Thursday, July 07, 2005

American Society's New Victims (They're Not Who You Think)

Geoff Aung has done an interesting piece for Campus Progress about the College Republican National Convention held recently. According to Aung, the most bizarre aspect of this conference was the theme of victimhood that conservative speakers imparted to the young crowd. For a party that claims to despise victimhood, feelings of victimization abounded at the CRNC.

Students were given ideas of compelling phrases to use on posters announcing College Republican events; one of these ideas was the question "Where are my reparations?" According to Aung, speaker after speaker attested that College Republicans are the oppressed ones, "that professors despise them, administrators shun them, and fellow students regard them with skeptical eyes."

This self-pity to me seems such a foundation of the Republican presence on college campuses, and it is audacious at best, selfish and disingenuous at worst. When the College Republicans brought David Horowitz's Academic Freedom bill to campus at my school, the bill was entertained far more than it should have been, considering there was already recourse for discrimination of any sort on campus (go to p. 22 on the link, if you care).

The College Republicans I know and know of seem to be well-off and high-achieving students. If they are the oppressed people of this world, we should all be so oppressed.

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