#3. That We Save Our Grievances and Protests for Serious Matters
Yes, it is an imperfect world. There are many injustices that should be criticized and wrongs that should be addressed. But could we all please start the new year by taking a deep breath and resolving to limit our grievances and protests to matters of substance. We seem to have devolved into a populace of wildly over-sensitive people ever on the alert for anything about which we can feel aggrieved. The examples are everywhere. As a retired academic, I am sorry to say that far too many of them can be found in the educational sector.
I write this blog fresh from going to see Darkest Hour, the new movie about Winston Churchill and events in May 1940, as he took over as Prime Minister and Britain faced the prospect of battling Hitler on its own. Young people went off to fight, and die, in that war, as they had in World War One, and would again in Korea, Vietnam, and later military campaigns. They found the courage to face the triggers of the enemy and yet today’s young people can’t even deal with trigger words without retreating to a safe room. What has produced this generation of emotional weaklings?
To take another example (as addressed in an earlier blog), Laurier University has earned a great deal of well deserved negative media coverage after a fiasco in which a Teaching Assistant was summoned to a meeting with three university staff and subjected to totally unwarranted criticism. Her offence was playing a brief video from a program that had been broadcast on TV Ontario, in which two U of T professors debate gender and pronoun use. There had been complaints from the students, the TA was told (in fact, there were none) and she shouldn’t have shown the video. At the very least, she should have warned the students in advance about the threatening content and advised them that the Professor opposed to calling students by new pronouns of their choosing was wrong. Amazing! Young adults bright enough to be admitted to a university are apparently too weak and vulnerable to be exposed to contrary points of view and allowed to form their own opinion on the matter.
Meanwhile, the Toronto District School Board – perhaps concerned that it might lose its title as the most dysfunctional public education body in Canada – decided to one-up Laurier. Its staff sent an apology to the school community after a well-known folk song, Land of the Silver Birch, was performed at a school concert and some parents expressed concerns about it. The song is based on a poem by Pauline Johnson, who was born in the mid-1880s, the daughter of a Mohawk Chief and a white mother. In its apology, the school board officials explained that “while its lyrics are not overtly racist … the historical context of the song is racist.” What complete nonsense. On this basis, we should reject the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the USA because its historical context is racist.
Political correctness has gone overboard. We face almost daily incidents in which there is “much ado about nothing” – if I may be permitted to quote Shakespeare given the racial context in which he was writing. [If you don’t believe me, just ask Shylock!] If people would conserve their righteous indignation and use it in response to fundamental, substantive issues facing society, we would all be better for it in 2018.