edgar Quiroz-Medrano held an “End Racism at UC” poster next to Medina. “The UC system is made up of an overwhelming majority of white administrators which leaves only a few administrators of color,” he said. “This needs to change…”
Now there’s a guy Sharpton can use right now, never mind graduation.
Categories: Culture, Politics Al Sharpton, bankruptcy, berkeley students protest, California, entitlements, racism