Student Activists are Hillarious, Part MMXIII or “When ‘Keeping it Real’ Goes Wrong”
This video of the ignominious end of some kind of student protest at NYU has been making the rounds today, and it really is worth a laugh. It kind of reminds me of the 2000 occupation of Johnson Hall by a motley assortment of protesters demanding that the U of O join the Workers Rights Consortium.
The NYU kids, though, had an even more hillarious list of demands than did the WRC protesters. In addition to the usual laundry list of college progressive smegma, they decided to include such reasonable requests as the establishment of a student commission with full power “to vote on proxies, draft shareholder resolutions, screen all university investments, establish new programs that encourage social and environmental responsibility and override all financial decisions the committee deems socially irresponsible, including investment decisions” (and you thought the ASUO was bad…), forcing the university to “donate all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza”, and demanding that someone else pick up the tab for their political theatrics by compensating “all employees whose jobs were disrupted during the course of the occupation.”
My favorite part of the video, though (aside from the cameraman bleating out platitudes about “consensus”, “hierarchy”, and “power structures” that he obviously thinks makes him sound “academic”), comes at the end when he’s making video of the protesters’ possessions just in case campus security confiscates their stuff. After making sure to document all the MacBooks, iPods, and headphones the rabble-rousers are carrying around in their bags, he proclaims that the police won’t be interested in confiscating a water bottle, since “they probably drink corporate water.”
Fight the power!
The demands were kind of ridiculous, especially considering the pathetic little barricade they had arranged.
The funniest part of the whole thing was that the protesters were invoking every cliched notion of revolt they could think of: calling the school administrators and security “rats”, flashing peace signs with fingers, filming everything (while making false statements like “brutality”), requesting that they refrain from using guns, tasers, or “devices of force”. It was obvious that the filming of everything was an attempt at provoking some sort of reaction.
Maybe its just that these are rich, privileged NYC kids that like to make-believe they are revolutionaries (not much different than rich, privileged kids believing they are black/hipsters/vampires/etc), which is completely obvious by their a) utter lack of knowledge about what their legal rights are (You can’t ask us to leave! we have to have a democratic consensus before we hand over our ID’s); and b) innate right to special treatment (like demanding the police officers unhand them, making them ask for “permission” to apprehend them or passing by their barricade).
This made my day 🙂