Protestors in College Towns

The following is an adaptation of an email I sent to Brian in Iraq when he'd asked me if the protestors still protested on the corner of Providence and Broadway. It was quite a rant, but I think I hit some major points here, so here it is, republished for public consumption. Maybe it will help people put things in some perspective.

I live in a college town, and people protest. People have been protesting on the corners of major intersections at rush hour and in front of the post office since long before I was in college, and while I was here. Every year the "activist" groups have a fresh crop of freshmen to pounce on and indoctrinate. The older ones get a rush from recruiting new followers to validate their opinions. And there's always a new group of people that suddenly woke up to the fact that the world isn't perfect after they got away from high school, plus they've been patted on their heads all their lives for parroting the political views of their liberal teachers (and often parents as well). It's win/win up until that point for them. After all, who is going to say "yeah, I'm against the environment" or "yeah, I'm for war"? Nobody is. All their lives they've gotten kudos and head pats because they were kids and nobody expected them to tackle issues on a more complex level where you have to examine tradeoffs and consequences of action or inaction. So they get to college and decide in order to feel REALLY superior they need to go Speak Out™, become vegans, and wear only woven hemp. They do this not so much because they care about the issues, but because they want everybody to know that THEY care about The Issues™.It's all about ME for most of them. Look at ME! I'm ACTIVE! I'm SPEAKING OUT! I'm BETTER than you. YOU should listen to ME! Put ME in the papers. Put ME on the evening news. Everyone must see ME. I'm IMPORTANT!!!! Pat me on the head, I'm SAVING THE WORLD!!!!!!

They've always made me sick. In reality, all they've done is buy the extremist points of view that are the grotesque logical extensions of overly simplistic philosophies that are based on simple statements that happen to be true. War is bad. Nature is good. But don't try making an entire life philosophy out of either of those statements, because it ain't that simple in the real world.

I have resisted the urge to visibly flip them off as I drive by, although I've done it under my dashboard many times. I don't want them to think they got to me, see. What I like to do is completely ignore them, like they weren't even there. They WANT the attention, and negative attention is even better to them than positive attention. That's because the whole point is the whole exercise is to make them feel better than other people -- not just the other people who agree with them but are not protesting, but especially the people who disagree with them. When you confront them, it gives them "war" stories to tell their comrades back at camp. "And HE said [insert probably embellished misrepresentation of what you said here] and I said [insert politically correct party-line rant here] ." That makes them feel the most superior. That's what it's all about.

So for me, it's eyes on the road ahead and grumble at them and maybe flip them off under the dashboard as a way of venting. And of course, my blog helps. I vent here all the time. That's part of what it's for.

There were protests "all over the world" a week or so ago to mark the third anniversary of the invasion -- but none in Iraq. If there had been any in Iraq, you can bet the treasonous press would've been all over it.

I think that speaks volumes. The other thing that speaks volumes is that the protests have been far, far smaller than the organizers' projections. The leaders of the main groups that organize the big ones are communist groups (ANSWER, CND, and "Stop The War Coalition") -- who have a stake in doing anything they can to bring down freedom and capitalism. They're not really against the war, they're FOR the war and they are actively rooting for the other side.

However, their numbers are pathetically (and thankfully) relatively small. Unfortunately, their allies in the press tend to amplify their importance by reporting every little protest anywhere in the world without balancing that coverage with the quiet majority who, while some may even be unhappy that we went to war, definitely do not agree with the freaks that America is bad and that we should withdraw yesterday, Bush should be censured, impeached, & hung, and Kerry should be installed as President King, all men should be gay or neutered, and guns should be melted down and made into giant statues of limp penises to put in front of public libraries that don't have copies of Huckleberry Finn in them.

Yeah... multi-culturalists are basically anti-American-culturalists. They are cultural anarchists, or "No Culture"-alists.