We often quip to friends, family, and acquaintances that life is one long learning experience.
Which fits well with the premise of this post - that our perfect little town is, in a manner of speaking, an institution of higher learning: Brunswick College, a small, elite(ist), Northeastern progressive arts campus. Progressive arts seems far more to the point than liberal arts, especially if you understand the original meaning of ‘liberal arts.’ (Hint: the meaning of the word liberal, at least in the political sense, was pretty much the diametric opposite of what it is these days. Any connection to liberty has been tossed aside.)
Brunswick College, though, is not particularly selective. Our student body represents the full spectrum of human age, and all the other measures of diversity, as modern sensibilities demand.
We think of our Town Manager as the Chancellor; the Town Council as the Board of Trustees; and our Public Safety team as Campus Security. We look to them to see to our comfort, tranquility, and sense of self-esteem. Which includes responding forcefully to anything that might offend us at any level, because we’re fragile in so many ways. Not to mention that our annual property tax payments are vital to ‘college’ operation, even if our membership in the ‘student body’ is at best incidental.
Which brings us to this item: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3506491/Emory-president-Students-scared-Trump-2016-chalk-signs.html
It begins with these words, which should frighten even the most stoic amongst our readers:
Students at Emory University claim they were frightened and 'in pain' after someone wrote 'Trump 2016' in chalk around campus.
Officials at the Atlanta school, which has an enrollment of more than 14,000, were forced to act after the youngsters claimed their 'safe space' was violated when the messages of 'hate' appeared on sidewalks and buildings.
One student even said she 'feared for her life' as she thought a 'KKK rally' was going on, while others were scared a mass shooting was going to take place and wouldn't walk alone.
Jim Wagner, president of the 19th century establishment, wrote Tuesday that the students viewed the scrawling as intimidation, and they voiced 'genuine concern and pain' as a result.
He set up an investigation after members of the student government wrote to him and slammed the university's response, prompting a meeting that was shrouded in protests.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3506491/Emory-president-Students-scared-Trump-2016-chalk-signs.html#ixzz46VDMJZx2
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While some might find the chalking on the stairs shown above disturbing, we submit that the image just below is a hundred times more threatening; nay, a thousand times worse. It is indicative of what we now see shamelessly displayed on the Brunswick College campus.
We saw it recently on Brunswick’s Quad, and it’s got us all verklempt. It’s micro-aggressive, and has triggered all sorts of feelings of being in dangerous territory. The worst of it is that we suddenly feel like we’re back in college, and need to get our grievance gravitas buffed back up for present day use in this most hostile of towns.
We have no choice but to ask that the Brunswick College Human Rights Task Force take our concerns into consideration, and address them in upcoming reports. They might consider these quotes from others as they do so:
"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive." -- Thomas Sowell
Kenneth Minogue writing in National Review, Nov. 18, 1991:
An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world. The university, in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with comprehensive ineptitude, has become the natural habitat of the ideological enthusiast. A kind of adventure playground, carefully insulated from reality in order to prevent absent-minded professors from bumping into things as they explore transcendental realms, has become the institutional base for civilizational self-hatred.
We hope and trust that you will bond with us as we call for emotional justice, and look for the town to provide safe space and emotional counseling to help us deal with the outrage and endangerment we’re feeling.
And we can’t wait to see what the Human Rights Task Force reports out.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
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