Coffee shop conversation in a college town between student protestor (S) and senior citizen (SC):
SC: I don’t know what they teach in college nowadays, but I’ve heard there’s a trend to make gender issues an important topic.
S: It should be. In fact, the university offers a gender-studies curriculum.
SC: Hmnn. Are there jobs in that outside of university professorships and government watchdog agencies? Is there also a curriculum for agglutination?
S: Huh?
SC: Let me rephrase that. Is there a curriculum in, say, the psych department for human behavior based on human gregariousness?
S: [again] Huh?
SC: I’ll say it this way. I think human behavior can be reduced to four types of behavior: First, the affinity for and participation in mobs; second, the affinity for isolating or antipathy toward any large gathering—but not agoraphobia—and third and fourth, the two others would be a tendency toward either of those without any commitment, that is, agreeing with the behavior of either the first or second without participating beyond feeling for or thinking similarly. I am doing this off the cuff, and haven’t really thought it through, but it seems to me that we gregarious humans sometimes take our affinity for one another to the extremes of mob action or isolation.
S: Sorry, I’m lost.
SC: Take protests, student protests, specifically. What are today’s issues that drive people to protest? What concerns you? Free tuition? Gender? Rights of any kind? Socialism vs. capitalism?
S: I’d say I have concerns about those and…and…racism, police brutality, immigration, and fascism.
SC: Have you participated in any large gathering to protest?
S: Well, not to the point of breaking things. I did go watch a crowd gather to protest some guy who wanted to spread hate on campus, but I was more a viewer than a participant. I know enough not to get directly involved in any mob behavior.
SC: So, I would label you in either my third or fourth category. Did you agree with the protest even though you didn’t participate?
S: Yes.
SC: So, my third category. You played it safe, showed up, thought favorably about the agglutinating behavior and the issue that generated it, but just could’t quite commit to it.
S: Sometimes protesting is good. I’ve had enough history to know about the protests that brought down the Berlin Wall and the Libyan dictator what’s-his-name. I’m old enough to know about the Arab Spring and the George Floyd protests.
SC: Gaddafi?
S: Huh?
SC: The Libyan leader was Colonel Gaddafi—though why he didn’t label himself “general” is a mystery to me. Anyway, with regard to agglutinating behavior driven by a cause, I think of my own youth.
When I was in school, we had some major protests on issues from Civil Rights to Vietnam to women’s rights to… I guess it was like so many times, a time of turmoil driven in part by a counterculture movement, counter, that is, to any social structure that developed after World War II and the Korean War. At one point during the Vietnam War the mob action peaked when students at Kent State were shot. Maybe you’ve heard the song by Neil Young. [sings] “Four dead in Ohio.” Shocked the nation. Student protests were common at the time. There were mob takeovers of university offices Looking back, I’d say many of those protests accomplished nothing individually, but they seemed to add up and change the course of the country somewhat. Mostly, they did one job in particular: Show one generation’s frustration with elders—the people who ran the world. Did you ever hear Jack Weinberg’s expression “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”? By the way, he’s in his eighties now, and I just—sorry to digress—came upon his clarification and recent statement that “But I've become more accepting of fate as I get older.” *
S: [thinking: “These old timers sure wander; I need another refill”]
SC: I remember one protest on campus in particular. It was a group of my classmates, maybe about a dozen of them, all holding signs that read “Ban the Bomb.” I find it interesting that my generation is now “elders” who run the world filled with bombs.
S: You mean atomic bombs?
SC: Atomic. Atomic bombs. The Cold War was hot at the time of that protest. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still visible in the rearview mirror. And those other protests were on the horizon. The Vietnam War, at least for Americans, had yet to start on the grand scale that took 50,000 American lives and an unknown number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and maybe Thais. The Civil Rights movement was gathering steam. But for my college contemporaries in front of the library that day, the bomb was the most pressing social issue before those other issues bubbled over the world’s melting pot.
My generation grew up in towns with radiation shelters. We drilled on hiding under school desks or standing by walls in windowless halls. Aboveground testing in the desert was televised; I saw those tests on our black-and-white TV. I think I even rose early to see them, kind of a fireworks display for a kid, and maybe a promise of an atomic future with some Buck Rogers travel on sputtering sparkler-like rockets.
