America’s days as a melting pot are over. There once was an American culture that assimilated the best parts of all cultures people brought with them to this country, and in turn those immigrants assimilated to the larger American culture. But that day is done. The pot of “out of many, one” is now a series of chafing dishes. And each of those chafing dishes is being conditioned to boil over on command.
We’re now a nation of the 1 percent against the 99 percent, this race being victimized by that race, men against women, old against the young, and so on. Everyone is special without having to do anything to earn that distinction and, as such, entitled to special treatment and consideration.
Ivan Pavlov showed the world the power of conditioning, how any creature with a brain can be trained to react how someone wants them to with minimal effort. Although he’s known for his work with dogs, modern times show how his research easily translates to humans. And nowhere is that research being applied more than on college campuses.
There was a time, or so I’m told, when the college campus was a place of discovery and experimentation. The place people went to expand their minds and expose themselves to all manner of ideas. It was where people “found themselves” and figured out what they wanted to do with their lives. Now it’s a place where young minds are conditioned to “identify” with various groups and learn to be victims.
Facebook now offers more than 50 “gender” options for people to “identify” themselves, dozens of ways for people to segregate themselves from others, which presents countless opportunities for victimhood. It’s martyrdom at $400 per credit hour.
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But the problem with telling everyone they’re a victim is even the people who don’t buy into it become numb to the charge. If everyone is a victim, no one is a victim. Genuine cries of victimhood are drowned out by a chorus of bogus cries of the same.
This isn’t news, and it isn’t new. Al Sharpton’s cacophony of corruption allows him to hammer checks, but the cause he and his ilk claim they’re helping is his greatest victim.
The real charges of racism, sexism, etc., etc., are reaching a level of meaninglessness because they’re becoming as common as “hello.” Your cup of water means the world to you when you’re thirsty, but its insignificance cannot be overstated when you dump it in a lake.
Clemson University is in the midst of one of the chafing dishes boiling over. The new Pavlovian instincts of martyrdom have manifested themselves in a group called “See the Stripes.” STS is very upset over a fraternity party held last month under the theme “Crip-mas,” a combination of the Crip gang and Christmas. It sounds stupid, but college is supposed to be the place where you can try and do stupid things. At least it was. Now it’s a hate crime.
STS saw “Crip-mas” as racist. Its members saw the Crips as a black gang, which may have been the case at the start but isn’t true anymore. It’s actually more telling of STS and its Pavlovian conditioning that its members hear the name and think race. But college students are now trained to find offense, to seek it out. Or, if it can’t be found, to manufacture it.
Much like a child throwing a temper tantrum, STS is demanding “action” by the school to make members whole from an event that had no impact on their lives. And just like a child demanding a toy, STS is insisting Clemson punish students for having unapproved fun.
Among the grievances listed by STS is “underrepresented” students don’t have a “safe” place to meet and discuss how they’re oppressed. In other words, STS is demanding re-segregation under the guise of diversity. It also has done a pigment headcount of the faculty and say it should “at least, be comparable to the percentage of students of color.”
Among the “demands” members have made to right the egregious wrong done to them by people they probably don’t know through an event they probably didn’t witness is that the university “prosecute criminally predatory behaviors and defamatory speech committed by members of the Clemson University community (including, but not limited to, those facilitated by usage of social media).”
Nothing remedies a temper tantrum like a little fascism, am I right?
The idea of punishing speech arbitrarily deemed inappropriate is something that is not only the antithesis of one of this country’s founding principles, it was something colleges were supposed to be safe from. Encroachment on something so sacred as freedom of speech would’ve have sent students to the street just a generation ago; now they march to demand censorship.
Thankfully, for every Pavlov’s dog gang of thought police roaming the countryside and quads of America, there are those who simply won’t salivate at the sound of the bell. It’s Pavlovian in its own way, an intuitive pushback against the anti-Americanism families and common sense still instill in some people.
That pushback is the last line of defense against those chafing dishes becoming all there is; they’re the last vestiges of the melting pot. But it’s not all doom and gloom. The problem with progressive self-segregation and victim status so readily available to anyone is eventually those chickens come home to roost.
The progressive all-women’s Mount Holyoke College cancelled its annual performance of The Vagina Monologs” because students worried it could alienate transgendered students. (Seriously.) And Al Sharpton is heading to liberal Hollywood to “explore why” no black actors were nominated for Oscars this year (and hammer a few checks while he’s there, undoubtedly). Frankenstein’s monster is turning on itself.
If there is to be a death of this new birth of fascism that is where it will come from: within. The thing about totalitarianism is it turns on itself, it can’t help but. If everyone is a victim then everyone else is potentially a perp, and vice versa. It can’t support its own weight after a while; the only question is when it happens. The sooner the better, the sooner the less damage there is.
That Pavlov’s dogs were trained one way means they can be trained another. Luckily, unlike a ringing bell, freedom is the natural state of man. Let’s just hope we start heading in that direction again before too many more people are bitten.
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