Academics talk a lot of big talk about revolution, but they aren’t in the shoes of the owner of a laundromat who has worked 12 hours a day, and who now sees his business burn to the ground, because a mob has gone wild. They scoff at the police from behind the gates of their enclave.
The mind unmoored from tradition, not instructed by broad reading in the ancient cultures of mankind, and not chastened by the exigencies of hard labor, but given all the perks of the academic life and prompted to consider itself as a leader of mankind into a glorious future, is indeed a foolish but dangerous thing. For such a person is comfortably insulated from the misery his bad ideas cause.
Feminists in our sociology department who trumpeted the demise of the father-headed family- how often, I wonder, did they pay a visit to the fatherless young men in our state prison? Without the work of men who protected them each day and who built and maintained the halls where they preached their liberation, they could not take one step, and do not think for a moment that they chose to live in neighborhoods where the family had fallen apart. The most vocal critic of religious faith in my English department lived in a posh island town, where you do not have to live among the poor who bear the brunt of a life conceived without God, though you might hire some of them to arrange some rocks on your lawn.
“Question Authority,” say the academic generals, but God help you if you dare to question theirs. Then they move all the machinery of the powerful against the weak, and if you are a young man questioning a grown woman- let us say for example that you express doubts about the place of women in the army—she will cast you as the aggressor, and will play the Damsel in Distress Card, calling upon the administration in shining armor to make her feel safe again.
But not to worry, the men are cowardly too. That is why they organize students, so that they can hide behind them, and let their shouting prevent anybody from asking those embarrassing questions that might reveal their irrationality or their ignorance. Isn’t that what pawns are for, to run interference? Read more…
