THOUGHTS FROM THE AMMO LINE
Scott Johnson, Powerline
Ammo Grrrll goes TIPTOEING (Past the Graveyard of Formerly Free Speech):
Way back in my misguided leftist days in San Francisco, I knew two families with wildly-varying child-raising philosophies. One couple had a lively little boy who ran barefoot in damp, chilly, meeting halls that exhibited the same standards of hygiene as many radicals did personally. He ate hot dogs, chips and candy, some picked up off dirty floors. He was bright and energetic and never sick.
Another couple had a little girl who was a hothouse flower. She was fed organic baby food and kept far far from other ragamuffin children and any adult with even a sniffle. As anyone who knows anything about immunity would guess, she was sick most of the time.
My mother was a clean freak of the first order, but her sister (of blessed memory) bordered on the insane on the subject. She boiled her children’s Monopoly pieces and tried to put the board in the oven to sterilize it. (That didn’t work out.) Her kids (my cousins) couldn’t play in a sandbox. Every letter we ever got from them mentioned one or more of the kids being down with the flu.
When I was a young mother, I tried to chart a kind of middle course. I had learned by that time from observing others’ experiences, that it was a yuge mistake to tiptoe around when the baby was napping, whispering to everyone, “Shhhh…the baby’s asleep.” Consequently, our son learned to sleep through piledrivers on the street outside his bedroom and knock-down/drag-out (or more accurately, drag queen) fights coming from the apartment above us. That flat was occupied by two large, high-strung gay men. I gathered from the shrieking, this was not a monogamous couple, yet at least one person was not on board with that, or as the saying goes, “comfortable” with it. They may have been gay, but they still fought like men. It often sounded like a saloon fight choreographed by John Wayne.
A couple weeks ago, I opined on the horrendous damage to our language and our freedom by the cossetted SJWs and Pajama Boys who are allowed to have speakers disinvited, CEOs fired, and entire subjects closed because they feel “unsafe.” Everyone around them is forced to respond to “microaggressions,” a meaningless synonym for “nothing.”
The damage to our Republic by caving to this utter nonsense is hard to calculate. But what about the damage to the shrinking little violets themselves? I am totally serious. What happens to those around whom people are forced to tiptoe?
I know for a fact that if you always tiptoe around an infant, she will never sleep through a night and will startle at the drop of a pin. She will be anxious and fearful.
Life, my dear friends and readers, is very, very tough. Nobody escapes unscathed. I am not talking here about the extraordinary courage necessary to storm the beaches of Normandy, go house to house in Fallujah, or raise a flag at Iwo Jima. I am talking about ordinary life. If you can’t stand to have a speaker on campus with whom you disagree – for a speech you aren’t even going to attend! – you are going to fold like a cheap card table at the first sign of any real trouble. How are you going to survive a layoff? Where will you find the strength to take chemo? How are you going to deal with the sudden death of a spouse, the incomparable pain of the loss of a child, the very real possibility of some day ending up with a serious disability?
We pamper our children at their peril. It’s tantamount to denying them vaccinations to shield them from all adversity, challenges, and differences of opinion.
Not even to mention the peril to a legal system wherein the standard for a tort has traditionally been something that would be offensive to someone “not unusually sensitive” when EVERYONE is “unusually sensitive” and must be catered to.
