— by Hephaestus
As I turn the dial knob on my vacuum tube TV to change from channel to channel, I’m looking at video of a bunch of kids who desperately want to play at being “protesters” and “revolutionaries”. I guess that’s what happens when their parents didn’t let them pretend to be cowboys and Indians when they were littler.
These protester kids have had lives that have been so pampered, so easy, and so sheltered that they hunger to be involved in anything they can pretend is “important”. Deep down they know they are useless and they are so immature that, at college age, they are still playing make believe. It is ridiculous that we have government and corporate leaders who are trying to appease these entitled teenagers’ temper tantrum.
Throughout history, other generations, both in America and around the world, faced real challenges. They faced war, famine, plagues, dustbowls, economic depressions, revolutions, and civil wars. They knew real privation when they had to begin work in coal mines as children and slept in cold, dirt-floor buildings, where the only book in the home may have been the family Bible.
The only hardship these protesters have faced has been slow internet and terrible ennui. Their life of luxury, with boundless opportunity and endless entertainment in a society so sissified that they weren’t ever even allowed to lose at kickball, leaves them starving to be involved with something that has meaning. With no need for a real struggle to put food on their plate or plow a field or to work at a part time job to pay for their education, by college age, they are still functionally children. So now these 6′ tall and C-cup children want to dress up as revolutionaries and pretend to protest against a nonexistent dictatorship. If you doubt me, look at the Seattle CHAZ/CHOP zone, where there were literally young people dressed in superhero and wizard costumes.
In their schooling, largely taught by the previous generation of narcissistic hippies, today’s protesters were only taught history though the eyes of the preceding generation, which thought history began and ended with themselves. They were told that anything before World War II President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was paleontology. They were taught that the only important parts of Western history were World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam war. The “Cold War” was taught from the perspective of India’s socialist Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, that there were no good guys or bad guys, and everything was just a power struggle. The Soviet gulags, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”, and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn were just footnotes, if they were even mentioned at all, as the communist Hammer and Sickle were stripped of their terror and turned into a cool rub-on tattoo.
In what passed for their schooling, they were taught that the only significant “heroes” since World War II (aka “the beginning of history”) were “protesters”, whether they were the Civil Rights protesters or the Vietnam antiwar protesters or the protesters for independence in the colonial world like Mahatma Ghandi. It is no wonder these bearded and hairy-legged kiddies all want to put on their protester cosplay and pretend to be doing something important.
Ghandi created the modern “protest” design of semi-violent street marches and civil disruption as a way to have a war of independence for India against a British empire with a conscience, that he knew no longer had the will to simply shoot them all. It worked and the world took note that political objectives could be accomplished with lots of shouting and poor personal hygiene, instead of armed rebellion. The unstated prerequisite was that the target was already a pretty decent western government to begin with. This is demonstrated by the fact that shouting and guitar concerts never changed policies or overthrew totalitarian dictators like Russia’s Josef Stalin, Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler, China’s Mao Tse Tung, Cambodia’s Pol Pot or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
Martin Luther King could reasonably rely on Ghandi’s method to force the United States to remedy its unfair treatment of its black citizens because the majority of America already knew racism was wrong. Our founding philosophy had told us it was wrong. Our founders themselves argued about it so America just needed a voice, a face, and some insistence to prompt us to follow our conscience. The civil rights protest movement was a powerful and good activity that succeeded in banishing some genuine faults within American society and making us truer to our society’s intended form.
Never mind that I thought that the damned hippie antiwar protesters were a bunch of long-haired, commie-coddling, spoiled brats. At least their protests were done out of genuine fear of being drafted. Cowardice is actually an emotion that an adult human can feel. They may have been aping other important protests, but they were protesting something that posed an actual threat to their own precious lives.
So now today’s adult-sized children, with their empty lives searching for meaning, are dressing up as protesters and pretending to tear down the society that has made their comfortable, unchallenged lives possible. Never mind the fact that they are protesting lukewarm coffee and that their toast is only buttered on one side. Their teachers and professors, the now gray-haired, incontinent, and addled former hippies dampen their wheelchair seats and gleefully clap at their grandchildren’s antics with the same pride that a previous generation smiled at a child wearing Daniel Boone’s coonskin cap.
I, for one, hope that these Comi-Con revolutionaries finally get the spanking they’ve been aching for, but didn’t get when they were in diapers, before any real harm is done. Hostile foreign powers are always looking for signs of weakness and they can easily see that this army of wizards, rainbow warriors, and mustachioed “wymen” could be easily conquered by a disciplined platoon armed with stern looks and harsh language.
Or they could be bought off with a participation trophy.