Spare Me The Right's Tears For Kyle Kashuv - He Deserved Being Bounced From Harvard

"WAAAAAHHHA! Dem Libwuls gotta stop pickin' on Kyle! BWAAAHHAAA!"

Back on March 26 last year I posted about the fearless Parkland students who marched and demonstrated to return gun sanity to this country. I also tore into the NRA-backed punk, Kyle Kashuv,  who gained notoriety by going against his classmates.  In the words of fellow blogger Ilana Novick on smirkingchimp.com:

"Kashuv’s political views are often at odds with his fellow Parkland survivors. After the horrific Parkland shooting, many of the surviving students, including David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, became activists. They organized the March for Our Lives in support of gun control and often spoke out against the policies of the Trump administration. Kashuv was an outlier among his classmates, a conservative defender of the Second Amendment."


 As I wrote at the time, in my above-cited post:

"Then there is the other clueless NRA tool making the talk show rounds on behalf of the gunrunners and 2nd amendment phonies. That would be Kyle Kashuv who.actually tweeted the following ding on his fellow Parkland  students:

No one's feelings are hurt by a group of people who Don't have a basic understanding of US case law and are fighting to get existing laws passed.

Which is total balderdash.

In fact it's Kashuv who lacks a basic understanding of U.S. case law pertaining to the 2nd amendment given he is blissfully unaware there is NO  "existing law" that currently bans military grade weapons like the AR-15 which is one of the provisions his classmates want passed.

Nor is he aware of the D..C. vs. Heller  Supreme Court decision  e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2018/02/sorry-you-have-no-constitutional-right.html

Kashuv is now in the news after Harvard decided to revoke his admission. He asked for a face-to-face meeting but was told the matter was closed. Predictably, conservative Twitter erupted Monday, arguing that this was another case of liberal -elite Harvard bashing conservatives. Actually it was not, so these Reich whiners are off base.  It was a case of Kashuv trashing his own  Harvard aspirations by posting racist slime drivel - and Harvard finding out about it.  But I will get to that.

The backstory is that when he was 16, some months before the shootings, Kashuv wrote racist comments in text messages and on a collaborative Google doc.  In many ways it reminded me of the gaggle of 10 dimwits who also had their Harvard admissions rescinded in June of 2017.  This  after their depraved texts under a self-branded  “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”  were posted on a Facebook message board.  The story was first reported by the Crimson.     Suffice it to say that even one of the "least" offensive posts -  by one person in the original clique -  is simply too abominable for words, or repetition here.

Back to Kashuv: He was studying for the A.P. American History exam with some classmates online. Around midnight, they got restive and suddenly thought posting aberrant brain farts would be cool. At least a change from the drudgery of study. So they began posting assorted racist garbage and tried to see who could outdo the other in terms of outrage.  Much like the ten losers noted above on the deformed "memes for bourgeois teens" group.

Kashuv’s comments, to any normal, sentient person who read them, were degenerate, blatantly racist and anti-Semitic. He wrote the N-word twelve times and then even explained that he was good at typing that word. “[P]ractice uhhhhhh makes perfect.”

All sorts of excuses have been made for him in the wake including by NY Times scribe David Brooks,  who wrote:

"Moral formation is not like learning math. It’s not cumulative; it’s inverse. In a sin-drenched world it’s precisely through the sins and the ensuing repentance that moral formation happens. That’s why we try not to judge people by what they did in their worst moment, but rather by how they respond to their worst moment. That’s why we are forgiving of 16-year-olds, because they haven’t disgraced themselves enough to have earned maturity."

A nice patter but it doesn't hold water.    Left off Brooks' defensive radar is that each sentient human - certainly by the age of 16, and according to Catholics by the age of 7 - at least possesses the capacity for reason and a rudimentary conscience.  The role of conscience  as Ethics professor Cheryl Mendelson has noted ('The Good Life', p. 71) is critical to having a moral compass:

"In the premoral mind.... in place of the individual's capacity to think and act according to conscience - there is mere egoism: the demand or wish, to be allowed to do and have what one wants."

Even a 7 year old arguably has the capacity to know it's wrong when he grabs a candy bar off a store shelf and stashes it into a pocket.   He may not know the details and nuances of his moral choice, but instinctively he knows it was antithetical to societal accepted norms. And indeed, the furtive act amounted to taking something that wasn't his, he just wanted it at that time. Ego over conscience.

In the same respect, when the 14 year -old Donald Trump Jr. in Queens tested home -made switch blades on alley cats, he had to know at some level it was wrong to slice up those animals and leave them to die in agony. (The discovery of Trump's penchant for testing custom-made switch blades on cats was what led his dad Fred to ship him off to a military school in New York.)

