Time for Colleges to Stop Enabling Misguided Protestors on Their Campuses
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
Recently, Columbia University canceled its commencement ceremony, denying thousands of young people and their families an opportunity to celebrate an amazing accomplishment; for many (or even most) families, one that came at tremendous economic and psychological cost.
This, just days after USC did the same. Most of these students spent a large portion of their high school, college and/or graduate school tenures during COVID, when they were subjected to harsh limitations on social interaction, the toll for which we may never fully appreciate. Now, the culmination of their efforts will forever be tainted in memory, and for what?
Nationwide we are watching what havoc decades of false narratives and indoctrination can wreak. When you live in the latter part of a modern Roman Empire you can invent problems. And when a society coddles and condones and ultimately encourages catastrophizing, it ends up with the mobs we see marauding around today like wannabe Maoist Red Guards. They read about Selma or Kent State or Chicago 1968 and feel bad that they missed out; they saw pictures of their parents in retro Che Guevara t-shirts in the ‘80s and romanticize about revolutions; they believe demagogues who tell them our country and the West (and by extension Israel) are irredeemable; and in any event they believe false prophets like teen puppet Greta Thunberg that Western-style capitalism is killing the planet. (Ms. Thunberg is, of course, now fully in the thick of it with the Hamas sympathizers.)
Add in some well-placed funding from odious sources that are now being revealed, social media and good old-fashioned Jew hatred and this is where we are – watching some of the world’s great universities self-immolate, seeing seething masked mobs screaming insanely about non-existent genocide and watching Jews (most notably teenagers and young adults) cower in fear like it is the University of Vienna circa 1938.
I was reminded of the “ceasefire” march in Chappaqua back in February, about which The Examiner wrote. Your reporter cited the “passion” of the organizers, including several Horace Greeley High School students. I was there, and what I saw instead were unhinged, hysterical and manipulated teenagers unthinkingly doing the bidding for the worst elements in society – Islamist, Jew-hating, anti-Western radicals. That brand of “passion,” well-coordinated and funded, is precisely what we saw on college campuses.
If administrators and politicians don’t step up soon, and if people don’t wake up and stop the hand-wringing and navel gazing that has afflicted us over the last 10 or so years, we will have unimaginable and irreversible tragedy. And all the parents who have raised these misguided brats will have to answer for their negligence.
Christian G. Hildenbrand
Chappaqua
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