The wonderful world of Luke Gatti

This young man, this juvenile named Luke Gatti, is getting famous for all the wrong reasons.  You may have seen the video of the now-former student of the University of Connecticut berating the manager of a student cafeteria the other night.

But if you see it for the first time, it won't be the first time or the last that you have seen a kid act this way. Gatti is 19, a year older than the average freshman, but that's because he started college last year at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, only to be arrested twice in the first month of classes and sent back to his family home in Bayville, Long Island, where he is known as a Mets fan and ski racer. During those arrests for disorderly conduct and assaulting a police officer, young Gatti used all sorts of profane language and racial slurs.  Nice kid. And his parents had to put up with him all year before shipping him off to UConn, and now this.

Luke showed up at that cafeteria the other night with an open bottle of alcohol.  There was certain evidence that he had already poured a certain amount of alcohol down his neck prior to being stricken with hunger pangs that could only be sated by gobbling a nice helping of Jalapeño-Bacon Mac and Cheese.  The manager of the place denied him service for carrying the open container, and then the donnybrook was on.

Watch the video to see a few things.  Yes, he gets arrested again, and is hauled away like the sack of waste he is.  This past Tuesday, he was seen loading his stuff into his father's car for his annual Autumn Ride Home After Being Thrown Out of School.

The complete lack of respect he shows for the manager, his fellow students, and (not that this matters much) himself is evident from the tape.  The manager tells Gatti to “think” and tells him to leave, and Gatti says, “you’re going to look like a f------ tool.”

Because who dares deny Luke Gatti food?

I don't know the first thing about this jackanapes but I can tell you he was not raised right.  It's the same thing you see day after day from kids who, moments after emerging from the womb, are hugged and told how there was great doubt that the world could survive much longer without their arrival.  And then they go to school, where there are no longer distinctions between students who achieve and students whose main achievement is keeping a chair warm with their glutei maximi. Everyone gets a participation medal, everyone is on the all-star team, every kid is the best at everything, everything is indulged and little faults like behaving like a galoot are ignored and ascribed to lack of breast feeding.

Then, little Luke goes to college time after time and on a weekend bender he runs into a guy he thinks he can demean because he is but a member of the servant class, here to bring starchy spicy food to His Majesty. In the video, you see the manager being ridiculously tolerant, and only when The Crown Prince of Lukistan shoves the manager does another employee introduce the conceited nincompoop to the floor.

2015.

His parents can display his annual mugshot
the way other families put out
school pictures.  This is 2014.

It's not really so troubling that a young man had too much spirit in him to behave in a contumacious manner.  What turns me inside out to watch this is knowing that the world is full of people just like him. Someday he will finish college, if he ever gets started in one, and go on to own a pharmaceutical corporation that raises the prices of lifesaving medicines by 1500%, or he will become a lawyer that specializes in foreclosing loans on widows and orphans, or he will become a candidate for office and claim that only members of the religion that he affiliates with should be elected, in violation of everything legal and right.

At 19, Gatti is already a blight upon society.  But, given room to grow, he will become even worse, unless some judge steps in and sentences him to growing up by learning to serve others, rather than demanding that they serve him.

And I know other people his age who act like perfect gentlemen and ladies.  It would be wrong to label all 19-year-olds as being the same, when one like this clown is more than enough.