Following Pearl Harbor attacks on December 7, 1941, thousands of young Americans from 17 to 21 years of age reported into U.S. Army Basic Training bases across the country. Six weeks later they were on troop ships to battlefields around the globe to fight mass murderers from Nazi Germany and fascist Japan. These GIs became renown as “The Greatest Generation”.
On October 7, 2023, just over one hundred years later, thousands of over-educated American students from our elite universities left classes, grabbed their signs and masks, and joined in with angry mobs vilifying Israel. Their chants and signs supported Hamas terrorists who had invaded Israel gruesomely massacring 1,400 of its innocent civilians.
Today our fine universities have provided their students with “safe spaces” and other protections against the “microaggressions” to lessen academic and other student anxieties that they might encounter within their ivy-covered wall enclaves. By joining these protests, they could fight against the “oppressors” in Israel who had encroached on their fight to protect “victims” wherever they could be found or derived. Their covered faces prevented them from losing an opportunity for $175,00 per year starting salaries with prominent American law firms.
In contrast, the GIs found their safe places in shallow foxholes they dug with short shovels. If they ducked their heads at the right time, they could evade the micro aggressive missiles fired against them. Occasionally, they were able to leave their safe spaces and shield themselves behind rock walls – there were no reports that these walls were ivy-covered! Each GI had a pair of “dog-tags” around his neck in case a micro-aggressive object shortened his life. With his body so identified, his family could receive a telegraph message from the President and hang a Gold Star banner in their window. Many of those that survived were given “GI Bill” opportunities for college educations in or near their home communities. They then took their place helping build the greatest prosperity in America ever known to mankind.
As they marched off to war, the Greatest Generation participants were not burdened down with a scholarly understanding of the war. They also did not have to answer the moral issues of killing in time of war. Nor when they boarded the ships, did they perceive the courage that might be required of them when they discovered one day that their opponents were trying to eliminate them from the face of this earth?
Within today’s cloistered walls of academia and without the threat of risking their lives in a war would it be too much to ask today’s pampered generation to at least be taught sufficient moral awareness to separate premediated mass laughter from political pedagogy? Is it unreasonable for them to be able to read and assemble historical facts? Or can they not be asked to argue their radical positions rationally without the backing of a screaming mob to protect them? Unfortunately, these students protesting do not seem inclined to relinquish their current motivations and ideologies for more time-honored and tested precepts.
In their defense, these students did not come into these learning environments from around America bringing with them the vitriol and hatred being exposed in their protests. Nor did they come already believing that “from the River to the Sea”, a second genocide for the Jewish people who had escaped the Holocaust of WW II, was a valued objective for completing the “Final Solution” of Hitler? Why are their university professors in their protected tenured positions instead not stiving to generate this generation students with true intellect, moral clarity, and an inner courage built around Truth, or “Veritas”, as they used to proclaim at Harvard until recently?
No, like in the lyrics from the song from the musical “South Pacific”, their students had to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
No estimates have emerged from the media what percentage of students at our revered universities named in the news were involved with the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel protests and marches. However, when camera angles do not isolate the mobs by showing full streets in Cambridge, New York City, and the Washington Mall, the numbers are not insignificant. Because students from these elite schools have traditionally become the best and the brightest leaders of our nation across all professions, especially in our Federal government, we can only assume that with them as our future leaders our nation’s decline is inevitable.
If this decline is not reversed, then history will be obliged to honor this select group of over-educated adolescents and their nauseous professors by identifying them as “The Shameful Generation”.
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