Occupy = Give it to me for free

Interview with a pepper-sprayed UC Davis student

emphasis in following quote mine

We’d been protesting at UC Davis for the last week. On Tuesday there was a rally organized by some faculty members in response to the brutality on the UC Berkeley campus, and in response to the proposed 81% tuition hike.

One of the reasons I am involved with #OWS, and advocating for an occupy movement on the UC campus, is to fight privatization and austerity in the UC system, and fight rising tuition costs. I think that citizens have the right to get an education regardless of economic condition. Most people are not going to get a job where they can afford to pay off student loans. But to exclude people from knowledge is unconscionable.

I’m not going to spend too much time on whether the police should have done what they did, whether pepper spray should have been used, whether the students had the right to be there. That said, I will make a couple of general comments on that.

1. The university has clear rules about camping, which were waived for one night. They were then asked to vacate and refused. They were then warned they would be forcibly removed if they did not comply. The students were not on their own property (the property is of course paid for by tax dollars, which is another issue that should not even be, but probably the topic of another post) and were asked to vacate said property in accordance to the rules.
2. I don’t think there was a need for the police brutality that took place. At least not yet. It may have escalated to that, it may not have, we won’t know now. I’m very much against a police state, but some method of law enforcement is necessary for situations when a person, or persons will not vacate property that is not their own when they have been told to do so (of course this is but one instance of when police or some means of enforcement may be necessary in a society). It seems like that applies here.

But moving on to the main point I want to make, what’s truly frightening to me is the part I quoted above. This student apparently believes he has the right to receive an education at taxpayers expense. While I agree he has the constitutional right to pursue any education he would like to, he may not use someone else’s money to do so unless that money is freely given to him.

We in this country (save for a very few of us) have come to have a warped sense of what a right is. We now believe many things are rights that are not. Healthcare, welfare, education, you name it. The American people now think they are entitled to privileges that should only be theirs when they have exercised their true rights to work and earn such things.

I fear much for this country.