Reading the endless parade of people who are offended by the littlest things, who require 'protection' from anything that disagrees with their belief du jour, or worse, don't want to be exposed to anything that contradicts their make-believe world view makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs “GROW UP, you pathetic babies! The world is not all kittens and rainbows and unicorns! It's mean. It's nasty. And there are people out there that, no matter how good and nice you believe yourself to be, have no problems with killing you, robbing you, raping you, enslaving you, or worse, saying something that offends only those of you with your “whining fragile snowflake” knob set to 11, just because that's what they want! You're fragile feelings don't mean s**t to them and no amount of sitting in a circle and singing Kumbuya will stop them from doing what they want to you! It's time to grow a pair, you sissies!”
Of course my rant would have many of them curled up in a ball in some corner, whimpering about how mean and nasty I am, that I am “double-plus ungood”, and they need their mommies to make them feel safe. And, of course, I. DON'T. FRIGGIN'. CARE!
Earlier this month I read a piece by Mytheos Holt that stuck a chord with me that stated quite plainly that people who require trigger warnings or other such 'accommodations' to protect them from every day life should be expelled.
While Holt was talking primarily about colleges, I think it could be applied to a lot of the perpetually offended crybabies throughout society demanding all kinds of concessions that everyone else finds ludicrous and, quite frankly, deserving of scorn and ridicule.
As Holt writes about the fragile snowflake community inside our colleges and universities:
In other words, how can you be so cruel as to expect these students to engage with knowledge as it actually exists? They’re just trying to get the degrees they paid for in peace. Leave them alone.In case you missed it, Holt is being sarcastic, throwing the idiocy of these people back in their faces. College is supposed to prepare you for “life's slings and arrows”, not coddle them and leave them unprepared for the real world outside of academia. If they can't handle reality in college, there's no way they'll survive once they graduate. As anyone can tell them (assuming they'll actually listen), 99.999% of the workplaces will not waste their time or money trying to accommodate the snowflakes and are more likely to fire them for creating a hostile work environment. There are more than a sufficient number of examples over the past few years showing how one toxic snowflake can create chaos within the workplace. Most employers will not put up with that for long. I know of two personally, where a new employee started complaining about fellow employees - many who had been there for years without any problems - reporting them for 'harassment' and other imagined sleights and driving HR crazy. In the end, the new employee was booted before the end of their probationary period because they were the one harassing the others, damaging morale, and negatively affecting productivity. It won't be any different with any other employer.
Holt also shows how coddling the college snowflakes tends to hurt others, either directly or indirectly.
Let’s get back to Myers’ “just let the poor traumatized kids get the degrees they paid for” argument. No, don’t let them get those degrees. The whole point of those degrees is to signify their bearers possess qualities beyond merely the credit rating to take out vast amounts of student loans. The entire reason college degrees are supposed to be valuable is that they signify a capacity to absorb and process specialized knowledge beyond what non-degree-holders have. This is, in fact, the whole purpose of education generally.Should a college punish the majority of its students just to make allowances for someone who shouldn't even be there to begin with? Of course not. Furthermore, should society be forced to adhere to increasingly restrictive rules and regulations meant to ease the suffering of these overly sensitive people? Absolutely not. If they cannot live in the real world without ending up being emotionally paralyzed or catatonic, then they do not belong out in the real world. They should be cloistered in some institution that will keep them shielded from all of the trigger words and microaggressions they find it so difficult to live with. They are not well people and need treatment for their mental illness. The should not be indulged because it only encourages their delusions and increases their fragility.
This means if some troubled or weak students have allowed their mental illness to preclude them from absorbing such knowledge, the fault lies not with the college, but with them. Such people are as ineducable as an illiterate English major. The solution is not to expel knowledge from the classroom that is disagreeable to these feeble and fragile minds. It is to expel them. Their place is in a psych ward, not a school, and their money (or, more likely, their parents’) is better spent seeking treatment there than spoiling education for everyone else.