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Extinguishing the Light
Just released cartoon by Michael P. Ramirez covers my favorite topic. What the hell is wrong with young people today who cannot tolerate anything that doesn’t reinforce their happiness?
More like doesn’t reinforce their momentary comfort.
I still think that young adults who grew up in families in which they felt loved and respected don’t need, expect, or even want their college to be an incubator that keeps out opinions they find despicable or offensive. They only want, as anyone would, to be physically safe there.
A lot of the overgrown kids we see and hear on videos, screeching at people who don’t want to keep them safe, for instance, from offensive Halloween costumes (Yale) are unconsciously angry and hurt over not having had real parental support in the years before college. Certain opportunistic professors and administrators simply use the unacknowledged grief, anger and longing of the people we call snowflakes to manipulate them into demanding what they want them to demand.
I used to work with people who have severe mental disabilities. You’d be suprised at how often their caregivers (their “support providers”) prompted them to demand things that weren’t necessarily good for them but that made life easier or better for the staff caring for them. Something similar to that is happening with the so called snowflakes and the canny adults egging and subtly pressuring them on.
You got half of this right. It’s not a one-way street. The teaching of these young people of how to behave to others is frequently missing. I don’t mean to pick on anyone with only one child (their task is more difficult) but a family of children with siblings has greater pressure and opportunity to get this two-way treatment working properly.
EDIT: I meant to say a little more here. Your point that these children grew up feeling loved and respected does not in and of itself instill in them any understanding that out in the real world what they have experienced is not the totality. I’m a little removed from public elementary and secondary school but I do observe that much of the conflict experience has been or is being removed. I think that’s ok but still requires learning about reality.
Re 33
My point is that these kids did not grow up feeling loved and respected. They may or may not have been spoiled or overprotected, but spoiled and overprotected is not the same thing.
I’m saying that, without knowing it, these kids want the college environment to provide them with some kind of nurturing they didn’t have within their families.
I also think young people enter college without having had the kind of social training (or, to put it your way: conflict experience) families once provided to young people. For instance, these college kids are less likely to have been involved with their family in a church; and, through that involvement, to have worked with people they didn’t always like or agree with. Their parents were less likely to have known their neighbors in the years they were growing up, and less likely to have attended town hall meetings.
I sometimes think the best preparation for college would be a year spent with the Amish.
I’m guessing they all went to high school though, and there’s nothing more suited to getting you used to “working with people you don’t always like” than Modern American High School.
I suppose it would be hard to feel disillusioned with deeply-held beliefs. My point was that it at least doesn’t impact your real life, although perhaps if you were involved in progressive activism, it would.
I remember being involved with a progressive movement because it was led by a woman I liked a lot. Alas, one excuse I used for it is that in viewing the inner workings of the organization, I realized it could never actually function in a healthy manner! Sure enough, it didn’t, and the girl eventually moved on to different things.
I became a conservative from pretty much the moment I started to learn about politics, even though my parents were fairly staunch liberals. I think the thing that started me on the path was that my father was a professor who took research money from the Defense Department’s ARPA, and spent much of his leisure time writing about the evils of the Defense Department and nuclear weapons! It just struck me as rank hypocrisy, so I felt an immediate sympathy for the Defense Department, whoever they are.
What made you recognize the wrongness of progressive views?
Re # 35
High School, when I was there, was very divided into different groups that often were quite hostile to each other. Of course that was a very long time ago.
I don’t remember any particular animosity. Maybe it was because I was always the new kid (I went to a new high school every year), or maybe it was my involvement in athletics, but I never noticed any group hostility. I went my senior year to a high school in Camp Springs, MD. If there was ever a chance for animosity, it was at that school. It had a vocational wing and a college-track wing, but I never noticed any particular bad blood.
I noticed some group hostility in my high school (Woodbridge, Ct) in 1974. Though, I suppose it would be more accurate to say the groups just stayed apart from and ignored each other. But from what my younger brother and his friends told me, it was way worse by 1977. I mean there were fights between Zags (whatever they were) and, I think, Jocks.
