Generation Snowflake Dissolves

Check it out. Donald Trump has pledged to bring jobs back to America. We do not know whether it will happen, but it was a winning message.

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, American college students have been suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Regressing to childhood, they have been comforting themselves with blankies, lollipops and puppies. They have retreated to their safe spaces to calm their troubled psyches with coloring books and cry-ins.

I will repeat a question that I have previously raised: Why would anyone want to hire them? These are the best and the brightest that America’s universities can offer, and they are behaving like a bunch of four-year-olds. If you were thinking of building a company in America or building it in some foreign country where college students manifest something resembling maturity, what would you do? Wouldn’t you think twice about hiring anyone from this band of cry-babies and sore losers?

One understands that these children think that they need therapy. They have been told and they believe that therapy solves everything. It’s the fallback position for America’s young people today.

And yet, back in the old days, when your humble blogger was in college, the president of the United States was assassinated in Dallas. No one was asking to be let out of exams. People grieved, but they did not throw tantrums and retire to crying rooms. They did not run over to the student health service to get a dose of therapy.

It is now customary to dismiss that bygone era as hopelessly repressive, but the current explosion of whining and whimpering is not going to heal anyone’s psyche. Making a spectacle of yourself, making a fool of yourself in public is not therapeutic.

Nor is rioting in the streets. Whatever catharsis it provides, there comes a time when you sit back and say to yourself: what was I thinking? What did I look like? It’s the reason why therapists have given up on the notion that people who express their anger intemperately often end up feeling worse afterward.

You might imagine that students, who are in the business of learning how to learn, could use the current political situation as an occasion for study and reflections. If they do not do so, I suspect that they have never been taught how. Having been fed a diet of empty self-esteem, they know nothing beyond the fact that they are the most wonderful creatures who have ever walked on the face of the earth. And that they are right about everything.

Students who cannot deal with loss or with failure are in serious trouble. They have suffered an education that has told them that therapy will solve everything, because all that matters is how you feel about yourself.

If you have always been coddled and protected against trauma, you will never learn how to deal with failure. The first time you fail you are likely to melt into a puddle. The trigger warnings and safe spaces will have made you hypersensitive to loss.

Today’s college students are enslaved by their emotion. They have not developed their rational faculties to the point where they can take a step backwards and evaluate the situation at hand-- to find the good, the bad and the ugly in it.

In olden days students were taught to make the best argument for both sides. They were taught that one-sided thinking is a dead end, or better, the road to fanaticism. Students ought to sit down and to try to make the best arguments they can for the Trump victory and for the defeat of multiculturalism. And then they can balance it out by making the best arguments for defeating Trump. At that point they can disagree intelligently and respectfully. Right now, they reject all opposition ideas with contempt and derision. You see what that has got them.

The antidote to ignorance is information. But students need to learn how to find and to process information. And they need to be taught by teachers who believe in facts. Too many academics today do not really believe in objective facts and reality. Thus, their students are lost and adrift, slaves to their whims and emotions.

Michael Moore did not much like Donald Trump, but he did understand why Trump would win. We cannot say as much for the snowflakes whining into their crying towels.

Here is Moore:

When you give them information, the ignorance level goes down, and when that goes down, hate goes down.

Say I was stuck next to somebody on a plane who was like, I can't [sit next to Michael Moore] and asked the flight attendant if they could move. I started a little exercise years ago. I take out a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle and say, "Why don't we make a list of the things we agree on and don't agree on? And I'm going to predict that we agree on more things than not." Maybe the way we remain strong is to work on the things that we agree on, and agree to disagree on the things we don't agree on. Let's have a great debate. Have the debates in the legislature and Congress. And on some of these I'm going to win, and on some of these you're going to win. That's the way it's going to be. Let's be adults.

Funnily enough, it sounds like cognitive therapy or a close facsimile thereof. It applies well to many people who support Moore.

And then Bill Maher said this last night:

He won. He ran a vicious, vulgar campaign and I gave it back exactly in measure—I was also vicious and vulgar—but he won. And he did it his way. Nobody gets to sing that song more than Donald Trump. Everybody told him he couldn’t do this, he couldn’t do that—and he won. He did the hardest thing in the entire world to do: win the election as the leader of the free world.

Of course, Maher will be a diehard opponent of Trump. So will Michael Moore. It is their right. The problem with today’s college students is that they are following their gut feelings. They are enslaved to their feelings because they lack information and because the educational system has allowed their rational faculties to atrophy.

If they gather the information, consider all points of view, they can choose whatever they want. They can become political activists or support the candidacy of Chelsea Clinton. At least, they will not be running around making fools of themselves by exclaiming to the world that they feel very strongly about matters they do not much understand. And that, my friends, would be a giant step forward.

I trust they will prepare themselves for the fact that the caricatured version of Donald Trump they saw in the campaign is not the Donald Trump they are going to see in the White House. Barack Obama is not the only one who was humbled by the election.