When I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early sixties, a line formed.  This line quickly became quite a long line.  The university required students to take certain courses in order to graduate, and the number of places in these required courses was limited.  This line was for registration in one of those courses.

Students waited patiently in this ever growing line.  All day they waited.  All through the following long, bitterly cold winter night they waited.  They waited as the horizon brightened with the rising sun.  They waited until the door to registration was about to open.

Just as the door was being unlocked, a crowd of hooligans forced its way past the head of the line and through the door.  The campus police, who had witnessed the whole affair, did nothing.  Despite the protests of those who had waited patiently for a day and a night, the police did nothing.  A delegation from those who had waited confronted the class registrar with their protest.  The registrar dismissed the complaint of the protesters and registered the hooligans first.  Those toward the end of the line, many of whom had waited a day and a night, were out of luck.

As the news of the incident spread across the campus, a rising wave of anger spread with it.

This was one of several incidents that took place at Berkeley in those days.  Not long after, a rebellion, known to the world as the “Free Speech Movement,” broke out.  I wonder if there was some connection.

Now we have other line jumpers.  Illegal aliens, some call them.  Undocumented immigrants, others say.  Our liberal establishment, like that old Berkeley administration, gives these line-jumpers special privileges that legal immigrants don’t have: free tuition, free health care, plentiful jobs and other financial support – and, dare I say it, the vote. 

Rebellion by those who follow the rules has given us an unexpected new president.  I wonder if there was some connection.