Still, that might just have been a 1970’s thing and not the way high school usually was, before or after that time, or the way high school often is now.
Miffed White Male, if high schools are, or were, a good enough social training for civilized behavior and respect for people’s right to express different points of view, then why is there less respect for freedom of speech at colleges now ?
I’m as disgusted by the college tantrums as the rest of you. But this attitude is not unique to young people or this time. Polls going back to the 1930’s or earlier pretty consistently show that about 30-35% of Americans think free speech protections go too far and the government should censor speech.
Friday night I was at a Republican event that had three speakers, each of which was an immigrant from a different country. By far the one who got the most applause was the one who warned that we should not allow immigrants from godless countries a platform to spread their godless ideas. She was the only speaker who got a standing ovation from the audience. I remained seated.
I may be missing something, but: (1) what is the point of that original tweet? To somehow undermine the legitimacy of free speech by quoting a piece of embarrassing rhetoric? (2) what is Howard Dean’s rationale for making that statement? Is it, by any reading of the law, correct?
Re 40
When she saw what you were doing ( remaining seated that way) the speaker must have been terrified. I assume the police were called to put a stop to your violence.
Seriously, have there been other times in our history that controversial speakers, speaking at college campuses, were commonly threatened ? Other times when people listening on campus to controversial speakers were commonly punched, hit with sticks, pelted with rocks ? I know this kind of intimidation has always gone on at other locations. Has it ever before happened this often at colleges?
This wasn’t a college incident, but about a week ago people were celebrating the resurrection of a man who was beaten, crucified, and killed for spreading a message that some people didn’t want to hear. Wanting to use force or intimidation (either personal, mob, or government) to silence people with unpopular opinions is not a 21st century innovation.
My point isn’t to excuse the campus mobs. The instinct to shut people up who disagree with us is part of human nature. That instinct is not exclusively found on the left or in the young. My point is that we must be on guard against such uncivilized behavior whether it is coming from people on the left, on the right, or straight down the middle. I think we listen with a critical ear when our political adversaries condone taking away someone’s right to speak, but we’re more likely to shrug it off — or even cheer — when someone on our side does the same thing.
Re: 43
You’re probably right. I honestly don’t know. Could you give me some examples of times people on the right have attempted to keep someone from speaking or being heard ?
I don’t have any examples off the top of my head when a right-wing mob has prevented someone from speaking. But I gave the example in comment #40 where a speaker at a Republican convention opined that godless immigrants shouldn’t be allowed to spread their godless opinions.
I have no idea what your age is, Ansonia. If you are young you might not be familiar with the name Paul Harvey. Back in the age before Rush Limbaugh, the only really big nation-wide conservative voice on the radio was Paul Harvey. On numerous occasions Mr. Harvey opined that there is something wrong with us as a country because we allow the FDA to regulate what we can put in our mouths and noses, but the government allows us to put anything into our eyes and ears. Calling for government censorship is not exactly the same as a mob preventing someone from speaking, but they are both still violating the principle of free speech.
I won’t disagree that the left has more people than the right who want to do away with free speech. But it’s not exclusively a left-wing phenomena.
Thank you, Randy. I’m 60. But, I didn’t know who Paul Harvey was. Tom (better half, 62) vaguely remembers him.
Scary.
Yeah. There was a lot of racial animosity (much diminished in the varsity and JV sports teams.) Interracial violence was almost exclusively black on white, and included strongarm robberies and some really creepy and sadistic assaults by black males on white and Asian girls generally taking place in the girls’ bathrooms. My sister and her friends stopped going to the bathroom alone. Other schools were worse, though a former junior high school teacher of mine was stabbed trying to stop a fight, and a high school teacher was fairly seriously injured.
There was a drama teacher who should have been seriously injured by someone but never was. He tended to pick a female student each year, groom her and sleep with her. A junior high teacher in his late 30s married an 18 year old former student of his…
Re 47
Though I won’t say much myself, none of what you write surprises me.
For those of you interested in free speech issues I would suggest checking out What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech in the New York Times opinion section.