The Left, the American Campus, and Boorish White “Activists”
By Ben Welton
Throughout the U.S., September 11, 2013 was celebrated and commemorated in predictable ways. While most Americans treated the occasion with a somber respect for the dead, a select few exercised their rights as Americans to be boisterous and brash in the face of state-mandated political correctness. By now we all know what two million bikers did in D.C., and more unfortunately we know what the slimy Florida Pastor Terry Jones tried to do.
In the inconsequential state of Vermont, an equally brazen act of remembrance occurred on the campus of Middlebury College. In keeping with a decade-long tradition, Middlebury’s College Republicans and Democrats, in a show of solidarity and old-fashioned “good faith,” planted 2,977 flags into the earth, each one symbolizing a victim from that day. Typically, the day is an easy one, if not a little boring. Sure, students will stop and take some time to reflect (then they go right back to their distraction screens), and during the orderly clean-up session, a few friendships will be made and memories shared.
This year’s ceremony didn’t go so smoothly, however. Sometime in the early afternoon, a group of activists uprooted all 2,977 flags in protest. Their cause? Native American rights. Besides a muddled bark of “American imperialism,” the five dumb-witted defilers of tiny American standards claimed that the flags were impaling sacred Abenaki ground – a burial ground no less.
Color me stupid, but when I hear “sacred Indian burial ground,” I generally tend to have nightmares about Jack Torrance limping up the stairs or pale, dead-faced children slicing Herman Munster’s tendons. The problem with this Indian burial ground is it isn’t one. Not only is there no evidence for an Abenaki resting place on Middlebury’s campus, but, to make matters more ridiculous, the student-run, school-sanctioned 9/11 memorial does not even meet the criteria for grave desecration. Don Stevens, the chief of the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe, has not only publicly denounced the protestors as “Disgusting,” but claimed that “Putting flags in the earth to honor bravery would not be disrespectful.” So even if Middlebury’s campus was crawling with unclaimed and unknown Abenaki tombs, undead warriors would not start hacking off the limbs of the living over just a few thousand flags.
So, if the Abenaki (who have no love for the state of Vermont) were not against Middlebury’s 9/11 memorial, then who was? Answer: white liberal activists. One of them, Amanda Lickers (who claims to be Native American) asserted that the act “said ‘no’ to settler occupation.” In a written statement, Lickers said that she “took those flags…a small reclamation and modest act of resistance.” Okay, we can quibble over “modest” here, but Lickers’s justifications pale in comparison to her pale-faced co-conspirator Anna Shireman-Grabowski. Shireman-Grabowski, who has written for the Salon, claimed in her own written statement that “While the American flag on the Middlebury hillside symbolize [sic] to some the loss of innocent lives in New York, to others they represent centuries of bloody conquest and mass murder.” After going deeper into her self-loathing by calling herself “a settler” (see: “white person”), Shireman-Grabowski asserts that “the campus is not big enough to hold a marker for every life sacrificed in the history of American conquest and colonialism.”
Yawn! Anyone who has ever been on a college campus has heard this argument. It comes down from the bully pulpit of the tenured faculty member and it goes directly into the accepting mind of the suburbanite white student. To be even more specific, the suburbanite white female. Partially because they increasingly outnumber males on American campuses, and partially because they make-up one of the more liberal voting blocs for the Democrats, young white women are prone to such pointless displays of protest. To make matters worse, the have a bad tendency to go off into the world, writing about and proselytizing their actions as if they matter or are convincing to anyone. Shireman-Grabowski is just another overeducated bore decrying American colonialism from her safe, intellectually homogenous vantage point. Frankly, the most surprising thing about this story is how quickly the university, the town, and the Abenaki moved to condemn this gang of five. Usually, these blustering barbarians are allowed free reign for their unscholarly behavior because left-leaning campuses are bloodless or otherwise too scared of their own students.
Who knows what lies in store for Shireman-Grabowski and her brood, but I am sure she’ll let you know when she makes her next move. Leftists are rarely good at keeping secrets, and the art of being inconspicuous is generally lost on them. I had a firsthand experience myself during a Veterans’ Day celebration that I helped to organize on the campus of the University of Vermont – New England’s Berkeley but with poorer hygiene and an embarrassingly bad fashion sense. After our group, which was comprised almost entirely of Army, Navy, and Marine Corps veterans, had finished planting flags and reading the names of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had to suffer through the expected cranks. One guy claimed (of course) they the dead had fought for oil, and that we needed to be enlightened to the fact that our service only meant more money for the already rich. Since this guy looked like he smelled like grizzly bear shit, we didn’t take his prophecies too seriously.
We did however take the threat of a campus-wide protest seriously. Before we could even sing the National Anthem, a group of censorship-loving anti-imperialists threatened to boycott our ceremony. It took a lot of schmoozing to get them to back off, but even then their scattered presence throughout the crowd made the day uneasy. The University of Vermont is overwhelmingly female, and the state itself is almost completely white. Guess who I kept a lookout for when it was my turn at the podium?
