The Grievance Generation

Remember the campus unrest in the 1960s? Whether you agreed with the students or not, they were protesting about things of great consequence — like civil rights, or the military draft, or the Vietnam War. They had chants like “hell no, we won’t go.” Those were the good old days.

Now we are witnessing whiney college kids marching in the streets screaming obscenities or taking over the university president’s office for what? Feeling slighted? Having their feelings hurt? Talk about rebels without a cause.

One of the trendy demand by the aggrieved students is free college tuition. And why not? Nearly everything else these millennials have ever had was handed to them for free.

I’ve traveled to many campuses in recent weeks and experienced the melodrama of student grievances first-hand. To be fair, I should note that many of the students are impressive with open and inquiring minds. It’s only a loud-mouthed minority whose mission is to shut out and shut down views they find a way to be offended by.

These leftist kids are agitated. Angry. This the hangover effect, I suspect, from the shattered utopian dreams of Hope and Change. I have noticed in recent months that these students attend my lectures not to learn anything — they know everything already — but hoping that I will slip up or say something they can label as offensive or that violates their eight-volume campus speech code.

When I ask them what they want, a typical response is a “radical transformation of the economy” to reduce income inequality, racism, sexism, and, of course, to end climate change. Government will command these changes to achieve this transformation. These are young Stalinists who are willing to suspend almost every basic freedom and civil liberty for “the greater good.”