You’ve probably heard about the latest ruckus on college campuses: Trigger warnings.  It’s been going on for about a month now, but recently it reached that level of fever pitch that can only be found in the pot-fueled drum circles of rabid Leftism.  In case you were too busy doing things like going to work and being a productive member of society to know what I’m talking about, I’ll explain.  Trigger warnings are alerts for readers that the material in a given work of literature is possibly offensive to some group, or that it may ‘trigger’ a post-traumatic stress reaction in some students.   What authors and books are being held up as potentially traumatic?  Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, to name a few.  In other words, classic pieces that most people with any kind of decent education have read.

The idea of trigger warnings comes from feminist blogs and sites, which flag certain types of material so that readers can choose to skip it if they may find it offensive or troubling.  A site may put a warning on a post about sexual abuse so that victims of rape can avoid the article, for instance.  Now they want to expand that to college courses as well, which is a far cry from making the conscious choice to avoid certain types of content on the internet.  Putting an “NSFW” (not safe for work) tag on something so that an employee can know to not click on it at work is a good idea.  Turning that around to say that professors need to cater to people who have already chosen to be in a particular college course is something totally different.

As a grad student in criminal intelligence, I see a lot of material in my classes that is offensive to a large number of people.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that if violent crime is not offensive to someone, there’s a problem.  According to these new rules proposed by several student organizations across the country, I should have the right to demand that my class on crime scene forensics include a warning that the textbook talks about violent crime, just in case I’ve been a victim of some form of it somewhere at some time and don’t want to see anything about it because it may upset my mental apple cart.  An undergraduate taking English Literature, according to these Arbiters of All That Is Good And Fair, should be able to demand notice that the classics they will study talk about such things as rape, or abuse, or murder, or Mean People Who Do Not Play Well With Others And Say Mean Things.

Here’s a news flash: The world holds literally every kind of person, every kind of belief system, every kind of twisted and sick thing you can possibly think of.  Whatever weird idea you can think of, chances are extremely good that there is something in Google on it because there is at least one other person who’s into that.  (I would advise against actually putting all your weird ideas into Google, unless you think maybe the federal agents that subsequently show up at your door will be into them too.)

Keep in mind that college classes are voluntary efforts.  We choose to be a part of them; in fact, we pay good money to attend them.  We get plenty of notice up front what the textbook will be, what materials will be used.  For someone attending classes within their chosen field, they should already have a pretty good idea as to what kind of content they can expect.  In my case, I already know going in that a class on Transnational Violent Crime will include details of horrific acts committed by drug cartels.  The student taking American Literature should probably expect to read some Mark Twain.  If Huck Finn offends you, perhaps you should stick to Wicker Basket Weaving and Interpretive Dance, because you’re not ready for the real world.

“Frankly it seems this is sort of an inevitable movement toward people increasingly expecting physical comfort and intellectual comfort in their lives,” said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group that advocates free speech. “It is only going to get harder to teach people that there is a real important and serious value to being offended. Part of that is talking about deadly serious and uncomfortable subjects.”

In other words, people are to the point where they demand to never be intellectually and emotionally challenged.  They want to create their own reality, and they literally want notice that they may come into contact with something that might infringe upon that reality.  That is intellectual laziness at its finest, and will do nothing but further the decline of the American student—something we already cannot afford any more of.

There’s something even more sinister about all this.  Grade schools are growing increasingly explicit in their brainwashing; in the US and Canada more and more pornographic materials are being held up as “education.”  Common Core curriculum offers young teens sexual material as “literature.”  Everything about what is being taught to our children now shapes their worldview to be okay with everything from sexual perversion to pedophilia and promiscuity.  Their morality is being shifted to the opposite of what we were taught as parents, and what our parents were taught.  By the time these kids get to college, they have the twisted ideas of “relative morality” and the idea that no matter what they do, no matter how many people they sleep with, how little discipline or self-control they have, it’s okay—and now they’re demanding that no one correct their worldview.  No one is allowed to offend them, to challenge them, to force the light of reality into their devoid-of-all-morality brains.  The same kids running around using the phrase “Uncle Tom” can’t even tell you where the reference comes from, and wouldn’t know the name Harriet Beecher Stowe if she did a concert as a hologram.

Oral sex being taught to grade schoolers?  That’s okay.  But don’t mention Anne Frank.  People get offended.

I wonder if George Santayana is banned too.