Why College Students Shouldn't Be Granted the Freedom of Speech

Brought up under the impression they’re all winners and told their excrement is platinum by their mothers, today’s college students find nothing wrong with dispensing their wise, sage-like wisdom to us schleps. Us morons, us simpletons who do not have the benefit of being so intelligent and enlightened as they. Us working stiffs who despite our age are not as wise as these 20 year old putzes.

And the reason I bring this up is because I have ran into another one of these geniuses our public schools has spit out of the assembly line, sent to the local community college, and now sent out into the real world where I get to listen to this idiot’s drivel.

However, there is one benefit about this, and that is when the topic turns to things like economics, politics and so forth, wherein I might be “slightly” more learned than the 19 year old emo kid, I find it amusing listening to them tell me “how the real world works” and “how the economy works.”

Now there was many things this latest sophomoric sage had to tell me; global warming, Obama is our saviour (did you know he’s for change?)and so forth, but one of them was that if we really cared about energy independence and the environment, we’d get rid of as much plastic as we possibly could.

This was an odd one to me, because I didn’t know that plastic was now enemy #1. So I asked him, “Aside from cutting holds in bottle holders so turtles don’t get caught in them, how is cutting back on plastic going to help lessen our dependence on foreign oil?”

“Well,” the future Albert Einstein said, “because we don’t just use oil for gas, we use it for making plastics as well. And if we all just cut back on the plastic we’d use, we’d be able to do a lot in terms of fighting high gas prices. Even if you recycle your grocery bags, it will help.”

My eyes now rolling, I contemplated asking him what percent of the oil we consumed ended up going into actual plastic, but thought this would short circuit his brain. I doubt he had the intellectual veracity to look it up, let alone develop this idea with independent thought, but instead had been fed a line of BS by his professor about how re-using plastic bags was going to crush OPEC and now, like the millions of college freshmen today, parrot this line of BS to parents, elders, strangers and economists who could actually verify such things.

Doing some quick eyeball math (and generously assuming ALL residuals go into plastics) 4.6% MAX goes into plastics.

What angers me most about this I cannot decide. Is it the fact such a large percent of our youth (and presumedly the “educated” ones at that) have such a lack of intellectual independence and a spine to think critically about such things and can therefore be fed such lines of BS? Is it this moron, and legions like him, are going to vote for Obama and therefore not only negate my vote, but force me to suffer the consequences of their ignorance? Or is it their arrogance in thinking somehow they’re actually wiser than people who have 10 years on them AND the ability to think for themselves? It may even be the slight depression I’m going through realizing this is the generation that’s going to “work up the wealth” to pay for my social security.

Plus, there’s a sense of hopelessness. This was at a bar, I don’t want to lecture somebody who is in under the impression he is the lecturer and I am the student at a bar. It’s pointless, he’s not going to listen. I am tired of being that one guy at the party when he was 23 that wasn’t a democrat or a pot-smoking liberal and having to defend myself, capitalism and America by a bunch of brainwashed dolts, and 10 years later, still having to do so. It gets tiring. It behooves the question, “When the hell are you guys going to grow up and start thinking for yourselves? When is curiosity or an intellectual honesty going to take hold of your thought process by which you kind of prove to yourself the sh!t you’ve been spewing since you were 18 is actually true or not? When are you going to turn off American Idol and the Barack Obama Fest on the MSM and pick up an issue of The Economist or the WSJ? Or is it going to take a massive recession and massive poverty on par with the Great Depression to kick your asses into giving a damn about the country’s finances and becoming good financial stewards of this democracy?”

And then, there they sit. Looking at me as some oddity, like a zoo animal.

“Ooo, I didn’t know we had a Republican in town. He’s so strange looking. Look at how he acts. I didn’t know capitalists drink beer. Interesting. Take a picture of it!”

Regardless, the price for this youthful ignorance that just doesn’t seem to want to go away with age is going to be incalculable. We are still a democracy. And for better or for worse, we will get the government we deserve, inevitably one that is not a democracy.

But at least we’ll be recycling plastic bags.