But as an old person, I digress.
S: [thinking: “How long, how many refills am I going to need here?”]
SC: Where was I? So, there they were outside the college library, my classmates walking back and forth with their anti-bomb signs—for about a couple of hours. Next day, no protestors. Quiet college campus. And, as they say, lo and behold, the bombs continued to proliferate. Futile protest in front of a college library.
S: But protests can change the world. Look at that Arab Spring. Colonel Gaddafi is gone. Police reform is in the back of every big-city resident’s mind. And my contemporaries have shut down fascist speakers.
SC: Yes, protests can change things and disrupt societies. I mentioned the Berlin Wall. There’s no Soviet Union today though Putin is trying to re-establish it. But one of the reasons that most protests are futile is that social inertia is difficult to overcome—even with persistent protesting. Once a system is in play, it stays in play. When societies abruptly change, bad things can happen. Think 1917 in Russia, if you know your history.
So, I’ll grant you that some radical changes do occur. Unfortunately, they aren’t all good. Libya went from being run by a dictator to being run amuck in regional and terrorist strongholds. And as far as that back-of-the-mind police reform goes, you can note that many cops have resigned or moved from big cities to towns, making the big cities less safe. Look at the surge in crime because of protests for reforms.
S: So, what’s your point?
SC: There will always be a reason for students to protest. Always be a reason for agglutinating behavior. Heck, think Spring Breakers on a beach. Some people just need to gather, to group, to be part of a crowd or mob. They can both belong and be anonymous in a mob. And students? Yours isn’t the first generation with protestors. Think France in 1832. Think of France in 2023. Lots of protestors. If you know your history—they still teach history at the college, don’t they?—you’ll remember that students were involved in the June Revolution in Paris in 1832 just as they are involved in today’s protests over issues like labor, retirement, and pensions. Like so many gatherings of young protestors, all protests involve people with different motives for protesting in the same crowd, and as TV on-the-street interviews reveal, many protestors don’t even know the reason for the protest they attend, especially those who take the protest as a chance to loot. Look at your protesting and agglutinating generation. Motives have been both defined and undefined. But that’s always the case in human agglutination.
Anyway, as I said, there will always be a reason to protest or to gather, and protests always include agitators who lead the impressionable to violence and destruction for the sake of destruction. Heck, just look at the violence that follows a college team’s or professional team’s victory or loss; there’s an underlying penchant for mob action. It’s one of those four behaviors I mentioned. Every generation has its share of individuals with mob mentality, you know, the idea that in a mob everyone is an anonymous blob as unidentifiable as a mitochondrion in cell plasma, all mob identities obscured in numbers and by hoods and masks in a day of digital photography and CCTV.
S: I’m still not following.
SC: Well, let’s look at what makes some of your contemporaries take to the streets to protest.
S: Like?
SC: Conservatives expressing conservative views. The people you referred to as fascists.
S: You mean like those crazy, Nazi MAGA people?
SC: If that’s what you want to call them.
S: They’re fascists.
SC: Meaning what?
S: They want to…uh…uh…spread their fascism.
SC: Remember what I just said about defining a motive for gathering?
S: This is a college town. We don’t need to hear their racist, fascist ideas. In fact, there’s a protest planned for tonight. I won’t go, but I know some who will be there.
SC: What are they protesting?
S: Some conservative fascist coming to speak.
SC: What makes the person a fascist?
S: Against shared restrooms. Against poor migrants. Against health care. Against recreational drugs. Against stopping climate change. Against…See, I know the reasons. Who wants to hear that fascist stuff?
SC: Not quite the bomb, eh?
S: What?
SC: Well, in that fruitless protest against the bomb I saw so long ago in front of a college library, the topic was banning weapons that could destroy all the Northern Hemisphere’s urbanites in a day and pollute the planet with radioactivity that could cause cancers for a few centuries just about everywhere, not to mention that nuclear winter scenario—talk about climate change! One day’s activity of nuclear holocaust and the world enters months or years of nuclear winter. Now there’s a threat that seems greater to me than the banning of biological men who desire to pee in a girls’ restroom.
