Quickies: Plaints Of The Hothouse Flowers Of Academia

     I won’t have time for much today – this “living” business can be awfully trying – but I do want to comment on this tale of the aftermath of an encounter between carefully indoctrinated psyches and unfamiliar ideas:

     Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos made an appearance at Rutgers University, and his ideas and rhetoric so traumatized the delicate flowers who heard him that many of them attended a "group therapy" session afterward.

     You are not going to believe what happened next:

     According to the paper, students and faculty members held a wound-licking gathering at a cultural center on campus, where students described “feeling scared, hurt, and discriminated against.”

     “A variety of different organizations and departments were present to listen, answer questions and show support” to the apparently weak and vulnerable students, who just a few days prior had disrupted Yiannopoulos’ event by smearing fake blood on their faces and chanting protest slogans.

     One student at the event told the Targum that they “broke down crying” after the event, while another reported that he felt “scared to walk around campus the next day.” According to the report, “many others” said they felt “unsafe” at the event and on campus afterwards.

     Please read both the above-linked stories in their entirety.

     I’ve written before about victim status having become a negotiable currency. Anyone who thinks the whining students in the above story are sincere is a thrice-damned fool. They’re claiming to feel “scared” and “unsafe” to get something for it: possibly a relaxation of Rutgers’ rules or academic requirements. Not even the tenderest eighteen-year-old from the most sheltered imaginable environment could plausibly claim to have been frightened by a speaker’s expression of an opinion contrary to his own at an event no one was required to attend.

     But that’s what will predictably follow when students learn that “feeling scared, hurt, and discriminated against” has become the coin of the realm.

     Believe it or not, this is actually the better of the two possibilities. Imagine if the students whining above really were sincere. Imagine what that would portend for their futures – and ours, given that the Rutgers environment is about average for American colleges and universities in our time. For them to support themselves by that most realistic, unforgiving undertaking known to Man – employment – would be inconceivable. Expecting them to run a country – and make no mistake; their generation will be doing that in about thirty years – would be beyond parody.

     Whether I’m right or wrong about what’s really going on at Rutgers and other places that have embraced the “safe space” cant, I repeat my original proposal for treating the political diseases American “institutions of higher learning” suffer: Wall them off impenetrably. Allow no further ingress nor egress. Cut off their access to the Internet, as well. Throw some packets of seed and a few rakes over the walls and let the denizens scratch their suppers from the ground. Shoot anyone who attempts to escape; it would be the merciful thing to do.

     Perhaps a century or two from now we could break through the walls at a couple of representative institutions and see how things have been going within. But for the present, there is no good to be had from any college or university that has succumbed to this virus. Should it get loose into the general population, may God help us all.