Pro
28:1 KJV The
wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.
"Sticks
and stones may break my bones, / But names will never hurt me." - Early
20th century common knowledge.
2014:
Year of the fainting couch http://j.mp/0Vapors14
or http://nypost.com/2014/12/29/2014-year-of-the-fainting-couch/
December 29, 2014 | 7:08pm Modal Trigger
Will 2014 be remembered as the year the public
got riled up over a garish shirt (as opposed to the accomplishments of the
physicist wearing it)? Photo: AP
The fainting couch doesn’t have the same cachet
it did in the 19th century, which is a shame, because it should be more in
demand than at any time since the age of corsets and delicate sensibilities.
To put it in Victorian terms, 2014 had a case
of the vapors. It was all aflutter. It needed smelling salts and a fan, and a
good rest on a fainting couch to restore its bearings.
It was a year when the national pastime of
taking offense and of fearing that someone might be offended reached such
parodic levels that Kim Jong-un got in the act.
It used to be that, of all the groups and
nations that one had to worry about offending, for politically correct or
commercial reasons, the North Koreans simply didn’t rate.
The “Red Dawn” remake a couple of years ago
featured cruel North Korean invaders. In last year’s “Olympus Has Fallen,” the
White House is attacked and occupied by dastardly North Koreans.
But 2014 was the year, thanks to the hack of
Sony Pictures in retaliation for the spoof movie “The Interview,” that even the
North Koreans made the “do not offend” list.
It was the year that a scientist made an abject
apology for wearing a shirt that offended feminists in a TV broadcast; that
Amazon Prime put a label warning of racist content on “Tom and Jerry” cartoons;
and that various news outlets refused to say the name of the NFL team from
Washington on grounds that even uttering it made them complicit in rank
offensiveness.
It was a year when the nation’s colleges and
law schools cemented their reputations as places where easily offended children
go for a few years to become slightly older easily offended children.
Colleges canceled appearances by Ayaan Hirsi
Ali, Condi Rice (who technically pulled out of her scheduled Rutgers
commencement) and George Will for fear students might hear something they
disagree with from a figure they object to.
The University of California at Irvine offered
grief counseling (“in a constructive space”) for students upset at the
grand-jury decision in the Ferguson case, and Occidental College brought in a
religious counselor to comfort students who had volunteered for losing
Democratic Senate campaigns.
An open letter from law students at Harvard
upset at the nonindictments in the Ferguson and Eric Garner cases captured the
spirit of the year, and deserves an honored place in the history of the
rhetoric of plaint.
Its opening included the stirring declaration
“We are in pain. And we are tired.” It went on to speak of how “traumatized”
the students are (multiple times), and of their “distress” (multiple times).
It charged that the school’s indifference to
“the mental health” of its students violates the Harvard Law School Handbook of
Academic Policies.
The upshot was that the aggrieved students
wanted the administration to offer them a collective pacifier. “We call,” the
letter thundered, “for faculty to hold special office hours and for the
administration to make culturally competent grief and trauma counselors
available in the final weeks of the semester.”
It demanded more conversations about injustice
“in safe spaces created by the administration.” And it expected students to be
permitted to delay their exams — because what are the exertions of studying
compared with satisfactions of wallowing in a precious self-pity?
The response to these students and their
brethren at other elite law schools who made similar appeals should have been
“Please, get a grip. If nothing else will buck you up, at least show a little
self-respect.”
If this had been the mettle of the civil-rights
movement, it would have collapsed in a puddle of helplessness not long after
Rosa Parks was asked to give up her seat.
But that, for all its tragic failings, was a
different era. It was before so much time and energy were invested in taking
offense and coddling the offended. It was before the nation needed a fainting
couch.
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I2C 141230aa Pro28v1 Fainting 2014 | I2C | 141230
1108 | Pro28v1 Fainting 2014