S: Wait! Are you saying you’re one of those MAGA people?
SC: No. I’m saying that the battles of today though similar to the battles students have fought for at least a couple centuries, might not be focused on truths and important issues. Peeing is important, but peeing as men pee is different from peeing as women pee. Is gender-neutral peeing a cause worth supporting? What of the woman who is uncomfortable in such a circumstance, or in fear of going into a restroom where a potential rapist might be lurking? Sure, it seems to be a Puritanical view of sex to the “liberated,” but putting men in women’s prisons because the men identify as women has already resulted in pregnant female prisoners. What has “the cause” caused?
The mob never knows because the mob isn’t the individual who suffers the unwanted attack and possible pregnancy. And that is the problem with all causes that generate mob protests. In their implementation they all have unintended ramifications. Those unintended consequences come from the shortsightedness on the part of young protestors. Without some historical info, they want what the next generation is sure to un-want.
Again, think of that Jack Weinberg comment about being over thirty when he was young and about being “more accepting” now that he is “older.” Actually, I’m not focused on today’s issues because I know that all such issues are rather fleeting, as Weinberg’s old-age statement reveals. I’m more focused on those four categories of behavior in a gregarious species.
S: What about the migrants? MAGA people are racists.
SC: Again, you focus on an issue from a shortsighted and simplified perspective. Those who aren’t sympathetic to the cause of illegal migrants might be living a reality that the protestors don’t know, such as the reality experienced by Americans living along the border or those affected by crimes perpetrated by and drugs pushed by illegals. Most Americans are descendants of migrants just one to three generations removed, and many don’t even know their full genetic heritage; heck, even anti-white Angela Davis, famous for her protesting, was discovered to be a descendant of a Mayflower ancestor. Look around this room. You can see the genetic differences we have brought to the American coffee shop, not to mention the cultural differences. Nothing wrong with migration in itself. Humans have been migrating for at least 60,000 years or more when they left Africa to populate the planet.
S: But you fascists are…racists.
SC: Whoa! What makes me a fascist? Some commonsense positions? Maybe a little caution because I've seen some realities that you have yet to see? In fact, many protests are fascist in that they are demands for conformity. Censoring ideological opposition is a dictatorial—thus fascist—behavior. It’s also been the modus operandi in Communist countries.
S: Most of your generation is against the issues my generation sees as important.
SC: I think you need to remember that my generation went through its own turmoil. Weinberg is the example. And just as there are mixed motives in any group of protestors today, there were mixed motives in protestors then.
But one principle I believe you miss is that just about every protestor thinks that freedom underlies all other motives, as long as it applies to the protestors’ freedoms. And that’s where your fascism—sorry, your contemporaries’ fascism comes into the picture. Protesting and shutting down anyone’s free speech might be the protestors’ right to be free, but it prohibits another from being free. By the way, have you noticed that generally all loud protests seem to come from a fascist Left and not a fascist Right even though fascism might be called a far-Right perspective? Remember the Tea Party protests? There were seven arrests during those protests, all for misdemeanors. Remember the Occupy Wall Street protests? Those protests led to more than 700 arrests, many for felonies. That’s not to say that there aren’t loud Rightists, not radical Rightists, but it is to say that generally, students trend toward the Left and do so not by reasoned discourse, but rather by shutting down those who might carry a different point of view. Of course, you will probably cite the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Fair enough, but that only reveals to me, since I now have seen videos of government agents inciting the mob, that some people are inclined toward participating in a mob action, often without thinking. Thus, the trend in students toward socialist, and ultimately fascist, ideals. And that, my young friend, puts them in my first category, the need to gather, to belong, to agglutinate. Generally, it boils that melting pot down to one question that drives individuals in the mob: “What are you going to give me?”
S: So, you think we are leaches?
SC: Some. And some of your contemporaries are just “rebels without a cause” to use the James Dean movie title. Angry or frustrated because you believe there should be more to…to, I guess, life, to everything. Promises engendered by “ideals” that have never proved to be effective. Think how African-Americans supported Obama only to find that it was under Trump that they began to prosper.
S: [ignoring the comment about Obama] Like what ideals?
