Scared Mindless

by Bryan

6 comments

1 Steve Bates { 04.23.07 at 1:41 am }

In my experience in college, ROTC stood for “Running Over The Cliff.” Sorry if you were in it, Bryan, but that was my experience… many of the members were friggin’ nuts.

But really, this has only incidentally to do with ROTC. If anyone downstream of the ROTC member had behaved sanely, this would never have been an incident. Paranoia isn’t a response to trouble; it’s the source of trouble.

We live in interesting times. Somehow I think the current government likes it that way.

2 Bryan { 04.23.07 at 9:52 am }

My Dad was involved in founding Air Force ROTC. He was in the founding unit at Syracuse University and Colgate University. It’s pretty pathetic when future officers show no more common sense than that cadet showed.

It’s also pathetic that the university police didn’t think to look at their own parking permit database, as a white VW convertible with out-of-state plates should have leapt out at them.

3 Steve Bates { 04.23.07 at 11:13 am }

Well, I guess I opened my mouth and inserted my foot. 🙂

In my defense, my college days were during the Vietnam War at its most unpopular, and the ROTC guys probably caught hell from other students just for being military of any sort. That didn’t excuse some of the worst of them when they made full-blown, certifiably nutso statements. But it may explain a lot of their behavior.

FTR, I did not personally give them grief, anymore than I would have given my classmates who (thank God) returned from Vietnam any grief. It’s my nature to direct my ire at my adversaries, and I never perceived our troops as adversaries in that insane war, or at any other time before or since. (The government at the time came in for a lot of criticism from me, though.) But it was IMO an unusual time for the ROTC members to make the choice they did, and some of them were, in fact, passing strange people. In fairness, some would say that “passing strange” described the whole student body at Rice at the time…

4 Bryan { 04.23.07 at 12:49 pm }

Steve, if one of my Dad’s cadets had done that, there would have been a counseling session. It is a prime example of why I have always been cautious of eye witness testimony – people filter it through their own perceptions and prejudices.

5 Anntichrist S. Coulter { 04.23.07 at 9:45 pm }

“Recycling While Brown.”

Only in Murka.

I’m sure that Dick Cheney caught some major wood just from the CONCEPT of there being an ACTUAL “terrorist” at one of those subversive, librul, atheist-humanist, feminism-mongering UNIVERSITIES.

I’ve never seen an administration, or even a regime, show such an active, rabid hatred towards learning than this one, at least not since the Dark Ages.

But like the bumpersticker says, “The last time that knowledge was dangerous and religion owned the government, they called it The DARK AGES.”

This poor guy. Spends his life trying to bring enlightenment to the world, and gets pilloried on his own turf for RECYCLING and BEING NOT-WHITE at the same time. We’re not just through the looking glass, we’re beyond the frame and ass-end-up in a black hole of ignorance and surreal glorying in herd mentality.

6 Bryan { 04.23.07 at 10:33 pm }

Well, we can tell the coming generations that we lived through the most screwed up period in American government – everything that has gone wrong in the last 200 years condensed and replayed at the beginning of the 21st century.