Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
In response to Sebby, they cancelled graduation so 100% of students were impacted.
My son just graduated law school in Detroit. We have a huge Arabic population and the school’s student body reflects that. Was wondering if there would be any walkout, but no.
In response to Ty, not looking for an argument, but since they cancelled graduation what did she decline to speak at?
|
Missing class? I'd be pissed. But it's not a tragedy to miss a graduation. And the school should be mocked for having done so. That's an overreaction.
I'm not surprised there'd be lack of protest or walkout by those who understand the issues and whose families descend from one of the ethnic groups involved. The loudest voices in these protests appear to come from, unsurprisingly, upper middle class to affluent suburban kids, a lot of them white.
As a card carrying member of the upper middle class my entire life, I'm comfortable stating this: We Suck.
We'll tell you everything we know and how we could do it better. We'll venerate the "wisdom" of professional/managerial types and spout technocratic solutions for everything as if we've some knowledge the hoi polloi couldn't acquire if they'd had a few extra hours on Wikipedia. We know it all, because we've been to fancy schools, private high schools, and we've grad degrees, and even though we're thoroughly underwhelming in our attempts to be insightful or erudite, we think we know better than the rubes who don't enjoy the
New Yorker as much as we do.
We're a population of Leonard Bernstein's dinner parties from Tom Wolfe's "These Radical Chic Evenings" deposited along the train lines outside the larger cities. Gotta silly theory about gender? We love it. Want to take a decent idea like DEI and warp it into something extreme and alienating? We're in! Give us your silliest avant garde musings and we'll treat them seriously!
And show us Israel and Hamas in a tangle and we'll run it through a prism in which the world is split rigidly between oppressors and the oppressed and we'll find a way to obliterate nuance and call you a genocide-supporter for not excusing Hamas.
We took our History and Poli-Sci professors seriously in college, along with the wingnuts who deconstructed every piece of literature as loaded with strange critiques about the patriarchy, or arguments for climate preservation.
We're in large part maleducated by an entrenched crowd of professors who've never had a reason to police the silliness they taught us, and now teach our children, because they're never subject to metrics. They're tenured. They don't make payrolls, they don't get fired when they're wrong, so why in the hell wouldn't they spout claptrap to their students? What could go wrong? Nothing. To them.
People love to say there's a crisis of lack of respect for institutions. And many of those people are academics and policy prescribers in government. They say it, of course, because they're mad that people have begun telling them they're full of shit. But it's neither anti-intellectual nor unpatriotic to piss on the institutions. They deserve it. They'll call themselves "elites" and the paranoid right will play along and use the term as well, but these know-it-alls are anything but that. The people in charge are in large part credentialed buffoons. And if there's a crisis of any kind, its lack of institutions worth respecting.
The professional/managerial class of this country, and its children, who support the warped ideologies and bizarre thinking behind most protests, are the effluent of a broken academic system, and a fucked up class system that creates some very sheltered and silly adults. Remove that class from the protests and those gatherings will shrink by 70% overnight, at the same time the clarity of message will increase 5X.
