School year starts off ugly

The statute of Martin Luther King, Jr. on UT's mall got vandalized on August 15th. Here's the video. I don't know what they spray-painted, because it got cleaned up pretty quickly. It's being treated as racist vandalism, which is almost surely was since there's plenty of other statues on campus to mess with for those just looking to vandalize something.

This stuff doesn't happen in a vaccum. The right's continued thrashing of the poor strawman Politcal Correctness has convinced large numbers people, young men especially, that it's daring and downright rebellious to support racism, date rape, war-mongering, whatever. There is nothing daring about bolstering the cause of conservatism, of course. It's just pure cowardice to attack a statue of a man they would have trembled before in real life, just as it's pure cowardice to go pick on anti-war protesters in lieu of actually enlisting in and fighting the war. All of these things are part of a larger zeitgeist of intolerance, cowardice and entitlement.