Stop protesting like it’s 1968, and actually aim to make a difference

[mountaineer]

Stop protesting like it’s 1968, and actually aim to make a difference
By Karol Markowicz
September 29, 2019

Another week, another group of people taking to the streets to protest something or other.

They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. Two weeks ago, it was the Greta Thunberg-led climate-change protests. Last week, climate change again, plus the usual mass actions targeting various world leaders gathered at Turtle Bay for the UN General Assembly.

Maybe everyone is just having too good a time blocking traffic and throwing confetti to go home. ...

People “wanted to do something,” so what they did was take a nice walk? The breathless media coverage of most of these nice walks ­obscures the fact that protesting rarely accomplishes anything. ...

When Thunberg led the kids out of school with their “Don’t be a fossil fool!” signs, the grown-ups patted them on their heads, pleased to see the next generation following in their bourgeois-left footsteps.

The kids walked out of school, because, hey, which kid wouldn’t? But what do they want and from whom? No one asked them, lest the whole thing be recognized as the farce that it was.

Even the protests with clearer goals than “let’s change the weather” have been duds.   ...

Rest of article at NY Post

[mountaineer]

Related: a piece by a Yale student (also posted in its entirety at NY Post).

Entitled Yale students are sick with ‘protester derangement syndrome’
By Esteban Elizondo
September 28, 2019

Sit-ins, hunger strikes and angry mobs: These are all things I became accustomed to in my late teens and early 20s. No, I haven’t been living in a country experiencing severe political unrest. I am living in New Haven, Conn., and attending Yale University as an undergrad.

While this may sound bizarre to you, behavior typical of a severely oppressed society has taken hold among students who are part of the Ivory Tower. I call it Protester Derangement Syndrome, or PDS for short. ...

Why should people like me be silent when individuals appropriate the sacrifices of true activists to push their own agendas? People have died hunger-striking in genuine campaigns against staggering oppression and persecution, and no one has the right to spit on their memory the way those students did.

Perhaps luckily for the non-afflicted population, PDS is similar to chicken pox: It usually lies dormant for a while. Generally, symptoms only flare up during low-intensity academic periods when students have little else to do.  ...

The behavior exhibited by my peers should concern us all. Many undergrads have convinced themselves they are experiencing Maduro-style oppression, and this mentality will follow them into adulthood. I shudder at the thought of more than 1,200 PDS carriers inoculating the rest of the country upon graduation.

Or, as parents used to say (back when they were parents and not their offspring's best pal): Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about.

[goatprairie]

In about twenty years or so most of the current, whining students who feel that they are being oppressed by the cruel, cruel world will be in control of things.
If the country hasn't gone completely socialist by then, these dweebs will be facing the same whining students/young people as themselves who will be complaining about the people in power, the current dweebs who now think things are awful.
If they don't come to the realization by then that nobody is oppressed in the U.S., they never will.
But I'm betting most of them will finally realize what a great country they grew up in, and how easy it is to destroy something great.

[mountaineer]

What bugs me,  especially about the climate change nonsense,  is the mantra, "We have to do something! " and that's it - no practical solutions.  Of course, it's not easy to devise a solution when there really isn't a problem to be solved.