The recent campus rioting against unpopular or conservative political views is awful, but I have discovered the solution—by accident.
We have all seen numerous campuses riven by violence and a refusal to permit speech that does not comport with the current lefty line. This has happened recently at Middlebury, the Claremont Colleges, and of course—and most violently—Berkeley, which remains mired in a dispute over letting Ann Coulter speak.
Last week I spoke at Berkeley—and there was one protester. Actually he was more of a heckler, of the sort I’ve often encountered. He marched in the 1960s, his ponytail is now gray, but he still wants to interrupt and shout his views about Salvadoran “death squads” and unfair treatment of everyone from Fidel Castro to the Sandinistas. I would have been surprised, under normal circumstances, to find only one heckler at Berkeley.
Earlier on the day I spoke at Berkeley, I had spent an hour over at Stanford’s Hoover Institution with my old boss in the Reagan years, George P. Shultz. Shultz is now 96 but still entirely with it, and he told me “if you don’t get rioted at Berkeley today, your reputation is ruined.”
But I have seen the future and it works. I spoke at Berkeley on April 20—which turns out, unbeknown to me, to be famous as “420.” For reasons that are hotly disputed, 420 is now code for marijuana. Each April 20, pot smokers on campuses across the land gather to celebrate. Wikipedia, which is never wrong about such subjects, tells us that “April 20 has become an international counterculture holiday, where people gather to celebrate and consume cannabis.”
Weed Day was certainly a big deal at Berkeley. As I walked across the campus to the lecture hall where I was to speak, I crossed a vast field of pot smokers. You could get high just by walking through the crowd, and a smoky haze hung over the happy students. Of course no one showed up to riot!
It wasn’t that, as Secretary Shultz was warning me, the commies had forgotten the great battles of the Reagan years, or—God forbid—no longer recognized my name. It wasn’t that foreign policy is now considered boring, and they only break up meetings when provocateurs like Ann Coulter show up. No, it was that they were Too Stoned to Riot!
This is the solution. There need be no more Claremonts, no more Middleburys, no more Berkeleys where free speech is prevented. Think back to Berkeley’s “Free Speech Movement” of the 1960s, and you will recall that it was both actually for free speech on campus, and totally permeated with marijuana smoking. Was there ever a free speech rally in those days that did not have the telltale haze hanging over it?
This is the answer. Pusillanimous administrators and frightened faculty members need not bar controversial speakers nor court campus crises. Just announce a brief celebration of the benefits of cannabis and all will be calm, indeed even joyful. Too Stoned To Riot—I can see the T shirt now.
