Michael J. Totten has an interesting piece in Tech Central Station about all of the post-9/11 protestors who march against President Bush in the bluest regions of the blue states. As his title implies, “They March for Themselves“.
It’s a very good piece, but there’s a passage in it that caused me to do a doubletake:
I protested the Persian Gulf War back in 1991 when I attended the University of Oregon in Eugene. Every night I hit the streets with the rest of the university town’s motley radicals. We carried “No Blood for Oil” signs. We flashed the peace sign (which I didn’t then know also means “Victory”) at the police who were — I must say — remarkably tolerant of our antics.
That’s a remarkably curious detail. If I’m reading that paragraph correctly, Totten is saying that he didn’t know by the time he got to college that the peace symbol was originally the V-for-Victory symbol of Churchill. (Winston of course, not Ward.)
Maybe it’s because I’m several years older and grew up in the ’70s, when the afterburn of the 1960s was still remarkably present, but heck, I’m pretty sure that I knew the original meaning of the peace symbol before I was 10 years old.
Earlier today, I linked to a piece by Stefan Beck, who wrote, “I’ve always said that when universities hire left-wing profs exclusively, they hurt their avowedly liberal students most”.
He may be more right than he knows.
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