SC: Equity.
S: Just as I thought. You’re probably one of those rich guys. You have cars, maybe two houses, money in the bank, respect in the community of Joneses, and a financially secure future.
SC: Hey, in my first job, I worked as a garbage man, then in followup jobs as a construction worker—slash ditch digger—slash janitor—slash almost every menial labor job I could find. So, unless you have put in the days of sweat I’ve put in, don’t be so fast to stereotype. You might look at those of us who have spent years getting to a tenuous level of financial security as “privileged,” but for most it’s been a life of scratch-and-save. But I’ll grant that I had an easier life than my parents who endured the Great Depression and WWII and then struggled as members of the upper lower class or just barely lower middle class. My story isn’t unique in that family history. But none of that past has any relationship to fascism, the term you throw around so loosely.
S: Still, you don’t want equity.
SC: Equal outcomes? You’ve never played competitive sports or games, have you? But you probably have a favorite team or player. Why?
S: Well…
SC: As many have pointed out, those of you who argue for equity really don’t want it. And those of your generation who protest for it fail to realize that your insistence on it is a reflection of what Mussolini tried in Italy. Go ahead, prove that you do want equity. Offer to give your better grades to a poorer student so that both of you have an equal outcome, your A balancing his F, and both of you getting a C.
S: That’s absurd.
SC: Really? What are you, some kind of wicked capitalist in favor of meritocracy?
S: You’re twisting…
SC: Look, we’re never going to fully agree. It’s a generational thing that you will discover when you are among the elderly, when you look back at the ups and downs of your life and the tradeoffs you had to make. Your contemporaries are future Weinbergs. In the meantime, be a little less judgmental and general in your causes. And give my four categories of behavior some thought the next time you see a student protest. In which of those four can you place yourself? Participant fully engaged? Peripheral ideological participant? Antagonist? Peripheral antagonist? Oh! I suppose I should make a fifth category: Indifferent?
* Galloway, Paul (1990-11-16). "Radical Redux". Chicago Tribune. Vol. Tempo/Section 5. pp. 1–2. Retrieved 2015-04-30. “I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.” A text version of this article is also online
SC: I don’t know what they teach in college nowadays, but I’ve heard there’s a trend to make gender issues an important topic.
S: It should be. In fact, the university offers a gender-studies curriculum.
SC: Hmnn. Are there jobs in that outside of university professorships and government watchdog agencies? Is there also a curriculum for agglutination?
S: Huh?
SC: Let me rephrase that. Is there a curriculum in, say, the psych department for human behavior based on human gregariousness?
S: [again] Huh?
SC: I’ll say it this way. I think human behavior can be reduced to four types of behavior: First, the affinity for and participation in mobs; second, the affinity for isolating or antipathy toward any large gathering—but not agoraphobia—and third and fourth, the two others would be a tendency toward either of those without any commitment, that is, agreeing with the behavior of either the first or second without participating beyond feeling for or thinking similarly. I am doing this off the cuff, and haven’t really thought it through, but it seems to me that we gregarious humans sometimes take our affinity for one another to the extremes of mob action or isolation.
S: Sorry, I’m lost.
SC: Take protests, student protests, specifically. What are today’s issues that drive people to protest? What concerns you? Free tuition? Gender? Rights of any kind? Socialism vs. capitalism?
S: I’d say I have concerns about those and…and…racism, police brutality, immigration, and fascism.
SC: Have you participated in any large gathering to protest?
S: Well, not to the point of breaking things. I did go watch a crowd gather to protest some guy who wanted to spread hate on campus, but I was more a viewer than a participant. I know enough not to get directly involved in any mob behavior.
SC: So, I would label you in either my third or fourth category. Did you agree with the protest even though you didn’t participate?
S: Yes.
SC: So, my third category. You played it safe, showed up, thought favorably about the agglutinating behavior and the issue that generated it, but just could’t quite commit to it.
S: Sometimes protesting is good. I’ve had enough history to know about the protests that brought down the Berlin Wall and the Libyan dictator what’s-his-name. I’m old enough to know about the Arab Spring and the George Floyd protests.
SC: Gaddafi?
S: Huh?
