Or maybe the better term is LARPing (which isn’t so easy to fit into a succinct and clever title).
In either case, it’s people with privilege (talking about actual, personal, individual privilege, such as students (whatever their background) who’ve been accepted into some of the most elite educational institutions in the world and who, as a result, have traditionally had their ticket punched for a lifetime of success) identifying with, and pretending that they are–in all equivalent respects to actual victims–actual victims.
Examples abound, and like Lewis Carroll’s oysters, they come “thick and fast” these days, but the most egregious of them to come recently has been the idiotic Johannah King-Slutsky:
I don’t know who’s asking the questions here, but apparently he belongs to the very small fraternity, “Reporters With Balls.” (Emphasis mine):
R: Why should the university be obligated to provide food to people who’ve taken over a building?
S: Well, first of all we’re saying they’re obligated to provide food for students who’ve paid for a meal plan here.
R: But you mentioned that there was a request to allow food and water to be brought in unless I …
S: [Interrupts] To allow it to be brought in. Well I guess it’s ultimately a question of what community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Umm. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then, I mean, it’s crazy to say, because, I mean, we’re on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for, like, could people please have a glass of water?**
R: But [students] did put themselves very deliberately in that situation and in that position. So it seems like you’re sort of saying, ‘We want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food.’
The rest of the short snip shows Slutsky insisting that whatever group it is she’s representing merely wants to make sure that the University commits to not disrupting the flow of “humanitarian aid” into Hamilton Hall. Further questioning by the intrepid young man reveals the fact that there’s absolutely no evidence the university has done any such thing to this point.
So what we have here is an attempt by a PhD student in the English department at what was, once, one of the most elite universities on earth, to garner media attention by equating Columbia’s oppressor administration to that of Israel’s government, by pretending that the young–very healthy and very well fed–men and women pitching a fit and destroying property on a university campus are being denied HUMANITARIAN AID and are in just as imminent danger of starvation and dehydration as the unfortunate innocents in Gaza caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hamas. When–as is the case in Israel and Gaza, where hundreds of aid trucks are sent through to Gaza every day–no such thing is actually happening, and the devastation that’s being rained on Gazan civilians is entirely the fault of Hamas.
It almost (but not quite) makes me long for the days of the ISIS Brides. Or of the several other sad situations that spring to mind where deluded young Westerners who had been taught to hate their countries of origin at least buckled up and took off for climes unknown to live out their fantasies. Often, living out those fantasies had horrible consequences, and the remainder of those lives were–to quote someone those folks had probably never heard of– “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Perhaps something of a lesson was learned, because, somehow, that phenomenon doesn’t seem to be much of a thing anymore. And, at least in this case, the brave warriors of Hamas-adjacency prefer to stay Stateside. Don’t expect the “Queers for Gaza” flotilla to set sail for the Mediterranean Sea’s “Port of Gaza” anytime soon.
Still, these idiots really do think that their acting out, their posturing, their intransigence, and their baiting of those in authority makes them as oppressed as, and the equals of, the Gazans and therefore gives them the authority to speak in their names.
What morons.
Pray there’s a glimmer of hope. Even the Mayor of New York seems to have figured out that these sorts of demonstrations aren’t rising up organically or happening by accident.
You never know.
After all, on a day when Britain’s National Health Service declares that biological sex is an actual, non-negotiable fact, perhaps all things are possible.
**Bloody hell. Doesn’t Hamilton Hall have any bathrooms? Any water fountains? Or can these snowflakes only drink mountain water bottled in the Alps, or sparkling spring water from France? God help these loons when the organic matter actually does hit the rotating apparatus.
