Letters

My response to Dick Sheehan’s letter [“Who Is Sick?” Letters, May 9] is that we are both familiar with what campus demonstrations looked like, having lived through the unrest of the late 1960s. I myself participated in the post-Kent State shootings demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

I am far from naive about student passion and idealism. Those of us back then were fighting to save ourselves and our country from a foreign war whose necessity was deeply disagreed with. Today’s student rebellion, while as passionate, has devolved into disruptive actions that demonize fellow students for their race and religion. There is no moral equivalence to be found here.

It is increasingly obvious that these young students have been indoctrinated and funded by outside agitators whose political goals are counter to American values and history. Unfortunately, too many faculty members have succumbed to the false gods of the left. Increasingly, administrators are exposed as unable to manage these outbreaks due to their conflict over not losing student support and the loss of their alumni donors who are furious with their equivocation. Their acquiescence in the face of militant student occupation and disruption of academic life underscores the decline of our universities.

This descent began with the implementation of speech restrictions to conservative ideas and individuals. Speech on campus that attacks, questions or even declines to confirm the self-understood views (think progressive) or identity of another is referred to as violence and not tolerated.

This insulation from the real world of ideas breeds a dissociation with and inability to function with life as it is. From here, these snowflakes descend into woke-and-cancel ideology and a new controversy that will not tolerate the reality of binary genders. These delusional theories are being taught without challenge in some of our colleges and are the source of the aberrant behavior we are seeing.

So, Dick, I’ve made my diagnosis of the illness that has erupted across academia. I’m not sure how you pivoted from there to a condemnation of Donald Trump and some other House Republicans, but you did. My diagnosis in your case is the widely understood affliction of Trump derangement syndrome characterized by associating the former president with anything a Democrat finds disagreeable with in America.

I find our current leader, Joe Biden, has become indiscernible from the university administrators I mentioned earlier. His positions on Israel try to straddle all interests of his progressive constituency. He one day proclaims his unbreakable allegiance to the existence of Israel and the Jewish people, and shortly after pulls back promised military aid that will ensure victory over Israel’s existential threat Hamas.

This political decision to withhold military aid for political interests got President Trump impeached by your party, Dick.

Ed Surgan

Westhampton