Those were the days, my friend…

Arthur in Maine delivered a suggested administrative reply to the asinine”demands” of Amherst students, who appeared to be either trying to make state school students, like in Missouri, feel better by proving that attendees of elite private colleges could be idiotic too, or attempting to emulate their imagined betters at Yale  I hope Arthur’s form letter gets a workout, because there will be plenty of audiences for it.

Yesterday, there was an especially ugly demonstration at Dartmouth on November 12, with over 150 Black Lives Matter student members accosting white students and chanting, “Fuck you, you filthy white fucks!” “Fuck you and your comfort!” and “Fuck you, you racist shit!,” among other Elizabethan epithets worthy of the culture and and verbal virtuosity they have been imbued with in Hanover. Black Lives Matter is at the root of this uprising by the black privileged against the white privileged; it has been a racist and hate-based movement from the beginning, and the knee-jerk progressive politicians, journalists, pundits and leaders, including Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, who have given it their seals of approval either actively or passively should have this and all the  ugliness to come stamped on their resumes. They worked hard to create racial paranoia and divide the nation by color and ethnicity. This was the predictable result: I predicted it; many did. They intentionally planted dynamite in the nation’s most vulnerable fault-line—race— for political gain, and the tremors have started, where they usually do, on the campuses.

Good job, everybody. Good job.

These things do not happen in a vacuum. The macro-cause is always weak leadership, in the home, in the classroom, in the nation. Students may not know much, but they can tell when their country is in distress, and they want to participate in effort to help. Unfortunately, they have one tool at their disposal—disruption—and it usually makes the distress worse.

For I too am from the Sixties. It gave me a twinge of sympathy for Hillary Clinton when she got so much criticism for saying this during the debate on Saturday, for she only meant that she has experience with this phenomenon, and has seen it up close. (Well, she was also trying to duck the question.)

Arthur’s excellent script for administrators is, I fear, too little too late. These culture-wounding attacks on trust and speech  have been nurtured by parents, demagogues, indoctrinating teachers and cynical political leaders; administrators, the least influential and the most lily-livered of all, have scant chance of stemming it.

It would be a start, though.

Here is Arthur in Maine’s Comment of the Day on the Ethics Alarms post, Amherst Students Have Learned The Progressive-Approved Method to Win Political Debates: Intimidate And Censor The Opposition: Continue reading →