Watching events play out as they have, one has to wonder if the students screaming, squatting, and dancing without need for interpretation on the South Lawn at Columbia ever had the chance to play Capture the Flag growing up — or if these children of privilege ever played any games that weren’t organized by adults to maximize the probability of acceptance to top schools.
I mention Capture the Flag specifically because it’s precisely the type of game in which one defends one’s borders against a foe. In fact, most of the game involves patrolling the boundary rather than pursuing the objective, the flag.
A video at Columbia provoked the memory:
Most of the game is spent dabbling, quick single-step incursions, and then jumping home to safety. But occasionally there come pushes wherein one of your team will fly across the demarcation to uncover the enemy flag’s hiding spot. As the other team turns to chase him, the rest of your side capitalizes on their split attention and hares off after the scout. It’s one of the more advanced games kids play due to the negotiation, teamwork, and specialization involved (establishing the rules was often a 45-minute pre-war council). There must be rules if we were to be lords of flies (and ants and sticks).
Like war, Capture the Flag also allows for other games to take place inside the wire. For instance, the girls will often create a domestic order within the framework of Capture the Flag — hospitals, kitchens, and matrimonial ceremonies will be expected. It’s a game that creates heroes, those few who find the enemy flag and, dodging the entirety of the other side, carry a scrap of cloth endowed with supernatural importance into your fiefdom.
Thrilling for children, but supremely embarrassing to observe adults playing the same — even undercooked and overbaked college students.
For all the disgust I feel for the views of these students — students who are wrong on the facts about Israel as well as wicked in their treatment of their Jewish peers who have nothing to do with that country a world away — I can’t help but pity them. The adults failed these students. No one loved these young people enough to tell them that they were making fools of themselves and to shut up, get back inside, and go to class. Worse, when a few adults finally did try to establish order and enforce consequences, the faculty rushed in to defend and coddle the agitators.
What we are left with is an unserious situation made serious — an Of Mice and Men sort of deal where dumbasses can be dangerous even if they leave their dorms intended nothing more than chanting and sleeping in tents behind wrought-iron gates on a manicured lawn while pretending to be homeless.
But there are always a few who know precisely what they’re doing and have the connections and true belief to see things through — and the will and ability to incite a crowd’s worst instincts. One such young woman is Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Ilhan Omar and a certified piece of work. In her defense, she’s surrounded by miserable people. Her parents separated in her childhood, her mother found another man, her dad then returned to have another child with her mother, and then her mother cheated on her father with a political consultant to whom her mother is now married while her dad remarried within weeks. Hirsi’s politics are as spiteful and manipulative as one would expect.
From the New York Post:
The privileged daughter of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar amazingly claims she’s homeless and can’t get food after being kicked out of her prestigious $90,000-per-year Barnard College dorm following her arrest at last week’s anti-Israel protests on Columbia University’s campus.
Isra Hirsi, 21, and a handful of other Barnard students were slapped with suspensions after they were among the more than 100 protestors cuffed and hauled away for refusing to clear out from a tent encampment on the Ivy League school’s campus last Thursday.
“I was a little bit frantic, like, where am I going to sleep? Where am I gonna go?” she whined to Teen Vogue after learning she’d been evicted from campus housing and banned from using the dining hall.
“And also all of my s–t is thrown in a random lot. It’s pretty horrible,” said the disgraced student still supported by her Democratic “squad” member mom, who said she is ” enormously proud” of her daughter.
“I have like four shirts, two pairs of pants,” Hirsi complained. “I don’t know when I can go home, and I don’t know if I ever will be able to.”
Schools like University of Minnesota have shown how to handle these situations: Nip it in the bud before the crazies and the professionals show up. The Ivy League may be considered by some the playground of the wealthy and connected, but it needn’t take that description literally.