Noble Cowards

The kids who are on the front lines of the protest movement believe that they are following in the footsteps of something noble. They believe that the people who were protesting the war in Vietnam were noble, principled people.

While listening to Michael Medved's annual Memorial Day "3 lies about Vietnam" broadcast, he pointed something out that had also caught my attention last year. Namely that as soon as the draft was ended, all of the protests against the war disappeared too.

The protestors weren't protesting the war. They were trying to end the war only because that would mean that they no longer had to fear being drafted. However, if they had come right out and said that, they would have shown themselves for the cowards that they were.

Since that time of the late '60's and early '70's, the anti-Vietnam protestors have been so romanticized by the MSM and the college professors who are encouraging today's budding Leftists (many of whom were these very same cowards), that these kids think that they are upholding a noble tradition instead of the cowardly act that the protests were.

So today's college kids think that they are doing work along the lines of the Civil Rights movement instead of following in the footsteps of frightened cowards who were willing to let other people go to war in their stead.

They think that it's so cool that these war protestors sat around smoking dope and drinking dandelion wine while discussing the big issues of the war and politics. Anyone who has ever smoked a lot of dope and poured a bunch of alcohol on top of it knows that, even if they attempted to have those conversations, what came out was gibberish. It may have sounded good, but once you sobered up it usually turned out that you were babbling bullshit.

(If that sounds like the voice of experience, so be it. The Exile wasn't always the hard-nosed Conservative that he is today. Once upon a time he had long hair, a biker jacket and a taste for chemicals that would have made Keith Richards flinch. I get many of my insights of the Left from having traveled among them, though even then I knew that what they were saying was bullshit.)

These kids have bought into the lie of the "noble protestor". The anti-war protests of the 1960's were an attempt to regain that feeling that the Left had when it was doing something which was actually good, namely the Civil Rights protests.

The Civil Rights movement is the "crack" of the Left. They felt so good when they actually did change the world, that they wanted to get to that high again. But, as any addict will tell you, you never get back to that first high. From then on you're just trying to get back to that point, but you never do. As we see in the Left today, that craving eventually becomes self-destructive, but by that time, it's almost impossible to stop.

It's no coincidence that these people who are so enamored with drugs are also the ones who are trying to get that "high" of feeling good about themselves that the Civil Rights movement brought.

It's a well-documented condition called the "addictive personality".