February 24th, 2009
Cops: Move over, ma’am.
Bank robbess: HE TOUCHED ME! HE @#$%^&! TOUCHED ME!
In another part of the bank:
Robber #1: O.K., we’ve got three duffle bags full of large bills. Those greedy corporate lackeys will be interested in that.
Robber #2: I’ve got Melanie’s diary.
Robber #1: What’s it say?
Robber #2: “I hate it when people touch me.”
Robber #1: They’ll definitely be interested in that. You know they have nothing better to do than obsess over our opinions.
In all seriousness, this is the perfect storm (such an overused term anymore) of the worst elements of left-wing protest:
1. Entitlement. The students presumed that the private property they were squatting on was their “space.” The same mentality drives ACORN’s latest escapades. Entitlement was also exposed when the narrator demanded that campus security tell him what they were doing, as if they answered to him.
2. An exaggerated sense of victimhood. The young woman screamed “he touched me!” with enough decibels to slice through a rock concert as campus police dragged her off of the balcony.
3. Convoluted notions of propriety. Is there anything more cloying than young adults using buzzwords such as “consensus” and “devices of force”? Like an immature version of the U.N., the students attempted to give an air of dignity to their radical politics by repeatedly calling for “dialogue.”
4. Self-important rage. One gets the impression that some of the students were dying to be slighted, just so they could scream “(expletive) scumbags!” without seeming out of place.
5. Arrogance. I could probably roll this into entitlement, but when the narrator stated ”…they need to come back here and report to us,” pure arrogance is the first thing that came to mind.
6. Wistful symbolism. The girl holding up peace signs around 6:40 into the video was being passive-aggressive. Her silent protest reminded me of when Martin Sheen covered his mouth with a piece of duct tape with the word “peace” written on it a few years ago. It’s such an obvious stunt, about.com archives a photo of it in their political humor section.
7. A conspiratorial worldview. I know I’m hard on the conspiracy theorists, but there are few things police are less interested in than a common college student’s journal and computer files. I don’t know if NYU’s protestors know this, but cops can tell the difference between suspected terrorists and overly dramatic twenty-year-olds.
8. General cluelessness about the world at large. The narrator’s nonsensical comment about “corporate water” towards the end suggests he hasn’t grown out of the simplistic worldview that frames everything as a struggle between groups of victims and oppressors. The fact the students were demanding that a private entity publically disclose nothing less than it’s entire corporate strategy also betrays naiveté on their part.
New York University should be proud of the way they handled the situation. They didn’t cave into the student’s unrealistic demands, and the campus police were able to keep composed in the face of ceaselessly aggrivating protestors. If the comments I’ve been reading on this story are accurate, than even some Obama supporters are turned off by the student’s inchoate activism. That’s right, the NYU protestors are even an embarassment to Democrats.
Cross-posted on: 
I was going to write about something else tonight, but this is too good to ignore. Via Hot Air (warning: strong language): a video of the recent New York University “Kimmel occupation” being calmly dispersed. If you don’t feel like watching the entire thing, (the narrator’s a bit much to take), jump to the temper tantrum at 5:36.
The story is a that a group of mostly New York University students forcibly occupied the school cafeteria for three days. During their sleepover, they produced a bizarre list of demands, which includes, among other things, full disclosure of NYU’s private budget, card check for a local union, a student elected finance committee, which will focus first on boilerplate leftist issues (investigation into possible “war profiteering,” possibly boycotting Coca-Cola), paid scholarships for Palestinian students, and donations to the University of Gaza. The University promptly ignored the demands and broke up the packaged rebellion. The aftermath, in the words of 18-year old Mitchell Goulding: “The general consensus right now among the student body is that they are a bunch of idiots,” (perhaps I’m too cynical about the younger generation).
To grasp the ridiculousness of the protestor’s behavior, imagine the same approach applied to another criminal activity:
Cops: Freeze!
Bank robbers: No. We need to democratically decide whether or not we should freeze. This is supposed to be a consensus; I don’t know if you guys understand that.
Cops: Put the money down!
Bank robbers: Are those guns? Don’t expect us to cooperate if you’re going to use devices of force.
Cops: Step out of the vault!
Bank robbers: You guys busted in here. Give us ten minutes to decide what we want to do. You’re making us very upset, and we can’t guarantee our cooperation if you don’t negotiate with us.