Likewise,  Kashuv already had a moral compass and conscience by the time he wrote those racist epithets. His conscience may not have been fully aggregated or formed - but it was there - and he damned well knew right from wrong.   Hence, all the caterwauling now by the conservo crowd is a bit rich, especially in appealing yet again to the tired trope of  'political correctness'. Which has now become a general catch all and escape clause for dodging any moral responsibility .  An ethically grounded citizen appears and critiques Trump for his caging of migrant infants? "Political correctness!" is the knee- jerk response by these dingbats.

Finally, Harvard would have looked inconsistent in its admission rescission standards had it given Kashuv's vicious mischief  a pass while not doing so for the ten previous "bourgeois memes"   miscreants.  Kashuv, if he really had a brain - say to have earned that reported 5.345 grade point average at Parkland (preposterous grade inflation!) - ought to have known the competition to gain the advantage of a place at Harvard was enormous,  Tens of thousands of worthy candidates apply each year and receive rejection slips.

  In the words of two recent NY Times commenters:

"Harvard has the widest talent pool to draw from. Why would it accept a bright student who makes racist comments when they can accept the next equally bright student who doesn't?"

And:

"For every maybe racist kid who gets into Harvard there are thousands of non-racist kids who are dying to go. Harvard simply set an example for teenagers everywhere to clean up their acts and to be aware of how their social media is presenting them to the world. Without reforms like this, social media will take us and our kids all down the swirling toilet of crass behavior, bullying, words that should matter but don't seem to. Kids and adults alike should take this as a lesson in life."

Amidst this milieu and so many other more worthy students trying to gain admittance, Kashuv's best response now is to suck up his rescission and learn from his errors.  Also, cease thumping his chest about his "act of contrition".  Fine, he rendered himself contrite for his reckless and disgusting words, but now there is the piper to be paid.   Learn and move on!  Besides, not gaining entry into an elite school (or the prime one desired) it not the end of a talented person's options or aspirations.  Millions do not graduate from Harvard (or Yale, or Princeton) and still have very successful careers, lives.  Kashuv could as well if he ditched the self-pity and moved on.

Meanwhile, his conservative whiners, enablers, and apologists need to also grow up and rethink their stance.  No, Harvard isn't saying Kashuv "can't grow" or hasn't learned. They are merely saying that vicious words, as well as actions, have consequences - and for Harvard these are taken seriously. Unlike in the rest of  Trump's America.

And yeah, Kashuv did "experience a vicious shooting spree" but let's bear in mind his vile words on Google.doc were dispatched before that event, not after. So he doesn't get to claim it as an excuse, nor should he. 

See also:

Conservatives and the Right

Conservatives Play the Victim as Harvard Pulls Parkland Student’s Acceptance

Why The Parkland Students #Never Again Movement May Founder

Delaney Tarr, a senior at Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland FL, three months ago, warned the NRA backing pols: "We are coming after every single one of you and demanding that you take action, demanding that you make a change!" 

Part of the crowd which showed up for the "March for our lives" in Washington, D.C. two months ago.

No fully conscious citizen can forget how the Parkland #NeverAgain protest movement began with great fanfare three months ago, marking its high point with the "March for our lives" on March 24. The event featured stirring speeches from a number of the students whose Parkland FL school was the scene of the worst ever mass shooting for a high school.  In one of the first speeches, Marjory Stoneman Douglas senior Delaney Tarr told the crowd of the students’ demands, including background checks and a ban on assault weapons.

“When you give us an inch, that bump stocks ban, we will take a mile. We are not here for breadcrumbs, we are here to lead.”


Before her D.C. march appearance, Ms. Tarr appeared a number of times earlier, including on CNN, and MSNBC, warning NRA-backed politicos that "we are coming after you".  She achieved much prominence, as did the other Parkland students  - including Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, and Cameron Kasky  - based on their poise, knowledge and ability to articulate the anxieties of millions of kids nationwide, trapped in an out of control gun culture. (An estimated 300 million guns are possessed by a minority of U.S. citizens.)

Parkland student Jordan Khayyami, 15, warned: “I think that legislatures should be aware that the next generation of voters is right in front of them so if they don’t want to promote change then we will vote for change.”

The scenes of  hundreds of thousands of activated students was overwhelming to many of the victims of earlier gun violence, including Mark Barden, whose seven-year-old son Daniel was one of the 20 children murdered at Sandy Hook in 2012, Barden told a reporter from the UK Guardian:

“I did not expect this. I’m still astounded,. To me, it looks like our entire nation is finally on board, on the right side of this issue. It’s so inspiring and encouraging and overwhelming, and beautiful to me.”

