Even your aunt knows by now what happened in IV last weekend, since your mom shared the Buzzfeed article with her on Facebook. Why it happened is less understood, although the most probable story is that students began rioting in response to a unnecessarily violent arrest of the teenager who hit an officer in the head with his backpack. Maybe that’s what happened, and maybe it’s not, but the news cycle doesn’t wait and thinkpieces won’t write themselves. Those of us who thought we could escape Deltopia by staying out of IV last weekend were sorely mistaken.
Associated Students was quick of the gate with an email to UCSB students that said, in effect, Quit Inviting Your Shitty High-School Friends To Our Parties You Dicks. A few days later they provided a modified statement to the media that more or less said What The Fuck Just Happened Man, Damn.
Dissatisfied with AS’s even-handed approach, graduate student Patrick Mooney took the opportunity to remind us why nobody takes academics seriously by writing a a ponderous op-ed in The Bottom Line arguing that a 17-year-old from Los Angeles assaulted a police officer because the UC system has recently been making administrative decisions without sufficient student input. Wash the taste of that piece out your mouth with this first-hand account of Saturday night by undergraduate Alexa Shapiro, who identifies some important failures of the police response.
More student takes: Probably the emptiest piece came from Nonsense favorite Ben Moss, who took 7 paragraphs to write “lol woops I was wrong,” which, admittedly, is more than most professional columnists are willing to do. A political science major screamed a lot about stuff and got a nice kerfuffle going in the comments. And, of course, someone managed to blame the riot on a pregnant black woman, because of course.
Not all students are garbage, though, as Lily Kingsbury demonstrates with this nice piece about Isla Vista and community.
After all that you’re probably thinking Hey They’re Just Young, They’ll Grow Up And Be Smart.
Haha, no.
“UC parent” Adam Sparks innocently wonders Why Oh Why was Floatopia canceled in the first place, if we’d just let the kids have their beach fun none of this would have happened. An alumnus issued a stuffy whitepaper that at least did offer some concrete proposals. The Santa Barbara View couldn’t decide whether to commission a philosophical meditation from moral relativist Sharon Byrne or a sermon from concern troll Loretta Redd, PhD, so they just solicited “solutions” in an open thread, with predictable results. But none of the View commenters could hope to match the Final Solution offered by UCSB engineer Greg Dahlen, who literally called for the murder of 15,000 people in the Santa Barbara Independent.
So next time you find yourself thinking how terrible kids are these days, know that they’ll only get worse with age. That’s the real lesson of Deltopia.