I don’t remember what I was searching for when I came across this one-year-old article published in The Atlantic. Having an impatient nature, I can ignore quite a bit when it doesn’t conform to my goal. This article describes a college world that is foreign to me and distasteful. And enough people are run through the university mill that it will affect those who live in “the real world.” It takes the art of hunting witches to an exquisitely elevated form. The politically correct is nothing compared to the concept of microagression, and trigger warnings basically require professors to dumb down their courses completely to avoid accusations for things they wouldn’t have imagined. Below are the descriptions.

“Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.”

In this next quote, political correctness is compared to microagression.

“The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”

The article compares different generations and how they grew up, so a bit of historical background. There are some crazy examples of how social media plays a role in all of this, the embracing of emotional reasoning by higher education, how walking on mental eggshells contributes to increased depression and anxiety, and at the end, a nice list of cognitive distortions from CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) to help you examine your own mental exaggerations and potentially strengthen your mind.

If all else fails, then there’s minding my own business. I seem to interact and go out less and less these days. And to help others mind their own business rather than mine, I don’t mind keeping things to myself. I have a book sock around something I’m reading that I want to keep private. I really don’t welcome a conversation about some of my reading material, and that is that. I think we’re just going to have to hide who we are, if we fall on the politically incorrect side of the fence, in a variety of ways that best suit us. This was a super interesting read.