A letter to campus protesters
MIKE BOYLAN
You believe your demonstrations yesterday were noble and profound. You feel that you are acting on behalf of the greater good. These unwarranted feelings are vindicated by your fellow students and faculty members all over the state, aided by apologetic media coverage.
Your protest yesterday over California’s budget cuts to higher education, which is unfortunate and perhaps also avoidable, only affords you a venue to unburden yourself from the pent up anger you have over this horrific tragedy in your life, while making a mockery of legitimate injustices and true human suffering that you so blatantly disregard.
What has been made most clear by you is the palpable sense of entitlement and the disillusioned sense of priority that plagues this generation. We never look to ourselves, and always insist someone else come to our aid. Students see their tuition rise and turn their cheek to the fact that their education is still massively subsidized.
Your narcissistic-oriented jeremiads near the free speech area demonstrate not your commitment to make aware the importance of higher education, but rather your desire for self-gratification, an opportunity to puff yourself up in your own mind as a “do-good-activist” and difference maker, while spotlighting how you, personally, have had to endure misery and hardship. This does little other than expose the enormously large chip that resides squarely on your shoulder.
You remind me of the Madden Library protesters in November when students felt it was expedient to refuse to leave upon closing time, citing their demand for the extension of operational hours, presupposing their right for the library to maintain hours that are agreeable to their preferences. Among the diluted were those who held up the sign “This is our university.” No it’s not. It is no more yours than it is the taxpayers of California who are contributing to the state’s general fund so you don’t have bear the full costs of your education.
The degenerates who found themselves occupying Dr. Oliaro’s office yesterday demanding to speak with university officials feel perfectly comfortable imposing their will on others in light of their petty grievances. I have little doubt that you are merely projecting the trials and tribulations you have experienced in your life, the ones that have come to symbolize who you are and the person you are bound to become: your role as the bewildered victim; a person who exudes the perception that they are constantly on the receiving end of an endless amount of epic injustices and intolerable suffering.
You evoke the word “suffering,” which can only be said by a person with a demented sense of reality, responsibility, and morality. You do not feel the need to run and offer aid to those men, women and children in Fresno who are actually suffering from impoverishment because their plight does not directly affect YOU. You are concerned not with the greater good, justice or the value of an educated workforce, but solely of educational costs to you.
I suppose it would be asking too much of you to rethink how you might go about making a change, if that is what you insist to be your goal. It may be too much to ask you to step outside yourself and recognize there are other players, factors, and consequences involved. If you think that spending $500 more on tuition is a means to inflict “suffering,” you have had a wonderful life, which makes me wonder why you insist on acting like a disgruntled, bitter and senseless human being.