Death by Entitlement

[Mergie Master]

Two liberal idiots decide to bike and camp across the Middle East to show how good the people are there. That didn't work out so well.

Death by Entitlement

[Saltydog235]

Wonder if they learned from their mistakes?

[Mergie Master]

The last paragraph sums it all up nicely:

Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple's story? In the last analysis, it's a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin's word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child's fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.

[WhitewaterDuck]

Hey, I’m all for ditching something that ain’t doing it for you and pursuing whatever cranks your scooter, as long as you aren’t asking me to fund it. Sounds like they had a great idea, but the plan, based on typical Obama-induced millenial niavety, was FUBAR.