Recent campus protests on race, equality, free tuition

Human decency, equality of access and opportunity, justice against the use of force and fraud against person and property – all have 100% of my support. The protection of emotions, feelings, perceptions, the guarantee of desired outcomes at others’ expense, the use of intimidation to acquire status and results – you lost me. What is it that is really being sought by students and perceived victims? Equality of opportunity? Special privilege? Free money or tuition or degrees? Easier course work? Guaranteed prestige and jobs and income? Is work “oppression?”

If the desire is to be respected, valued and rewarded, is that best achieved through intimidating demands for special treatment or through work and achievement? Have government mandates and programs brought people closer to disregarding race as an issue? Or exacerbated, fragmented, emotionalized, politicized and monetized every conceivable difference of race, religion, class, opinion, nationality, hair color, ancestry,…? Will more mandates and laws and elections and subsidies and programs achieve “social justice” and “equality” and “fairness” and “diversity?” Do government programs and systems (e.g. education) merely perpetuate these perceptions and grievances? Can these terms even be adequately defined? Does constant discussion of the above themes distract from personal achievement and goals in a quest for nebulous, collectivist one-ness? Is the smallest minority not the individual? Isn’t it the individual that should be valued above any of the superficial and biological markers used to define, classify, categorize, and imprison one in a box of external parameters?

I don’t want to be White with you. Or Protestant with you. Or American with you. Or hetero with you. I do not need you in order to be me, to achieve, to find my path, to enlighten myself, to earn a living, to provide a service to another on a voluntary basis in exchange for income with which I support myself. Seeking warmth, meaning, protection, or advantage with a group is a primitive approach, be it as a guild of workers, union, nationality, patriotic mob, race or religion. If an enlightened paradigm is sought, it will not be achieved with primitive mentalities, government programs, intimidations, force and subsidies provided at others’ expense.