The ceremony at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day this year came as a calm in the eye of the political hurricane. It was filled with remembrances, testimonies to courage, bravery, and sacrifice – along with the accompanying sighs and tears of those families whose losses are so fresh they still feel the initial pain.
That iconic ground is revered as a campus for the bravest, the least selfish and the most sacrificial of this nation’s young. The brave who died all knew the danger and willingly ran to the fight anyway, to protect a nation of people they couldn’t even know.
They did it because they believed evil must be stopped in its destructive path. They were noble warriors, protectors giving their lives for strangers who shared their homeland, their flag, and their dream of peace and goodness.
Contrast that noble, manly courage in the face of deadly danger and murderous enemies with the attitude of another campus of young people who are demanding to be respected.
Students at the University of California at Santa Barbara who compose the Student Senate recently passed a resolution calling for (out of all ironies) “trigger warnings.”
What is a “trigger warning”? Is it a warning system to alert students to a campus shooter or some kind of terrorist assault?
Not hardly. Here is what the students are demanding: “trigger warnings” are cautions from professors alerting students that the lecture or syllabus might include something that would trigger feelings of emotional or physical distress.
Any discussion that could offend must warrant that the professor excuses the potentially offended student from class with no points deducted from his or her grade.
“Trigger warnings” were first used on the internet by feminist websites to keep women from post-traumatic stress disorder because they heard something that offended them.
Radically liberal Oberlin College has officially established “trigger warning” guidelines for professors for “anything that might cause trauma including racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism and other issues of privilege and oppression.”
Certain books deemed offensive because they deal with colonialism and religious prejudice are removed from university libraries, especially those books presenting biblical Christianity. The conspiracy against biblical Christianity lurks behind most of this demand to silence offensive speech.
These efforts at emotional protection will guarantee a future generation of weak, self-absorbed, narcissistic victims who will not be warriors willing to fight and die for life, liberty, and divine truth.
At Brown University, a protest mounted against a speaker who opposed liberal feminism because “bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences;” it could be “damaging.”
Thus from an Ivy League university comes the admission that truth is relative. It’s one’s experience that must be protected. No one is free to question personal experience achieved through the means of feeling.
At Brown, student volunteers put up posters advertising “safe spaces” for students who found the event, or even the idea of the event, too upsetting.
A New York Times article elaborates: “A safe space was intended to give people who might find comments troubling or triggering a place to recuperate. The room was filled with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”
This past fall, a homosexual student at Columbia University put “anti-homophobia” fliers under each dorm room door and asked that students tape them to their windows so the entire campus would be safe from anyone criticizing sodomy.
At Oxford University Christ Church College a debate on abortion was canceled because both debaters were men. The Student Union spokesman said the cancellation was right for “the safety, both physical and mental, of the students.”
At Hampshire College, student groups rejected the invitation to a band because it had “too many white musicians, and that made students feel unsafe.”
Some have called this insanity “self-infantilization.”
There are no “safe spaces” for those who enter battle and come under the fire of real deadly threats, and who often lose their lives. On the other hand, there is no weaker, more cowardly and fragile category of people than university administrators and professors.
It’s hard to imagine graduates under their influence coming out of their self-centered “safe spaces” to have any impact on society – other than to push it more toward socialism as they continue to demand that society meet all their felt needs and censor all that could violate their feelings.
The Master’s University and The Master’s Seminary have a strong commitment to our nation’s veterans who seek a Christian education to provide the finest academic training possible.
On a broader level, we produce people of conviction, strength, determination, boldness, and willingness to confront danger from physical enemies and spiritual enemies.
Many universities are catering to entitled, narcissistic, self-absorbed, indulgent, weak students who will enfeeble an entire nation in the future. There also seems to be no shortage of weak, indulgent Christians. At TMU and TMS, we graduate Christian people who stand fearlessly against evil and danger in the world while fighting the good fight for the kingdom of heaven.
The apostle Paul wrote: “Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong,” and added, “Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Cor. 16:13,14).
