The Entitlement Junkies

It’s 2017, another day --- another protest. Demonstration ad nauseam. We find ourselves in some alternate universe where smashing windows is admirable and a knit hat and an obscene poster somehow means you’re broadminded. Free speech now plays out in marauding crowds and rag tag rioters that have been coddled into believing that they have a mandate to destroy, censure and malign.

But these marches aren’t really about borders and immigrants – or tolerance and inclusion. After eight years of milksop and applesauce, the only collective skill we’ve mastered is a group temper tantrum. Our shared sense of capitulation has exposed our soft global underbelly overstuffed with green comfort food.

Success and achievement are no longer part of the national equation. The end game is mediocrity. Why be more when you can be so much less? It is enough to merely be present. I exist; therefore, I am … going to disrupt and destroy until I get all that I desire. With selfie-sticks and drawstring pants, they have come for their participation award and their trophy for falling short.

And so goes the new society of timid souls --- the Caspar Milquetoasts of the new millennium “who speak softly and get hit with a big stick.” America has been hit so hard and so often, we’ve become the speedbag of global activism. We have been slapped around more than Lou Costello. We are the ‘Sparring Bob’ of every failed state, rogue regime, and half-baked movement looking for followers, funding, and legitimacy.

This is the grievance coalition. To ere is human, to be average is a new religion. These are the motley disciples of hoopla, half-truths and hysteria. They loathe all notions of exceptionalism. They fear strength and fortitude. They abhor competing and winning. They want something for nothing and everything for free. They are foot-stomping, fist-pumping wild-eyed sore losers crying for a do-over that will simply never come.

Holed up in their ‘safe places,’ they peddle hatred. Behind the barricades of free assembly, they set fires. Within the refuge of the first amendment, they spread rumor and hyperbole, and they are not alone. The halls of ivy are the new corridors of intolerance. Journalists are now the lackeys of partisan politicking. Celebrities have become the crack-pot crusaders of activism at any cost.

Alas, we have finally reached ‘last call’ for the overindulged and the uninspired. Like angry drunks that have enjoyed too many jiggers of hooch, they’ve emerged from their eight-year stupor wracked by delirium tremens, tonic-clonic seizures and booze shakes. This is what withdrawal looks like. The pasty faces, hollow eyes and hoarse voices that come from finally being sober and accountable.

Welcome back. Now get cleaned up and function!