Morning Wood

Got wood? Got a woody?

If that is not sufficiently sexist, what about the wood paneling in the student union. Today’s college students have descended into self-parody. They could not have made bigger fools of themselves if they had been trying.

University of Michigan undergraduate Anna Wibbelman is offended. Perhaps not so much for herself as for the students who will naturally take offense at the triggering microaggression, the wood paneling in the student. Because wood paneling represents everything that is racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and transphobic in Western Civilization.

If you are asking yourself how a dimwit like Wibbelman got into such an august institution of higher learning, you are beginning to see that this nation is in deep trouble.

Faith Bottum reports on the ginned-up controversy at The Federalist:

Anna Wibbelman thinks wood paneling is sexist. And racist. And all-around bad. That’s why she wants it torn out of the Student Union Building at the University of Michigan.

According to a report in The College Fix, Wibbelman told a student-government meeting this spring that “minority students felt marginalized by [the] quiet, imposing masculine paneling” of the old union building. The former head of “Building a Better Michigan,” a college organization for improving student life, she wants the paneling removed during a proposed $85 million renovation of the historic landmark on the Michigan campus.

Not that she has anything against wood, exactly. But the history of wood is a history of oppression. Rich, white, privileged classes had wood paneling. Poor, minority, excluded classes had to make do with painted walls. Now, Wibbelman thinks, the sheer existence of wood makes students feel the weight of their old marginalization.

Apparently, young Wibbelman forgot about log cabins. Painted walls? Are you kidding? You remember log cabins. Abraham Lincoln was supposedly born in a log cabin. He was not a privileged rich white kid from the suburbs. 

The secret behind this is that Wibbelman is trying to make herself radically unemployable. If you were a recruiting manager and you did a quick search to find about Wibbelman, would you, upon reading her blather about oppressive wood paneling ever imagine hiring her.

It gets worse. Or, should I say, it gets dumber. Wibbelman is not some deranged outsider who is off her meds. She is parroting thoughts that are shared by many of her brainwashed fellow students:

Wibbelman is not alone in hearing oppression in quietness. There is a whole genre of op-eds and web essays noting the racism hidden in the demand for silence in libraries. Quietness, they explain, is a privilege owned by the elites, so minorities hear silence as a proclamation of white Europeans’ social superiority. The poor typically do not have quiet spaces, so when they encounter a demand for quiet, they feel a rejection of their culture….

The “legacy of imposing, racist, colonial monuments,” according to African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture, has resulted in modern minorities who feel “a widespread aesthetic aversion to strong iconic expressions, propagated by monumental mass.” To say the union building is “quiet” and “imposing” almost makes calling it “masculine” a redundancy. Its sheer existence is an affront. Generations of men had wood paneling, so today it speaks to Wibbelman about masculine dominance.

You can’t make this stuff up. College students seem to suffering from early-onset dementia. Those of us who are concerned for the future of our nation will find plenty of anxiety-producing memes within what passes for their minds.

The National Urban League used to tell us that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. In some cases, try as you might, you will have trouble finding anything resembling a functioning intelligence.

The message from today’s college students: America's future is looking worse by the day. America is screwed.