August is finally upon us, and summer now starts its slow slide into autumn. At retail stores across the nation, the Halloween displays have already gone up and will almost immediately be replaced with Christmas displays before the jack-o-lanterns begin to rot.
It's also time for back-to-school shopping. As a kid, I never looked forward to the start of school. There was the obligatory trip to the store for some new pants, maybe some shirts, and, of course, school supplies. There were not enough compasses, protractors, erasers, rulers, or pencil sharpeners in the world to put a positive spin on the end of summer.
By the time high school rolled around, you could usually get away with a Trapper Keeper and some pens that you scrounged from around the house — at least I did. When I hit my senior year, I even ditched the Trapper Keeper.
College is a whole other story. In addition to pens, notebooks, and laptops, there are toiletries, clothes, and whatever else a student cannot live without for the academic year. If you are sending your son or daughter to college or a university, make sure you add these things to the shopping list:
- Hard hat, football, or riot helmet
- Kevlar vest
- Mace/pepper spray
- Knee/elbow pads and shin guards
- Running shoes
- Gas mask/respirator
- Campus map with escape routes
- Eye protection.
Remember, this is only a partial list. Actual items may vary depending on the campus.
I'm only partially joking. Your son or daughter may not be an agitator. He or she may only want to get their money's worth out of an exorbitant student loan and receive an education. But while your student may intend to mind his or her own business, campus protesters have few, if any, rules of engagement, and your child may find themselves sucked into the vortex of insanity.
Odds are that this school year is likely to be as bad in terms of pro-Hamas protesters as the last — possibly worse since this is an election year. Campus Reform reports that the anti-Israel group CUNY for Palestine at the City University of New York has already issued a warning/heads-up/threat. The statement, which was issued on July 25, reads in part:
We are an autonomous group of students, faculty, community members and outside agitators who chose to disrupt the encampment’s status quo in order to dismantle CUNY’s active role in this genocide and ongoing apartheid.
The City of New York and their pigs continue to escalate their repression of the city. . . . The city of New York and their pigs are going to keep brutalizing and escalating, and so will we.
Anyone that chooses to play the role of a pig is the enemy.
As the zionist entity continues its destruction of the Gaza Strip—and the United States maintains its genocidal hegemony from Palestine to Harlem—the working class people of the world escalate.
The encampments were an escalatory response, but they often failed to envision an end goal beyond a meeting, a committee or an email,” the statement continued. An encampment should not normalize the institution, it should disrupt it, dismantle it and abolish it. A principled encampment should not collaborate with the pigs.
Whether we are fighting in Atlanta, New York City, Sudan, or Palestine, the enemy remains the same. The zionist entity escalates, so does the Palestinian Resistance. The pigs and institutions escalate, so do the agitators of the world!
Campus Reform said that italicized and bolded words were original and not added for emphasis. It came on the heels of this Instagram post:
Outside agitators aside, we are dealing with entitled, immature children of privilege who are probably still sorting out the last of their hormonal development. At the same time, as deranged as they are, they are deadly serious and could quite possibly be deadly.
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