Education protestors are whiners, while tea partiers are a movement

This country, at times, seems like it’s teeming with barrels of monkeys who are more inclined to spout nonsense than engage in productive dialogue. Take Peter Robinson, a fellow at Stanford University, a former White House speechwriter, and a regular columnist for Forbes.

On March 5, a day after thousands nationwide marched to protest funding cuts in education, Robinson wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal that only indicated just how out of touch he is with reality. Labeling the protesters as the “Me generation,” he argued that these students were selfish and self-absorbed for demanding money when so many families have been hit badly by the recession. In short, they carry a false sense of entitlement.

Never mind the irony that Robinson himself received a top-notch education from prestigious institutions: Dartmouth College and then Oxford University, and that he also works for an elite university where many enrolled are a product of privileged legacies. But wait, according to Robinson’s logic, it is those students protesting for a fair chance at a public education that are entitled.

There are many glaring flaws with Robinson’s piece. First, the generation he calls entitled made up only a portion of the protesters last Thursday. The rest were an equally frustrated group of parents concerned about their children’s futures and teachers who have been fired due to cuts.

Second, his definition of “entitlement” is skewed. Not only because Robinson overlooks his own privileged background, but he also doesn’t acknowledge that the idealism that these students espouse is not an aberration from the idealism they have vigilantly and regularly fought for. It is this generation who strongly opposed the Iraq War in 2003, and who just recently began a series of protests against racist incidents at UC campuses. Indeed, the generation he calls “self-absorbed” is very likely to work in developing countries, raise funds for natural disasters and engage with their local communities.

Most glaring of all, though, is that Robinson seems to find all the faults in these young protestors who are fighting for an affordable public education as they have been promised, but tea partiers, who claim they are trying to save their country, are heroes.

In a Forbes article in January, Robinson fought for the little guy – the tea partiers who have led the front in protesting Obama’s stimulus package and healthcare reform that would unfairly penalize these Americans, and who are due credit for their efforts while supine GOP counterparts merely observed. Unlike the students, when tea-partiers protest against health care reform that would benefit millions n the U.S., they are not self-absorbed, just patriotic.

The sentimental end is what really drives Robinson’s point home (cue in blaring trumpets): “But I do know this – and by now Obama knows it, too: The most potent political force in America is still an ordinary citizen who has finally had enough.”

Here, Robinson makes the most interesting point in his writing – one he probably did not mean to: the ordinary citizen who has had enough is a label only reserved for a select few. More specifically, the political force in America who should be heard is a small group of Americans afraid of an imagined monster – socialist in the White House, not a generation across the country who has tangible reasons to be upset. So, who really is the entitled one?

Regardless of one’s position on education funds and whether demands of these education protestors should be met, it is difficult to argue that hundreds of thousands of people are frustrated, upset at the lack of resources distributed to them, and probably at the lack people listening to them as they attempt to hold their government accountable.

Yet, the idiocy that Robinson argues is a shared sentiment among many – both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives – who have been quick to recognize the Tea Party as a legitimate movement and yet disregard the education protests (among others) as a product of either entitlement or banal whining. While Tea Partiers are running as third candidates in many states, an entire group of citizens is being ignored in the national political discourse.

The recession has not just hit middle America, and certainly not just a group of conservatives who still question where our President was born. It has also severely jostled job and health care security for a younger generation who now has to worry about completing their education because of rising tuition costs. And if anyone needs a reminder, it is this generation whose endless campaigning hours and efforts helped lead the Obama movement into the White House. Not only are they citizens, but they are effective citizens.

The March 4th protest was not the first education protest, and it certainly is not the last. California has already scheduled another round for later this month. And yet, there is an invisible barrier that somehow separates these frustrated citizens from the political discussion about the nation’s priorities amid mid-term elections. Perhaps those like Robinson, so concerned about the rights of the ordinary citizen, should listen to their own arguments for including the American public in the larger national discourse. At least I’d like him, the man who once wrote the famous Berlin Wall speech, hear his own words: “tear down this wall!”