I’m Not The Only One

Ten years from now, when people look back on 2011, if they remember little else, it will most certainly be all the protesting that went on this year.  Perhaps inspired by ongoing Tea Party protests which began in 2009 and continued into the next year, Occupy Wall Street has inspired copycat protests in cities and states around the world.

Some college students, inspired by the larger Occupy Movement inspired by OWS as well as in a show of solidarity with OWS, have occupied public spaces on their universities’ campuses, protesting such issues as tuition hikes and demanding increased scholarship funds for low-income students.  The most famous of these campus occupations have been the one at University of California Davis during which campus police doused the protestors with large amounts of pepper spray.

The spraying of the occupiers quickly became infamous, spurring national debate about police abuse.  The image and video footage of the incident has since gone viral and has even evolved into an Internet meme called Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop.

 Original image

   Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop Memes

Unfortunately, the students at UC Davis were occupying their campus to bring public attention not to police brutality or abuse of police power, but to tuition hikes.  Had they never been excessively doused with pepper spray by campus cops, their occupation would never have made nationwide headlines. According to one source, there are ten other college campuses with their own occupations going on, protesting many of the same things as the occupiers at UC Davis.  Have they received the same amount of media attention?  Of course not, and as long as the media spotlight is not on these campuses, the demands of the student protestors will never be even considered.

So what’s the best way to get your university to listen to you, if you’re really pissed off about some aspect of their fiscal or academic policy?  It’s simple: leave.  Instead of occupying your campus, students should be dropping out and taking their tuition dollars with them.  Bankrupt the college coffers and you’ll discover that suddenly they want to listen to what you have to say.  It’s no different than boycotting a business, or National Bank Transfer Day, when scores of people closed their accounts with big banks which accepted bailout funds and opened accounts with smaller independent banks or credit unions.

Why can’t these stupid students figure out that their universities’ administrators and presidents are indeed part of the 1% against whom they are raging in the first place?  Considering the massive debt one will accrue from borrowing money to pursue a college education and the poor return on investment one gets from most college degrees, dropping out isn’t exactly a bad thing and might even give students to opportunity to join the workforce and increase their income rather than spend it.

Isn’t it time for a national Drop Out Day?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Tea Party, Media, Civil Rights, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.