Word: Student protests

Anand Giridharadas, The Ink - Historically, students have played a vital role: forcing moral questions that sometimes blinkered, jaded, habituated, corrupted elders refuse to face. Let them. Their social function isn't to be as faultless as your CPA. Their job isn't to be right about everything or to know how to run foreign policy or to have all the answers.

You do your job. Let other people do theirs. And everyone doesn't have to do their job the way you would do yours. There is a role for students to do what they're doing -- and there is a role for diplomats and everyone else: they can handle geopolitical maneuvering, legislating, explaining things in the news, brokering peace, mounting legal cases, writing human rights reports.

Enough with this strange allergy to hearing a tune played if it's not on your instrument, not played in your style. This is a society. It takes a lot of people going at it in different ways to get where we need to go.

Sure, students get things wrong. But they rarely have mortgages, salaries, speaking engagements, lobbying contracts, revolving-door jobs, board seats, advisory gigs, and all the other things that make some older folks unable - or unwilling - to see clearly what they otherwise would surely recognize.
And in the long run, the things students clamored for 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago are now largely things that even the most encrusted establishmentarians support and take for granted. So always approach student protests with humility. And curiosity. Take your own view. But be curious, not certain.