The students - including speakers from other gun-victimized high schools, e.g. in  D.C., Maryland, Chicago,  also took time to set up voter registration booths, to prepare as many 18-year olds and others eligible to vote this year as possible.

But what has transpired since the last marches in April? Not much, and this bespeaks why the #Never Again movement may now be running out of steam.   This also highlights the bane of too many incipient mass movements that begin with energetic protests but soon expire - especially in the modern era (including "Occupy Wall Street"). The cautionary note being that even the most sensational mass marches and activism are often interpreted in hindsight as merely temporary shows of enthusiasm.  

Indeed, as we discovered in the 1960s, it is extremely difficult to translate march protests into sustained mass movements that can change history.  In fact, for most of American history -  going back to the "Wobblies" in the 1920s and even before - it was understood that movements required months or even years of planning and effort as well as determined commitment. It couldn't simply be a case of rousing the masses to concerted action, then say going off to college and forgetting about them, or assuming they will organize on their own.

This is why starting in the mid 1960s one was often asked to be part of "the movement", which was understood to mean committing your heart, mind and soul to the work at hand and then showing up whenever and wherever bodies were needed. That included not only in march protests like the kids from Parkland put on, but also appearing in Southern diners alongside African American students - say in Birmingham or Jackson, Mississippi in the fall of 1964, or on buses as "Freedom Riders".

I learned early at Loyola, in September, 1964, at a rapidly- called meeting by the  Loyola chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) that I was not cut out for such commitment.  I came out of curiosity to the meeting, held at nearby Tulane - with about 35 other Loyola freshmen - expecting to learn ways we could contribute. But when we were told we needed to board buses that weekend to go to Montgomery, Alabama as "Freedom Riders", many of us balked. For me it was a matter that I'd just commenced my college first year and was on scholarship - which I didn't want to risk. For others, it was that they simply didn't feel the amount of time  needed was feasible.  For others, it was a fear of actual physical harm since we'd already read of Freedom Riders being beaten and buses set on fire.

As it turned out, those who joined the CORE campaign were not seen at Loyola from the next year. The word was most had either dropped out to join the movement full time, or had been injured, or flunked out and left.   This brings us to the #Never Again movement.

Recall how two beat writers (Arian Campo-Flores and Nicole Hong)  on the staff of The Wall Street Journal wrote a stirring article ('From Shooting To Gun Control Movement')  of why these Stoneman  Douglas students were different, noting:

"The students at Stoneman aren't like those who witnessed previous mass shootings at Columbine High School in 1999, or Virginia Tech in 2007. They are digital natives, at one with the language and power of smartphones and social media.  That is one reason why the movement they started, dubbed #NeverAgain, has become a nationwide phenomenon in barely a few days, and shows signs of becoming the kind of campaign success that a company or politician can only dream of."

This and similar media pieces naturally spawned vast expectations.  It prompted the expectation - especially after a number of states had enacted new gun laws in response  - that this was just the beginning. But one little element appeared to escape the attention of the movement optimists: Most of the Parkland activists were Stoneman Douglas seniors who were now in the midst of Advanced Placement preparations (the AP Calculus test, for example,  was last Tuesday a.m.) and are going off to college. How then can the needed motivation and commitment be sustained if one must take on intense, new obligations? As many of us learned in our first year at Loyola, it can't. You can't honor two masters at the same time. If you honor your education with first priority you have to let full commitment to the movement go.

This is what Parkland's ambitious student activists are now learning and the rest of us as well.  That is, just dispatching social media texts  from an office and organizing to show up on the streets and in schools,  does not necessarily presage a movement or earn you enduring credit.  While jump starting a movement is easy, making it stick is a helluva lot more difficult - especially to translate into concrete change.

Make no mistake the latter has been achieved by the Parkland kids and victims, in terms of new state gun laws (see previous post), but much more could still be done - especially mustering the numbers to get 18 years registered to vote for the mid terms. Who will see this through?  What is possible, of course, it that the younger Stoneman Douglas students, e.g. 15 year old Jordan Khayyami and 16 year old Morgan Williams, can now take up the banner from their older peers.

If they don't, or can't - say because of time constraints or academic priorities - then the #Never Again movement that held so much promise three months ago, may now founder on the rocks of lower energy and inattention.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/cesar-chelala/77791/a-student-s-message-to-politicians-about-the-florida-massacre