As I retired College Professor, I read with disbelief stories about American universities where students were allowed to submit lists of trigger words that might damage their psyches and allocated safe rooms where they could retreat to compose themselves. Not to be outdone, Cambridge University took the initiative in providing students with trigger warnings before a lecture on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors – plays that include discussions of sexual violence and sexual assault.
Still in the field of education, the frequently dysfunctional Toronto School Board took the initiative of removing the word chief from such management positions as Chief Financial Officer, lest this term be offensive to Natives. There had been no demand for such action, but once it was taken, some Natives voiced approval – on rather contradictory grounds that the term was sacred or that it was too often used in a pejorative manner.
What finally prompted this blog, however, was a recent news report about the controversy surrounding the cover on Kellogg’s Corn Pops cereal boxes. It depicted corn pops frolicking in a mall, but one of them was coloured brown, not yellow, and appeared to be scrubbing the floor of the mall. Someone tweeted a complaint about the racial implication of this scene, prompting Kellogg to tweet an apology and announce plans to update the artwork. The debate continued via social media with some asking (who knows how seriously) why there didn’t appear to be any female corn pops and why, for that matter, the brown corn pop was the only one with a nose. Others suggested that the artwork depicted the brown corn pop as the only one with a job, while the others were behaving irresponsibly, surfing down escalators and jumping in mall fountains.
Let’s Deal With Real Issues
Good grief people. Get a grip. We have lots of real problems to address. Yes, there is systemic discrimination. There are biases against minority groups and those who are different. Women are the victims of sexual predators (as has been highly publicized of late). There are still too many living in poverty. Just today I read an article about a boat that capsized recently with 80 Rohingya refugees fleeing Burma. Only 24 are known to have survived and most of those who perished were children. I wish we would direct our energies to address these kinds of real, substantive issues and problems and not be so quick to take offence at every possible slight. Far too many people seem to be in a constant state of alert, ready to take to social media anytime they can find anything that might somehow be construed as politically incorrect. Someone who steps on a corn flake is not a cereal killer!