SC: The Libyan leader was Colonel Gaddafi—though why he didn’t label himself “general” is a mystery to me. Anyway, with regard to agglutinating behavior driven by a cause, I think of my own youth.
When I was in school, we had some major protests on issues from Civil Rights to Vietnam to women’s rights to… I guess it was like so many times, a time of turmoil driven in part by a counterculture movement, counter, that is, to any social structure that developed after World War II and the Korean War. At one point during the Vietnam War the mob action peaked when students at Kent State were shot. Maybe you’ve heard the song by Neil Young. [sings] “Four dead in Ohio.” Shocked the nation. Student protests were common at the time. There were mob takeovers of university offices Looking back, I’d say many of those protests accomplished nothing individually, but they seemed to add up and change the course of the country somewhat. Mostly, they did one job in particular: Show one generation’s frustration with elders—the people who ran the world. Did you ever hear Jack Weinberg’s expression “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”? By the way, he’s in his eighties now, and I just—sorry to digress—came upon his clarification and recent statement that “But I've become more accepting of fate as I get older.” *
S: [thinking: “These old timers sure wander; I need another refill”]
SC: I remember one protest on campus in particular. It was a group of my classmates, maybe about a dozen of them, all holding signs that read “Ban the Bomb.” I find it interesting that my generation is now “elders” who run the world filled with bombs.
S: You mean atomic bombs?
SC: Atomic. Atomic bombs. The Cold War was hot at the time of that protest. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still visible in the rearview mirror. And those other protests were on the horizon. The Vietnam War, at least for Americans, had yet to start on the grand scale that took 50,000 American lives and an unknown number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and maybe Thais. The Civil Rights movement was gathering steam. But for my college contemporaries in front of the library that day, the bomb was the most pressing social issue before those other issues bubbled over the world’s melting pot.
My generation grew up in towns with radiation shelters. We drilled on hiding under school desks or standing by walls in windowless halls. Aboveground testing in the desert was televised; I saw those tests on our black-and-white TV. I think I even rose early to see them, kind of a fireworks display for a kid, and maybe a promise of an atomic future with some Buck Rogers travel on sputtering sparkler-like rockets.
But as an old person, I digress.
S: [thinking: “How long, how many refills am I going to need here?”]
SC: Where was I? So, there they were outside the college library, my classmates walking back and forth with their anti-bomb signs—for about a couple of hours. Next day, no protestors. Quiet college campus. And, as they say, lo and behold, the bombs continued to proliferate. Futile protest in front of a college library.
S: But protests can change the world. Look at that Arab Spring. Colonel Gaddafi is gone. Police reform is in the back of every big-city resident’s mind. And my contemporaries have shut down fascist speakers.
SC: Yes, protests can change things and disrupt societies. I mentioned the Berlin Wall. There’s no Soviet Union today though Putin is trying to re-establish it. But one of the reasons that most protests are futile is that social inertia is difficult to overcome—even with persistent protesting. Once a system is in play, it stays in play. When societies abruptly change, bad things can happen. Think 1917 in Russia, if you know your history.
So, I’ll grant you that some radical changes do occur. Unfortunately, they aren’t all good. Libya went from being run by a dictator to being run amuck in regional and terrorist strongholds. And as far as that back-of-the-mind police reform goes, you can note that many cops have resigned or moved from big cities to towns, making the big cities less safe. Look at the surge in crime because of protests for reforms.
S: So, what’s your point?
SC: There will always be a reason for students to protest. Always be a reason for agglutinating behavior. Heck, think Spring Breakers on a beach. Some people just need to gather, to group, to be part of a crowd or mob. They can both belong and be anonymous in a mob. And students? Yours isn’t the first generation with protestors. Think France in 1832. Think of France in 2023. Lots of protestors. If you know your history—they still teach history at the college, don’t they?—you’ll remember that students were involved in the June Revolution in Paris in 1832 just as they are involved in today’s protests over issues like labor, retirement, and pensions. Like so many gatherings of young protestors, all protests involve people with different motives for protesting in the same crowd, and as TV on-the-street interviews reveal, many protestors don’t even know the reason for the protest they attend, especially those who take the protest as a chance to loot. Look at your protesting and agglutinating generation. Motives have been both defined and undefined. But that’s always the case in human agglutination.
