The Youth - Unintended Consequences
In the early 2000s while in Mexico City I ended up on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This is an enormous university, by any of the standards I know. The university had 370,000 students (as of 2023, but I believe a similar number 20 years ago).
Then the meeting started. After a long speech by the organizer (my Spanish was only good enough to understand half), students took turns standing and giving their own speeches. A few of the speeches were in English, which surprised me. The content was surprising too. One of the speeches was to persuade mainland China to abandon capitalist reforms. Another was in support of North Korea.
“I’m not sure if I understood, but was there a speech in support of North Korea? In support of the government of North Korea? And the continuation of the revolution there?”
Months later I became an MBA student at Columbia, a university that was in the news earlier this year because of student protests against the Israel–Hamas war. As part of that, student protestors took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall again (previous time, anti-Vietnam War in 1968).
