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Published Sunday, November 08, 2009 in Opinion

Arrested development?

Dear college students,

Some of you kids concern me deeply. It's the prime of your lives, and instead of acting like college students, you resemble a pack of kindergarten kids afraid to do anything Mommy hasn't pre-approved. Mommy, in this case, meaning the federal government.

This is wrong. You should be questioning every institution and threatening to bring the system to its knees. Just 40 years ago, college students were burning draft cards, shutting down campuses with ant-war protests, marching on Washington and making life miserable for the establishment.

You guys spend your spare time swapping digital music and chanting over organic vegetable gardens. How 'bout some outrage? Over anything?

The "Make Love, Not War" posters from the '60s didn't immediately end the fighting in Vietnam, but massive anti-war demonstrations led largely by college kids convinced President Lyndon Johnson to retire rather than face re-election.

It was college students or recent dropouts who disrupted the 1968 Democratic presidential convention in Chicago and became superstars of the '60s' counterculture movement.

I disagree with almost everything those student dissidents said and did, but you had to admire their passion. At least they knew this country works best when lawmakers are given fits instead of adoring looks and blank checks.

And right or wrong, those '60s radicals got results. They helped stop a war and make civil rights a reality for all Americans.

When historians look back at today's college students, what will they see? Maybe this:

A recent TV newscast showed a gorgeous coed walking across a gorgeous campus on a gorgeous day. Then she stopped and a look of alarm spread over her nicely made-up face. The camera zoomed in as she took several halting breaths and ... coughed right into her elbow ... which was covered with gorgeous designer fabric.

The young woman wasn't having a muscle spasm. She was doing exactly what Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius had taught her to do by demonstrating "the safe cough" countless times on TV.

It was unbelievable to see a real live college kid obeying government instructions on how to cough. Back in the day, college kids would have laughed at Sebelius and held a campus cough-in to prove they weren't being bossed around by big government.

Swine flu is no laughing matter, and we should all be careful where we spew our germs. But most of us got coughing lessons from our parents or pediatricians. Those lessons still work.

If we've reached a point where (a) government officials think we're so dumb they have to show us how to cough and (b) some people are so insecure they actually heed such advice, then the end is surely near.

College should be a time when kids question everything and fight to change the world in meaningful ways. These days, the only thing that might get students worked up enough to stage a protest is spotty wi-fi coverage on the campus nature preserve.

Please, kids. Come to your senses. Or lose them, which is more appropriate. Students your age used to say, "Don't trust anyone over 30." Now you trust an aging bureaucrat to teach you how to cough?

This isn't just sad ... it's wrong.

Anarchy is bad, but blindly trusting government to do anything right -- even teach us how to cough -- is worse. And in generations past, nobody knew it better than college students.

Where government is concerned, it's better to question everything. College students used to remind us of that. Maybe one day, they will again.

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