There is a growing epidemic among the youth of America. It starts during the grade-school years, when parents curtail the development of critical thinking and free will in their children, conditioning them to believe that the world does and will always coddle their fragile sense of self. They are taught that the only way to handle thoughts, ideas, and speech that makes them uncomfortable is to scream from inside their bubble, “I am offended,” so as to force those outside of the bubble to bend to their will.
But as comedian Steve Hughes explains, this is what happens when you are offended:
Many comedians, though, are staying away from college campuses- once the best place to catch established and up-and-coming comics, making us laugh at the absurdity of life. They are increasingly shunned away, by colleges and the students who mindlessly walk them, because someone might get offended by a joke.
Comedians including Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock now refuse to perform at college campuses because of hypersensitive students.
A new film, Can We Take a Joke?, shows how the new outrage culture has taken over the institutions that once were bastions of free thought and intelligent debate. According to the film, the outrage culture begins on college campuses when students don’t want to hear what they consider to be offensive ideas. It does not even have to be something that is offensive to them, personally, but the possibility that it might be offensive to someone else.
As part of their reporting, Campus Reform spoke to Foster. “I had such an amazing experience in college, it was a learning experience and I grew so much, so when I started hearing about my friends who were comics who were told they couldn’t do certain jokes…I was appalled.”
At the heart of the issue is the misconception of what does and does not constitute an “attack”. The line between the definitions has become as blurred and skewed as the worldview of those changing it to include a discrepancy between what is a true attack and what is not, as illustrated by a student asking a question to a review panel.
“For the first 17 years of my life I lived in a third-world country, and people would tell me that being attacked means getting aborted or raped or killed,” she explained. “But then, I came to the United States for college, and I was told you can feel attacked in a classroom if somebody presents a dissenting point of view. And I was like…‘that’s bullshit.’”
A fine example occurred during a commencement address, when Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow was met with positive reactions for equating microaggressions with sexual assault. Seriously. A subtle, indirect statement about something- words, those non-denominational, harmless, meaningless vocalizations- is equated to the physical action of forcible penetration of one individual upon another.
These students are not only content with censoring others with their outrage, but are ignoring their personal responsibility when it comes to exploring why they are offended in the first place.
“Everyone wants to play the blame game. So-and-so made me feel this way because they said that…no, nobody made you do anything,” she said. “You did that yourself. You have to own that.”
Greg Lukianoff, president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, candidly spoke of how colleges and universities were forced to publicly and painfully deal with a confluence of issues — race, sexual assault, gay rights, politically correct speech — that became mirrored and magnified in the microcosm of campus life.
Lukianoff made the argument in a viral opinion piece in The Atlantic that today’s students are “coddled” and demanding protections against offensive words and ideas. Their individual self-image is put before the protections of all as set forth by the First Amendment.
Lukianoff happened to be at Yale during the infamous Halloween costume shout-down of Prof. Nicholas Christakis, and whose viral video of it appeared to show just how many college students do not understand what freedom of speech is- or who it applies to.
Freedom of speech, he said, is not an “intuitive” concept, and Americans take its benefits for granted. “I think everyone understands that they have a free-speech right, but they don’t necessarily understand why you should have one.”
Students are becoming- unwittingly or not- vocal opponents of free speech by demanding protections and safe spaces from offensive words and behaviors. It is a 180-degree spin on mob mentality.
“Something changed. I don’t entirely know why”; but he can date the intellectual regression: October 2013, at Brown University, when the New York City police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, was invited to speak but was shouted down by students over his support of stop-and-frisk practices.
“I count that as the symbolic beginning because that’s when we noticed an uptick in student press for disinvitations, trigger warnings, and microaggression policing,” he said. “That doesn’t mean administrators have stopped doing goofy things, but now they can say, at least more convincingly, that they are being told by students that they need to do those things.”
A 2016 Gallup survey bears out his concerns:
• Asked if colleges should have policies against slurs and other intentionally offensive language, 69 percent of students said yes, while 27 percent believed they should be able to restrict expression of potentially offensive political views. And 63 percent wanted schools to restrict costumes that stereotype racial or ethnic groups.
• While 76 percent agreed that students should not be able to prevent the news media from covering campus protests, nearly half supported reasons for curtailing that coverage: biased reporting (49 percent), the right to be left alone when protesting (48 percent) and the right to tell their own story on the internet and social media (44 percent). For black students, percentages are higher (66 percent, 61 percent and 54 percent).
• Black students were least positive regarding the right to peaceable assembly: 60 percent saw it as a threat, compared with 29 percent of white students.
• Overall, 54 percent polled said the climate on their campus “prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”
The situation is affecting teaching as well. Material is being reviewed for its potential to offend and removed from curriculums; trigger warnings are now included in syllabi; and tenured faculty are seeing their careers end by having classroom discussions veer into topics or words that could be construed as racism or sexual harassment.
Beyond the fields and frat houses of college- you know, out here in the real world- the ability to poke fun at socio-political issues is being scrutinized in new ways, as well.
The political cartoon, a tradition dating back centuries, has come under attack- both figuratively and literally. The attack on the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo is a prime example of just how out of hand it can get. We’ve come a long way from the culturally-derisive days of Bugs Bunny cartoons to a time when a single-paneled comic strip can be met with a social media firestorm or a fatal expression of someone’s displeasure.
Comics have a long history of pushing buttons, so much so that an organization is needed to champion when the art and its creator make headlines for controversy- the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
Stephan Pastis writes the witty strip, Pearls Before Swine. Run in 750 newspapers nationwide, it is often outlandish and brash in its daily jab at society, sometimes grazing the radar of censors and sometimes hitting the center of the screen. He has had strips mocking the Bush administration attacked, and in 2007 he received death threats from Turkish citizens who felt his character Ataturk the Llama was an attack on beloved former leader Mustafa Atatürk.
His strip for July 27, 2016, was removed from Facebook, even after repeated attempts by Pastis to repost it. It was subsequently pulled from syndication and newspapers ran one from 2002 in its place.
In a screen capture of a since-deleted Facebook post, Pastis stated:
“So here is the strip that was not published. I guess the fear was that it would run, and another terrible event would happen, and it would appear to be making light of it. So it could not run, and a repeat strip had to be used. For what it’s worth, it was drawn over a year ago.”
Newspapers, of course, have every right to decide what content they want associated with their brand. Sure, to some extent they fear a Hebdo-like attack, but that seems like an easy out- especially when we consider the number of publications that run the strip. That’s a lot for even ISIS to pull off.
Attacks like Hebdo are an example of the extreme that the censorship occurring on college campuses will result in- where it is no longer merely a young adult whining about the big, bad teacher or classmate who “made them feel weird with their words” but the cultivating of a mindset that someone’s life is not as important as your personal feelings. Emotions can change with time; a life snuffed out because of something they said is finite.
The old saying may well be amended to: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words hurt so I am going to kill you.”
Sources: Red Alert Politics, CBLDF, NYTimes
© 2016 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions
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