Once again, the editors at The New York Times opinion section got sockless drunk and passed out at their desks before noon.

Go ahead. Find a more plausible reason for why some smart editor didn’t laugh like a hyena, tear this David Brooks opus on Saturday’s March For Our Lives into tiny bits, and throw them up in front of a giant electric fan. I mean, there is missing the point and there is missing the point, and then there is ending up in an alternative universe full of talking trees and lizards playing Texas Hold'em.

The march passed what I have come to think of as The Privilege Test. One of the great privileges of life is to be born an American citizen. We are the lucky inheritors of the American Creed, built around freedom, equality, opportunity and democracy. There’s no such thing as the French Creed or the Italian Creed but there is an American creed. As Richard Hofstadter famously put it, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.”

There is no evidence in this column that Brooks listened to a single word that was said from the stage on Saturday. Yes, the march was a demonstration of the essential historical fact that this country is not, say, Pakistan. But the column is little more than an attempt to recapture the word “privilege” from its current usage as a pejorative that should be checked at the door.

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A column on Saturday’s events that quotes Richard Hofstadter, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, and Samuel Huntington, but not Emma Gonzalez or Naomi Wadler, and that uses those events to make the author feel better about himself, is fairly solid evidence as to why the word “privilege” fell into disfavor in the first place. Brooks certainly didn’t hear Trevon Bosley talk about the life Bosley lives as a teenager in Chicago.

“I’m here to speak for those youth who fear they may be shot while going to the gas station, the movies, the bus stop, to church or even to and from school. I’m here to speak for those Chicago youth who feel their voices have been silenced for far too long. And I’m here to speak on behalf of everyone who believes a child getting shot and killed in Chicago or any other city is still a not-acceptable norm.”

That’s not “creedal passion.” It’s a plea to be allowed to grow up.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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