Anyway, as I said, there will always be a reason to protest or to gather, and protests always include agitators who lead the impressionable to violence and destruction for the sake of destruction. Heck, just look at the violence that follows a college team’s or professional team’s victory or loss; there’s an underlying penchant for mob action. It’s one of those four behaviors I mentioned. Every generation has its share of individuals with mob mentality, you know, the idea that in a mob everyone is an anonymous blob as unidentifiable as a mitochondrion in cell plasma, all mob identities obscured in numbers and by hoods and masks in a day of digital photography and CCTV.
S: I’m still not following.
SC: Well, let’s look at what makes some of your contemporaries take to the streets to protest.
S: Like?
SC: Conservatives expressing conservative views. The people you referred to as fascists.
S: You mean like those crazy, Nazi MAGA people?
SC: If that’s what you want to call them.
S: They’re fascists.
SC: Meaning what?
S: They want to…uh…uh…spread their fascism.
SC: Remember what I just said about defining a motive for gathering?
S: This is a college town. We don’t need to hear their racist, fascist ideas. In fact, there’s a protest planned for tonight. I won’t go, but I know some who will be there.
SC: What are they protesting?
S: Some conservative fascist coming to speak.
SC: What makes the person a fascist?
S: Against shared restrooms. Against poor migrants. Against health care. Against recreational drugs. Against stopping climate change. Against…See, I know the reasons. Who wants to hear that fascist stuff?
SC: Not quite the bomb, eh?
S: What?
SC: Well, in that fruitless protest against the bomb I saw so long ago in front of a college library, the topic was banning weapons that could destroy all the Northern Hemisphere’s urbanites in a day and pollute the planet with radioactivity that could cause cancers for a few centuries just about everywhere, not to mention that nuclear winter scenario—talk about climate change! One day’s activity of nuclear holocaust and the world enters months or years of nuclear winter. Now there’s a threat that seems greater to me than the banning of biological men who desire to pee in a girls’ restroom.
S: Wait! Are you saying you’re one of those MAGA people?
SC: No. I’m saying that the battles of today though similar to the battles students have fought for at least a couple centuries, might not be focused on truths and important issues. Peeing is important, but peeing as men pee is different from peeing as women pee. Is gender-neutral peeing a cause worth supporting? What of the woman who is uncomfortable in such a circumstance, or in fear of going into a restroom where a potential rapist might be lurking? Sure, it seems to be a Puritanical view of sex to the “liberated,” but putting men in women’s prisons because the men identify as women has already resulted in pregnant female prisoners. What has “the cause” caused?
The mob never knows because the mob isn’t the individual who suffers the unwanted attack and possible pregnancy. And that is the problem with all causes that generate mob protests. In their implementation they all have unintended ramifications. Those unintended consequences come from the shortsightedness on the part of young protestors. Without some historical info, they want what the next generation is sure to un-want.
Again, think of that Jack Weinberg comment about being over thirty when he was young and about being “more accepting” now that he is “older.” Actually, I’m not focused on today’s issues because I know that all such issues are rather fleeting, as Weinberg’s old-age statement reveals. I’m more focused on those four categories of behavior in a gregarious species.
S: What about the migrants? MAGA people are racists.
SC: Again, you focus on an issue from a shortsighted and simplified perspective. Those who aren’t sympathetic to the cause of illegal migrants might be living a reality that the protestors don’t know, such as the reality experienced by Americans living along the border or those affected by crimes perpetrated by and drugs pushed by illegals. Most Americans are descendants of migrants just one to three generations removed, and many don’t even know their full genetic heritage; heck, even anti-white Angela Davis, famous for her protesting, was discovered to be a descendant of a Mayflower ancestor. Look around this room. You can see the genetic differences we have brought to the American coffee shop, not to mention the cultural differences. Nothing wrong with migration in itself. Humans have been migrating for at least 60,000 years or more when they left Africa to populate the planet.
S: But you fascists are…racists.
