You probably read, as I did, that several universities in the U.S. are offering soft outlets for student angst resulting from Trump’s election win. Traumatized students are able to gather their wits by soothing themselves in Lego rooms, slime making, aromatherapy and other balms for the heartbreak of democracy.
This made me reflect on my own campus years in the late 60s and early 70s when my fellow students and I were tear-gassed and shot at while protesting what our government was doing. At Kent State and Jackson State, some of us were killed.
Back in my day (said the old geezer), American universities were hotbeds of resistance, cauldrons of political thought and laboratories of democracy. Today, apparently, universities offer succor to kids who want nothing more than to pet cats and listen to emo music if things don’t go their way.
That begs the question, what kind of citizens are universities producing these days?
Certainly, the hard truths about a pluralistic society and democracy are being glossed over in favor of some rainbow unicorn fantasy. If today’s students react to an election loss by seeking “safe spaces” and the comfort of making slime, they are not the generation to lead our country in a harsh real world.
It makes me contrast the 19- and 20-year olds of today with those colonial young folks of 1775. When King George imposed the Intolerable Acts, those kids didn’t seek “safe spaces” behind Momma’s apron, they joined up with the Massachusetts Militia and marched to Lexington and Concord to resist.
When Fulgencio Batista’s secret police started cracking heads at Cuba’s Santiago University campus in the late 1950s, those students didn’t run to some hidey hole to pet cats and whine, they took up arms and pried their country from a dictator’s grasp.
Their leader, Frank Pais, said before he was killed, “Rights are not given, they are taken.” Revolutions are won in the streets, not on the yoga mat.
If Trump’s electoral victory provokes today’s students into fits of thumb-sucking instead of galvanic political resistance, those students weren’t paying attention in history class, and they don’t deserve citizenship in a democracy.
Perhaps some tweedy sociology professor has convinced them that all Americans should have the same worldview as they do, and participation trophies mean something in the real world. If that is the case, those kids hiding in pastel-colored “safe spaces” and eating cookies sure took that lesson to heart.
Democracy is a binary exercise. There are always winners and losers in an election. But the only way to lose democracy is to quit the field, to run from unwelcome results, to seek a “safe space.” As long as there is free trade in the marketplace of ideas, there will be ideas that contradict your own. Those ideas sometimes win.
But democracy is also a cyclical exercise. The results of the last election stand only until the next election. And on and on it goes.
If pansy-ass students don’t have enough confidence in their own political beliefs to subject them routinely to the democratic process of wins and losses, they are better off making slime. They sure as hell won’t have what it takes to fight for them.
And that doesn’t only apply to students.
I am grateful that the University of Wyoming isn’t participating in this nonsense.
In true Cowboy fashion, one student leader said that UW doesn’t need to offer “safe spaces,” but rather a lively discussion. THAT, my friends, is how political disappointments should be handled
Here endeth the lesson.
Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
