Do you know, I am thinking that the current wokster crowd knows nothing of the concept of actions having consequences, sometimes of the fatal sort, and now and again of the professional kind. (Yeah, Sgt. Mom, welcome to the freaking obvious, I can hear some of you thinking…) But it’s both sad and infuriating to read of incidents such as that child in an adult body; presumed to be a Harvard graduate and accepted to an internship at a major international accounting firm … blowing all that by going all stabby-stabby-encounter on social media about theoretical opposition to her not-terribly-well thought out position as regards to racism against the black and woke, not to mention near to illiterate levels of grammar and spelling. Silly child, welcome to the 21st century, and let me break it to you that the internet is forever, as long as certain clever people make screen-grabs of your woke idiocy. What you post on social media goes far and wide, and even to the ken of people like … potential employers.(And also that whatever you and/or your parents laid out for Harvard tuition was not money well-spent. Just my .02.)
So there I am; trained as a military public affairs professional, and experienced in the ways of saying things tactfully and with consideration as to how they will be received by the larger audience. I don’t claim that I’m an absolute media genius about this, but seriously – in twenty years of mil-blogging, I’ve only gotten anxious feedback on a single casual post. Had to do with a big-city press club, if anyone is interested, and the manager of same misconstruing a spot of hyperbole as some kind threat to the premises and members.
The thing is – say stupid stuff, do stupid stuff – and get fatal or career-dampening consequences? Well, welcome to the real world, guys, gals, and beings of indeterminate gender. Play stupid games like posting a sketchy blockade and holding a protest dance party on a major highway in the middle of the night, dressed in black and twerking inexpertly, all while blithely assuming that the police force whom you have been roundly abusing and threatening for weeks have blocked the on-ramps … all that I can say is that the stupid prize is sadly and rightfully well-earned. Live-Action Role-Playing a revolutionary or member of the Resistance must be jolly good fun for the over-educated and overly-indulged spawn of the upper middle classes. I can only think that they are drunk on the fantasies of Zinn and Che, indulging themselves by playacting an oh-so-romantic part in this bit of street theater, during what will undoubtedly become written up in the history books as the Long Hot Summer of 2020.
As I remember the previous long hot summer of ’68, (and a half decade or so of quasi-political violence afterwards on the part of violent lefty scum like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers or the People’s Temple, or similarly vicious free-lancers like the Manson Family) I doubt very much that their dreams of revolution will come to pass. The last go-round, even though not quite as violent, finished up with the election of Nixon and Reagan and culminated in the collapse of Russia as the Great Marxist-Leninist Dream. So those failed revolutionaries – those who survived and did not gain any wisdom or insight, like Bill Ayers – crawled back into various academic sinecures and brooded and plotted a comeback. Which they are trying again, through deliberately mangling practically aspect of education from kindergarten through graduate school.
I am not prepared to be tolerant or indulgent of violent Marxist revolutionaries of any color. I am not inclined to be indulgent of the established mainstream media either – since I have very clear recall of how the loose affiliation of Tea Party organizations were vilified as racist hicks by entitled and on-national-broadcast jerks like Anderson Cooper, and most of the staff of NPR, among others. (Practically the only big- or semi-big-name reporter who treated the various Tea Parties as significant and worthy of sympathy was Selene Zito, for what that is worth.) The major establishment media (to include the entertainment wing, as well as the supposedly serious news and information element) is another of those entities who, like the above-mentioned individuals, are not considering the consequences of going full-frontal partisan.
In the orgasmic thrill of going all anti-Trump and pro-Woke, they do not appear to consider the loss of credibility across at least half of the viewing audience. Chip, chip, chip, drip, drip, drip … there goes all trust in the national establishment news media on the part of an increasing segment of the news-consuming public. The chipping and the dripping isn’t going as fast as I’d like, as there still remain large pools of believers – but still, all the fake news, blown-up conspiracies, crooked politicians, collapsed race-hate incidents, and the wave of violence against business owners, both small and large, in cities where Antifa and the Wokester Cult have been allowed free rein to smash, trash, loot and burn – all that has to be taking a toll.
Discuss as you wish. Interesting times, this long hot summer of 2020, isn’t it?