SC: Whoa! What makes me a fascist? Some commonsense positions? Maybe a little caution because I've seen some realities that you have yet to see? In fact, many protests are fascist in that they are demands for conformity. Censoring ideological opposition is a dictatorial—thus fascist—behavior. It’s also been the modus operandi in Communist countries.
S: Most of your generation is against the issues my generation sees as important.
SC: I think you need to remember that my generation went through its own turmoil. Weinberg is the example. And just as there are mixed motives in any group of protestors today, there were mixed motives in protestors then.
But one principle I believe you miss is that just about every protestor thinks that freedom underlies all other motives, as long as it applies to the protestors’ freedoms. And that’s where your fascism—sorry, your contemporaries’ fascism comes into the picture. Protesting and shutting down anyone’s free speech might be the protestors’ right to be free, but it prohibits another from being free. By the way, have you noticed that generally all loud protests seem to come from a fascist Left and not a fascist Right even though fascism might be called a far-Right perspective? Remember the Tea Party protests? There were seven arrests during those protests, all for misdemeanors. Remember the Occupy Wall Street protests? Those protests led to more than 700 arrests, many for felonies. That’s not to say that there aren’t loud Rightists, not radical Rightists, but it is to say that generally, students trend toward the Left and do so not by reasoned discourse, but rather by shutting down those who might carry a different point of view. Of course, you will probably cite the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Fair enough, but that only reveals to me, since I now have seen videos of government agents inciting the mob, that some people are inclined toward participating in a mob action, often without thinking. Thus, the trend in students toward socialist, and ultimately fascist, ideals. And that, my young friend, puts them in my first category, the need to gather, to belong, to agglutinate. Generally, it boils that melting pot down to one question that drives individuals in the mob: “What are you going to give me?”
S: So, you think we are leaches?
SC: Some. And some of your contemporaries are just “rebels without a cause” to use the James Dean movie title. Angry or frustrated because you believe there should be more to…to, I guess, life, to everything. Promises engendered by “ideals” that have never proved to be effective. Think how African-Americans supported Obama only to find that it was under Trump that they began to prosper.
S: [ignoring the comment about Obama] Like what ideals?
SC: Equity.
S: Just as I thought. You’re probably one of those rich guys. You have cars, maybe two houses, money in the bank, respect in the community of Joneses, and a financially secure future.
SC: Hey, in my first job, I worked as a garbage man, then in followup jobs as a construction worker—slash ditch digger—slash janitor—slash almost every menial labor job I could find. So, unless you have put in the days of sweat I’ve put in, don’t be so fast to stereotype. You might look at those of us who have spent years getting to a tenuous level of financial security as “privileged,” but for most it’s been a life of scratch-and-save. But I’ll grant that I had an easier life than my parents who endured the Great Depression and WWII and then struggled as members of the upper lower class or just barely lower middle class. My story isn’t unique in that family history. But none of that past has any relationship to fascism, the term you throw around so loosely.
S: Still, you don’t want equity.
SC: Equal outcomes? You’ve never played competitive sports or games, have you? But you probably have a favorite team or player. Why?
S: Well…
SC: As many have pointed out, those of you who argue for equity really don’t want it. And those of your generation who protest for it fail to realize that your insistence on it is a reflection of what Mussolini tried in Italy. Go ahead, prove that you do want equity. Offer to give your better grades to a poorer student so that both of you have an equal outcome, your A balancing his F, and both of you getting a C.
S: That’s absurd.
SC: Really? What are you, some kind of wicked capitalist in favor of meritocracy?
S: You’re twisting…
SC: Look, we’re never going to fully agree. It’s a generational thing that you will discover when you are among the elderly, when you look back at the ups and downs of your life and the tradeoffs you had to make. Your contemporaries are future Weinbergs. In the meantime, be a little less judgmental and general in your causes. And give my four categories of behavior some thought the next time you see a student protest. In which of those four can you place yourself? Participant fully engaged? Peripheral ideological participant? Antagonist? Peripheral antagonist? Oh! I suppose I should make a fifth category: Indifferent?
* Galloway, Paul (1990-11-16). "Radical Redux". Chicago Tribune. Vol. Tempo/Section 5. pp. 1–2. Retrieved 2015-04-30. “I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.” A text version of this article is also online
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