By DEXTER DUGGAN
Apparently without enough real frights in their lives, some privileged U.S. university students looking for grievances were taking offense this fall at phantom oppressors like — boo! — politically incorrect Halloween costumes.
Shortly thereafter, some young people in Paris who just wanted entertainment with California rock music on the evening of Friday November the 13 paid with their lives in an attack by deadly real Islamic terrorists at the Bataclan theater.
Lacking enough real worries, the U.S. students went searching for discontent. Meanwhile, some folks just wanting to enjoy themselves as the weekend began in France came to a crushing conclusion of all their earthly tomorrows. Were both groups equally ill-treated?
The human condition, once its material needs are satisfied, doesn’t rest. The ghetto may have more charity kitchens, but Beverly Hills has more psychiatrists when it probably needs more fully occupied churches and synagogues.
If more young Americans were military volunteers with daily lives truly on the line in these days of free-floating global terrorism, they probably wouldn’t be spending time dreaming up how to be offended on an overly accommodating campus — or at least accommodating of leftist political correctness. They instead would be more grounded in reality, on the parade ground or dug into a foxhole.
If asked, a high school graduate who went straight into the military might say he’d like to earn his college degree once he returned to civilian life. But some privileged civilians already enjoying the luxury of campus, without military service, seem vulnerable to more inexplicable anxieties than simply having to face the unknown future that confronts any young person.
Shortly before the Paris attacks, editor Joy Pullmann explored one reason for the unhappiness agitating some U.S. students in a November 10 post at The Federalist website, “Blame the mommy wars for the ongoing Mizzou insanity.”
Pullmann noted children’s needs early in life to develop emotional security and stability through reassuring contact with their mothers. And how this development may be impaired by insufficient maternal interaction, with the damage enduring for years.
“Even children who have, thankfully, not been subject to overt neglect, have a very strong and human need for ‘felt safety’,” Pullmann wrote. “In short, one of the major things that happens during a child’s crucial first years is learning, through thousands of episodes where he gets frightened or angry or sad and Mommy comforts him, that when bad things happen, he will be okay.”
And how might there be such insufficient contact in the modern feminist-overachiever world? Gotcha.
“I’m not saying women should not work. I’m a working mother,” Pullmann wrote. “I am saying, however, that we need to discuss the social effects of more mothers out of their homes full-time, especially when most women with children would prefer to work part-time. We need to consider that we may be earning more money to pay for the kids’ vacations and piano lessons at the expense of their ability to handle conflict.”
Adult difficulties in life may include both members of a two-parent family seriously needing jobs outside the home, especially in Barack Obama’s and Big Business’ intentionally destructive economy. But why take on more difficulty than necessary?
What have been some major themes among angrily protesting students in the recent news at some putatively admirable institutions of higher learning? Their need for reassurance and comfort — impatient hungers that should have been developmentally satisfied years earlier. Their fear of dealing with elemental discomforts and conflicts they should have learned to navigate as little people, not young adults.
In a separate article at The Federalist website, writer John Daniel Davidson posted “Campus protests show millennials don’t get the concept of ‘home’” on November 13. He wrote:
“Whatever the cause, somewhere along the way a swath of young people, many of them now enrolled at schools as varied as Yale and Mizzou, got the idea that you could be a full-fledged American adult while also demanding shelter from the tumult of adult life in America. These students do not want to feel uncomfortable or offended in any way, and they want their school administrators to guarantee this. This is what ‘home’ means to them.”
Davidson linked to a video of a disrespectful Yale student screaming at a professor about his supposed responsibility “to create a place of comfort and home for the students. It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that?. . . You are not doing that!”
Meanwhile, Davidson noted, there were complaints about the University of Missouri’s failure “to create spaces of healing” and “safe spaces” for students to emote.
Because universities already have provided counseling centers for decades, something more than that is being called for in this rush to the comfy-seeking barricades.
The Washington, D.C.-based conservative organization the Leadership Institute noted on November 17 that “dozens of our nation’s college campuses have been taken over by protesters who demand a ‘safe space’ for their liberal indoctrination to continue. These ironically named ‘safe spaces’ have proven to be anything but safe for conservative students.”
Author Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, posted “The university gone feral” at the National Review website on November 17. He wrote:
“The assumed impoverished black student at the University of Missouri who went on a hunger strike to protest ‘white privilege’ was raised in plenitude as the son of a multimillionaire corporate executive. The young woman who yelled obscenities at Yale over Halloween costumes is likewise a child of privilege. Campus outbursts reveal more about the anxieties and neuroses of the adolescent and pampered than about existential issues of hunger, violence, or bias.”
These U.S. protesters had been enjoying prime media attention before coverage of the Paris attacks took precedence. Golly heck, won’t all those murdered people at least let the protesters share equally in the spotlight? As one Mizzou Tweet said: “Not to take away from Paris at all, but just how they’re getting news coverage & the world’s support, we deserve it, too.”
As the campus saw it, the victims of emotional inadequacy needed as much international publicity as hundreds dead and maimed by Islamist fanatics.
The Wanderer spoke with accountant Pat Archer, 23, a Catholic who recently moved to Phoenix from St. Louis, Mo., a few hours down the road from the Missouri university. He noted students trying to find something to dedicate themselves to.
“Our generation is a generation without a cause,” Archer said. “You see this in movements like sustainability, gay rights. My generation is growing up with a surveillance state,” including the National Security Agency and social media.
“We’ve grown up in a digital environment, where everything can be tracked, and I think that’s one of the root causes” for concerns about safety and privacy, Archer said.
The concept of privacy even was twisted by the U.S. Supreme Court to invent a supposed right to abortion in the Constitution, he said.
However, Archer said, “There’s still a lot of Americans who have grown up and can…take care of themselves.” Even those who get “coddling at ages 19 to 22…get a nice dose of reality” when they go into the working world.
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