Soap Box

There's a lot going on at the colleges in this country.

Of course protest and upheaval are nothing new on college campuses and they have for many years been the proving ground for protest movements that sometimes catch on across the country and permeate their way to the mainstream, affecting elections and public policy.

Some of the movements have been beneficial in bringing issues into the light of public scrutiny and forcing Middle America into taking a long hard look at inequities and injustices. Some have been inane and silly, politically correct exercises in futility with most of the participants just along for the party.

Recently, the president of a Midwestern university was forced into resigning because of his supposed laxity in dealing with racial threats and slurs.

Now, I don't know all the circumstances or the ins and outs of the situation, and will not comment about the justice or injustice of his forced resignation, except to say that the entire infrastructure of the university seemed to cave in, leaving him little other recourse without ever hearing his side of the story.

However, since this has happened, it seems the media has been shining their light on what is going on at college campuses and have exposed some pretty alarming attitudes, and from what I can gather there are a lot of young folks out there who seem to think society owes them something.

That prosperity is a right, that it shouldn't have to be earned but that a goodly portion of the income of people making a lot of money should be taken away by the government and redistributed to those who make less.

Of course there�s nothing new about this attitude, it's called socialism it's designed to reward the less productive and it has failed miserably every time and everywhere it has ever been tried.

I also thought that colleges were supposed to be bastions of free speech that gave every ideology, every idea and every point of view a fair hearing, not a place where speakers with opposing views were shouted down and ridiculed.

I saw a professor on TV, who was trying to eject a reporter from a protest by force. Great example of supporting free speech.

Now the mantra is debt forgiveness, free tuition, I even saw a sign that read, "Education is a right"

A right? Free?

Well, my mislead young lions; let me enlighten you to a fact as old as mankind.

Nothing is free.

Somebody pays for everything, be it education, fire hydrants, health care or hay bales, somebody shells out for it all and when you redistribute wealth you don't create any more money, you just spread it thinner.

The government doesn't earn money, they only spend it, and it all comes from working taxpayers and it takes between 25 to 30 cents of every taxpayer dollar just to maintain the bloated, redundant bureaucracies that make up our federal government before they ever get to passing out the free stuff.

The United States of America is in debt to the tune of almost nineteen trillion dollars and fiscal sanity and a degree of national austerity is the only way it will ever be paid back, no matter how much the taxes are raised on wage earners, and if the demands of the college protestors are met it will never be paid.

America will sink into a morass of inflation and depression and our money will no longer be the accepted trade currency, which means that we'll have to buy someone else's currency to buy the foreign goods we have become so addicted to.

Are the racial problems as epidemic as the protestors are portraying them? I have no way of knowing, but I do know that there are no one-sided arguments and both sides need to be heard before resignations are demanded, classes disrupted and property destroyed.

If you think getting an education in a Utopian setting is possible, that you should have your education paid for by taxpayers and be able to dictate who the college hierarchy will be, you're going to have an extremely hard time in the real world, where, first of all your record could well keep you from getting a responsible job and your attitude will definitely keep you from rising above the boring and the mundane.

The name of the game out here is productivity and the ones who produce get the rewards, not about ideology or organizing protests because you don't like the boss.

To use an old country term, out here it's root hog or die.

That's reality.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

� Charlie Daniels

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