TEARS OVER DELTOPIA: CAMPUS SCRIBES MOURN TEMPORARY RETURN OF CIVILIZATION

There is no tragedy quite like a collegiate radical being temporarily separated from a weekend of state-subsidized debauchery. Over at the UCSB Daily Nexus, our aspiring Woodward-and-Bernsteins are currently weeping into their iced oat milk lattes because the big, bad Santa Barbara County Sheriff deputies dared to show up with flashlights and basic traffic barricades, putting an unforgivable damper on the annual tradition of total civic decay.

In a breathtaking display of dorm-room melodrama, campus writers have taken to penning open farewell letters to the empty asphalt of Del Playa Drive, lamenting the presence of the very law enforcement personnel who ensure the local housing stock does not burn to the waterline every spring. To hear the student press tell it, bringing order to the unruly streets of Isla Vista is practically an imperialist occupation, rather than standard sanitation and safety measures meant to keep twenty-year-olds from mistaking gravity as a social construct.

What the campus editorial board somehow manages to miss between their tear-stained metaphors is the quiet paper trail running right through the County Administration Building. Local working-class taxpayers are left footing a massive, multi-million-dollar emergency services bill every year just so the progeny of coastal elites can play Mad Max on rented lawns. While university regents sit comfortably in Oakland collecting six-figure administrative perks, our underappreciated deputies are the only adults in the room, babysitting future sociology majors who view basic noise ordinances as a civil rights violation.

Rest assured, the enlightened co-eds will survive their traumatic weekend away from the keg stands. Isla Vista will survive too, cleaned up by county road crews and protected by the men and women in uniform whom the campus literati take for granted. Before we know it, Monday will roll around, the trust-fund allowance will clear, and the temporary anarchists will be back to lecture the rest of us on responsibility.