Leftist faculty educated students this way. America created these children, but leftist activists raised them, because parents were too busy working through their own self-fulfillment woes.

It's a cultural shift that seems crafted:

Self-fulfillment -> follow your heart -> feelings first -> feelings only.

We have a whole generation of people who excuse bad behavior and failure with "I was having a hard time, I have to have my support peacock on the plane." None of these people heard "No" enough as a child.

There's value in teaching children to ignore name-calling. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me." This is what we used to teach. People can be mean, don't let it affect you. Show grit, find it in yourself to continue anyway, and you'll succeed.

Now? Achieve power by exploring your victim-hood and collapse in shaking outrage because someone disagreed with you.

We need to start fixing this, and clearing these piles of frivolous administrators from the staff at universities would be a great start.

Isn't that largely because the most marginalized groups started speaking up, and started being heard? Hasn't it progressed from there?

I think it's fair to say LGBTQ, women and brown folks are being hurt in tangible ways by dominant language (words can in fact hurt when they influence generations of behavior), and like most progress there seem to be some who are experiencing downsides now that things are changing.

Who decides who has sour grapes?

Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce with regressive policy?

Blaming the staff without examining the broader cultural shift seems as bad as an emotional support peacock.

The staff is using "inclusiveness" as the political cudgel it was intended to be. The people exercising power are doing so on behalf of the so-called marginalized with no evidence that the measures they're taking are beneficial in any way.

Words cannot harm you. Actions harm. Please stop perpetuating that nonsense.

Name-calling or epithet-hurling has not hurt anyone in a tangible way (tangible means "touchable" something physical). Bias, and discrimination based on bias or prejudice does cause economic and sometimes physical harm. It is proper behavior we need to teach, not hypersensitivity to phrasing.

This is it. Dangerous allyship... but I still think you aren't giving words and behaviors they lead to enough credit - the odds of the participants of this thread being in a marginalized group (myself included) are low, no language and set of behaviors systemically oppresses us.

I worry we throw the marginalized baby out with the bath water in discussions like this.

I agree with you that words do have power and meaning, but disagree with the current zeitgeist approach of censorship.

It causes far more harm on average than any minimal help it does in some cases. There’s substantial active harm in the amount of gaslighting and ill conceived redefinition of words going on. It’s exactly the sort of whitewashing of thought that’d lead to the world found in The Giver.

> throw out the marginalized baby

I think that’s just an updated version of the “white mans burden” — the white man has a burden to take care of the poor colored people.

The real way to change such things is over time by hard work and engagement. Dismantling actually oppressive systems in financial systems and laws. Giving opportunities not outcomes. Reducing things like inflation which disproportionately affects poorer people. And a hundred other things, all of which were working over the last decades with improvements in almost every metric for marginalized groups. Still lots of real work left.

    Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce
    with regressive policy?

Yes. American culture has always been a tug of war between puritanical norms and libertine norms, and we're seeing the latest mutation of the puritans taking over. It doesn't seem that way, because this iteration of the puritans have co-opted the language of the libertines, but if these university administrators were transported back in time, they'd be enforcing Prohibition laws with equal zeal. Transported further back in time, they'd be organizing the expulsion of Catholics, Quakers and other "heretical" religious sects. There is, and always has been, a large segment of America which looks at the average frat kegger the same that a Taliban mullah looks at a collection of unveiled women. They hate fun, and, given a chance, they will do their utmost to banish it. And if fun can't be banished, it will be regulated into submission.

Of course, they don't do this for themselves. No, of course not. They do it to improve the moral worth of the people. Their zealotry is driven by the purest of intentions.

    Who decides who has sour grapes?

The ones who have placed themselves in a position to define which grapes are or are not sour: the aforementioned bureaucrats.

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis

This reminds me of an old saying:

"The beatings will continue until morale improves."

I enjoyed reading this. It brings a nice perspective on the issue which is hardly talked about.

> ...we're seeing the latest mutation of the puritans taking over. It doesn't seem that way, because this iteration of the puritans have co-opted the language of the libertines, but if these university administrators were transported back in time, they'd be enforcing Prohibition laws with equal zeal. Transported further back in time, they'd be organizing the expulsion of Catholics, Quakers and other "heretical" religious sects...

This rings true to me, and I find it very insightful. Thank you for writing it.

I agree with this sentiment a lot. Many people could benefit from understanding that a whole world of hard facts exists outside of their feelings.

There also appears to be a whole world of alternative facts.

>> Self-fulfillment -> follow your heart -> feelings first -> feelings only.

This is it. This sentence is 100% correct.

The problem is not valuing inclusion, diversity and psychological safety. Those are just the excuses used by bureaucrats to justify removing autonomy. You can promote those values without requiring people to preregister attendees for every party.

>> the parents of millennials (boomers)

OI. The parents of the millenials are the X-gens mate.

Sometimes known as the lost generation, or latch-key-kids etc.

The boomers are _our_ parents! And don't you forget it.

Now, get off my lawn :)

no, the millenials are a very large group because their parents were an even larger group, the boomers.

> OI. The parents of the millennials are the X-gens mate.

Usually, yes, but not always! I'm 29 (born in 1993), which I think is pretty clearly in the range of millennial (definitions vary, and I've seen cutoffs anywhere between 1994 and 1997, but I don't think anyone would put me in Gen Z by any reasonable stretch of the imagination). My parents were born in late 1958 and early 1959, which is probably not within the most common definition of boomer, but I've met other people my age with parents born a few years before mine. I don't think anyone would consider someone born in, say, 1955, to be Gen X, and having a kid at 39 in 1994 would have been somewhat unusual but not really that crazy (especially if the other parent happened to be a few years younger).

If that still doesn't convince you, I don't think I have anything else I could say, but maybe reading this comic might provide a compelling argument: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EOdaSW2XUAE1Pxm?format=png&name=...

I am an old millennial (39), both of my parents are square in the middle of boomer, and had me when they were 23 (they are in their early 60s now, so born at the tail end of the boomers). Still, it's not like they had me at 35, they were 23 and still entirely skipped gen X. They'd could have been born even earlier and had me later in life without much risk.

I get where you're coming from but I think maybe relax a bit there...