Posted on 10/03/2014 10:08:42 PM PDT by huckfillary
The differences between student-led movements in this country and in Hong Kong are striking. One need look no further than their respective demands and the ideas that animate their protests. When American kids are moved enough to organize, they are almost always protesting for more "freebies," not more freedom, as the courageous students today in Hong Kong are doing. The students in Hong Kong are speaking truth to real power, with all too real consequences for questioning and challenging their ruthless communist masters. When the Hong Kong protests have subsided, those lucky enough to avoid imprisonment will face a bleak future. With their government dossiers stamped "Counterrevolutionary" or "Traitor," their once-bright job prospects and promising careers will have vanished indefinitely.
Home-grown campus protests, when they happen, are predictably shallow and generally involve protests against tuition hikes, cuts in government education subsidies, or something that has to with maintaining or increasing their level of dependency on the taxpayer. It's all a way of extending their interminable adolescence at someone else's expence. Oh yes, I almost forgot, they are sporatically moved to public displays of sanctimony about offensive team names and the obligatory Earth Day tantrums. Bottom line---they are mostly just excuses to party or skip classes. And what are the consequences if they are identified and caught by the authorities? At most, just another hangover.
I can't remember the last time there was a genuine pro-liberty campus uprising.
Where are the demonstrations against campus speech codes and "thought police?"
Where are the demands that government not only get out of the bedroom, but out of the classroom, the operating room, and the examining room?
Where are the protests against the massive long-term deficits that will surely be borne by today's youth and yet to be born? Where are the calls for reform of our Social Security System, the ultimate form of generational larceny?
And finally, why are today's students silent in the face of the glaring hypocrisy of the pro-choice movement. Freedom, we were once taught, was indivisible, you know pro-choice down the line. No so on today's college campuses. Today's students and their academic mentors are quite selective when it comes to liberty. Pro-choice only applies to abortion and military service. When it comes to education, retirement savings, or health care and insurance, they uniformly embrace the compulsory, one-size-fits-all government solutions that are the antithesis of any truly consistent pro-choice, liberty-based philosophy and ideology. And they make little if any effort to explain these glaring inconsistencies. Scholars one and all.
Nearly every college tuition-paying parent can rest assured that they are completely wasting their money, that their kids are learning little or nothing of substance, have acquired no critical thinking skills, and will remain lifelong knee-pad government/establishment suck-ups--questioning nothing, challenging nothing, swallowing everything.
Those Hong Kong freedom protestors are the sort of illegal aliens I’d like to slip across our border... I’d welcome any defenders of freedom.
Such brave young people.
Obviously, the kids in Kong Kong weren’t brought up in our Government schools.
June of 1989, perhaps (in Tianenmen Square)?
Also recall the hundreds of Austrian students from Vienna and Graz that went across the border night after night into the frozen waste-deep swamps near Andau, the closest point in Austria from Budapest. They evaded shoot-to-kill patrols with dogs to locate lost and separated refugees fleeing the Hungarian Communist worker’s paradise. We encouraged them to rise up, then turned our backs. Sound familiar?
Sounds familiar indeed. But finally 33 years later it was Hungary that cracked open the Iron Curtain resulting in the downfall of Communism.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.