Good sentiment, Sgt. Mom. In laughing at the silly privileged white girls acting stupid, let’s not forget that they are no more acting on their own limited brain cells than were the Red Guards in China. There are mayors and governors (often also female) who are actively encouraging this anti-social behavior for their own reasons — with no concern for the safety or long-term consequences for the silly girls.
What motivates those mayors & governors acting against the interests of the citizens who elected them? Now there is a good question!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The pendulum swings one way, and then it swings another. If you’re the party pushing it off center, take care to how far you push it and at what speed, because the inevitable backswing is going to come, and it’ll come back at a rate and velocity at least equivalent to how far and fast you pushed it.
Unrest in the streets? If you can’t maintain the energy of your Red Guard or your Spartacists, guess what? The counter will come. The “activist left” of post-WWI Germany did not foresee that their works would lead to Hitler, at all. But, they did: Had they not scared and terrorized the normies of Weimar Germany, Hitler’s reactionary forces would never have gained the traction that they did, and the sane middle might have kept him in the beer hall. Unfortunately, the idiot leftoids felt no restraint, and did not consider the repercussions.
I actually don’t really blame the Nazis all that much; consider what went on in Bolshevik Russia, and you start to see them as less crazed and violent, and perhaps more justified in their response. The Germans knew what the hell was going on in the Ukraine; they had first-hand reports from refugees. Tell me that the Reds are coming, see them in the streets the way they were…? Yeah. I don’t know what my reaction would have been, to tell the truth; I think the Nazis might have seemed the somewhat saner alternative. I don’t know–All I know is that I thank God I never lived through those years, and never had to make that horrible choice.
The crazies on the left are doing it again, and I think they’re going to find that there’s a price to be paid for their actions. Where the counter-reaction lies, I don’t know–But, I’ll wager good money that among the casualties are going to be the modern mass media and most, if not all, of academia. They’ll be lucky if they don’t wind up coping with a Pol Pot, at the end of it all. I know that my restraints on the matter are loosening, and if they wind up being marched off to reeducation and destructive labor camps, I’m probably not going to be saying spit in their defense. Hell, at the rate they’re going? I may be actively assisting the project, in simple self-defense, them before me. I fear that these people aren’t amenable to reform, and may have to be excised from the body politic in job lots in order to maintain any sort of civic peace. They are turning politics into a zero-sum, them-or-us proposition, and I do not intend to be among those filling the mass graves.
We’re all going to have to make that choice, I fear.
Well they’ve been trained by people whose theories (God knows if they are pushing these without thinking or actually desire the inevitable) ignore the consequences of messing with biology, with hormones. Who would have thought that education was less likely to happen in open classrooms or with grades in the show up and you get an A format. Who would have thought that incentivizing illegitimacy would get more of it. Who would have thought . . .?
My present personal favorite of the current wokster crowd knowing nothing of the concept of actions having consequences is the set of imbeciles who lay down in front of a moving train, expecting it would stop. Lucky for them they were able to jump up and run away when it did not.
These people are literally too ignorant to know how ignorant they are, and have no idea how much they rely on the forbearance of their less stupid betters to remain alive and safe from harm.
Their real problems will begin when they finally erase that forbearance.
Not that they’ve noticed, or would understand if it was pointed out to them.
the set of imbeciles who lay down in front of a moving train
Repeats and reruns. I recall incidents from the ‘80s (maybe the ‘70s) that ended in amputations. And shrieking about evil corporations who wouldn’t stop their trains.
Were the about-to-be amputees dupes or sincere believers who wanted blood?
Irritating as the Wokesters are, consider that the coddled, sheltered , and cocooned can’t know much about something they have not experienced first hand. I do genealogy so I have witnessed the grief, loss, and pain that was pretty much inevitable in generations past, until electricity, antibiotics, vaccines, much safer working conditions, even safer cars…. Case in point, reading Stephen Ambrose’s “The Boys of the Wild Blue”, I was taken aback by the reality that George McGovern’s flight crew of teenagers had already experienced losses and grief at a very young age. Compare that to today’s family. At my granddaughter’s christening in 1994, she was in a five generation picture, which even then was becoming less rare. It would seem possible to postpone maturation indefinitely. I don’t know how you fix this.