UCSB Workers for Palestine and Other Inanities
by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg
None other than President Abraham Lincoln is credited with having opined that “the philosophy in the school room in one generation, becomes the philosophy of government in the next.” The truth of this folk wisdom is confirmed by a sober look at the schools of the last generation. As a 30-year veteran public-school teacher, I can attest that we have promoted an educational program of indoctrination that inverted the order of reality; it was meant to punish virtue and reward vice, to ingrain “cultural competence” through identity politics, and to accept aberrant and unnatural sexual ethics. The aim was/is to create little political activists.
A close look at the classrooms of today reveals that indoctrination has become brainwashing; cultural competence has become race baiting for the purpose of political tyranny, and the new sexual ethics points to normalizing radical gender ideologies. This shift ought to strike fear into your hearts.
As proof of this imbalance, there has been a prolonged protest at UCSB in what they are calling the “Liberated Zone” encampment, a six-week-old monument giving form to the movement. It is promoted by two main student groups: UCSB Divest and UCSB Students for Justice in Palestine. These two groups share grievance space with graduate students on strike. The protesting groups organized a rally on International Workers Day – May 1st – and the rally was called “UCSB Workers for Palestine.” Their rallying chants were “Workers have the power” and “Engineering, you can’t hide; you are building genocide!” Worse still, they organized a stunt on campus that traverses the boundaries of law, intelligence, and decency.
On May 28th at 11 am, a group calling itself an “autonomous collective” donned masks and dared to “liberate” the Carrillo and De La Guerra Dining Commons at UCSB. They bullied the staff to stand back while offering free food to all students passing by the respective dining commons. Many students took the “generous” liberators up on their offer and literally stole the food from the dining halls. This began before noon and by 2 pm, the De La Guerra Dining Hall was out of food, according to dining hall workers.
News of the criminal activity, publicly supported by the UCSB Liberated Zone, quickly spread among the student population, while the outside world remained unaware. The “autonomous collective” gave an anonymous interview to the Daily Nexus. In a UCSB Liberated Zone Instagram post, the offending group stated their purpose as “everyone can eat for free,” because the group “would rather the school’s money go to feeding the students than to bombs or war research.” They go on to explain, “If UCSB can afford to fund bombs and missiles to send to Israel, they can afford to let their students eat.”
Word Salads at Free Lunch for All Event
I spent a day on campus interviewing students in the Liberated Zone. One student asked a chef standing by, “what do you think about this?” The chef replied, “I don’t like it, but I am told I can’t do anything about it.” After I spoke to several dining hall workers, they told me they just stepped back with the instructions to stay out of the way, but they really didn’t mind that all their food for that meal was stolen. Although the students wouldn’t help me identify the people or group responsible for the “liberation” effort, the anonymous perpetrators left a record of their intentions that was widely distributed on campus.
The attached explanatory letter is an incoherent mess of recycled Marxist rhetoric, but at least it informs the reader that it was written “by UCSB students for UCSB students.” It is as bewildering as it is anonymous. The authors make false equivalence between Palestine and UCSB. They make false statements about the nature of the food supply chain. They make absurd statements about the nature of the economy and money. In plain speech, these students hide behind strings of elaborate words they believe serve as a justification for breaking the law through theft and violence. It must not be lost on us that they use words like “liberate,” “occupation,” and “takeover,” as euphemisms for grand theft and grand larceny in the style and justification of the BLM riots and looting raids.
Our students at UCSB are at the tail end of their classroom experiences and at the front gate of the public square. The philosophy of the classroom in the last generation has successfully made political activists out of a good number of university students at campuses all over the nation. UCSB is no exception. The activism to which our own students unabashedly commit, the stunts they are willing to pull, and the collective letter they distributed all demonstrate ill-formed minds and deformed consciences. These students arrogate to themselves the illicit license to confront dining hall workers and take property that is not rightfully theirs. This is not a good sign of what the future holds.
If we are paying attention to the developments in modern education, we will come to clearly see that schools have transitioned from purposefully making political activists into making little domestic terrorists in the mold of neo-Marxist secular humanism. If the last line of the letter, “this is the beginning…” is a realistic portent, we have cause to be concerned.
If these UCSB students and their efforts to “liberate” institutions are any indication of what we can expect, God save us from the next generation of school children.
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This is why many parents have decided to home school their children. The ideology of the public school system can be dated back to John Dewey, (of library filing system fame) who proposed that public education would be the means to “bury the rotting corpse of Christianity”. He died in 1952. Since then, education has gradually transitioned from being largely run by people of faith to people who are atheists. The goal of the Marxists has been to take over education, and thus control the nation, without needing fire a gun, in their conquest of what used to be a Christian nation. The success of this coup is seen in the incoherent nonsense written in the manifesto of the thieves at the dining commons. Borrowing a fortune to send your children to UCSB, and most other similar institutions, seems not just a bad investment, but a form of societal suicide.
Excellent article. Parents of these pampered children are the problem. They were too busy worrying about themselves, so they let the government raise their kids or let the TV/media do it for them. To be a responsible parent is hard work, and most Americans now days think "Hard Work" is for losers.