Between the Bridges

Between the Bridges: The Barbarians Are at the Gates

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Peter Mahon in Between the Bridges

My apologies for the on again, off again status of this column over the past several weeks but I was laid low with a bout of pneumonia.  Feeling much better by late last week I started to pen a new column which I quickly placed aside Friday evening as I remained glued to my TV, radio and the internet through Saturday morning following the horrific events which took place in France.

As most of us looked on with anger and disgust at the carnage visited upon the city of Paris last Friday evening by radical Muslim extremists, I was actually ashamed and embarrassed (but not surprised) as University of Missouri student activists utilized social media outlets to express their annoyance that the coverage of the massacre in Paris had replaced front page coverage of their protest activities. One budding student genius actually took to Twitter to opine, “Interesting how the news reports are covering the Paris terrorist attacks but say nothing about the terrorist attacks at #Mizzou.”

Nurtured with academia’s continual assertions that the students have a “right” to be free from “hostile environments” and “microaggressions,” a right to a “comforting, safe space” while on campus, a right to be free of the tyranny of “white privilege,” a right to “income equality,” a right to be free from language with an inherently violent and discomforting nature regardless of our Constitution’s First Amendment, a right to political correctness, and a “right” to a free college education, many of our colleges and universities are giving rise to a generation of infantile, me-centric, spoiled brats, attending school on Mommy and Daddy’s or the taxpayers’ dime and apparently are incapable of thinking for themselves.

This new generation of supposedly educated American youth viewed the bloody streets of the City of Lights last week through a prism of selfish eyes and could only wonder aloud, “But what about us?” In the minds of many of these of these students, their “right” to a free education, unfettered by any situation or circumstance which might make them feel uncomfortable, somehow trumped the rights of those hundreds of innocent civilians killed or injured by terrorist guns and explosives in Paris. How dare the slaughter and injury of hundreds of innocents eclipse the media coverage of the much more important issue of these students’ struggle for their litany of perceived “rights?”

I can only wonder how these very same professional student activists would feel if they had lost a family member on 9/11, the Boston Marathon or, god forbid, had they actually been inside the Bataclan Theatre in Paris on Friday evening when terrorists clearly defined the difference between perceived inherently violent language delivering a sense of discomfort and actual violence which delivered death and destruction upon hundreds of innocent concertgoers.

I, for one, have had enough of spoiled, selfish, ungrateful, overly sensitive, safe-space seeking, college loan collecting students to last me a lifetime.  It’s time for all of them to grow the hell up and finally realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that they have to exist and live in the real world, which does not revolve around them.

It is also time for many (not all) of our college academics to ask their proctologists to locate their heads, place them firmly back on their shoulders and start teaching these kids how to think for themselves rather than what they want them to think. The atrocities of the radical Muslim extremist attacks in Paris last Friday clearly depicts that there are far more serious issues that we as a nation must be concerned with and that no matter how wide the ocean, we are not safe.

Whether you want to admit or not, the barbarians are at the gates and there is no “safe and comfortable” space any of us can retreat to at school, at work or at home.