Strong, Empowered Woman Exposes Her Vulnerability

Back in the day it was de rigueur to pronounce every woman strong and empowered. Apparently, someone got the zany idea that the more you say it the more it becomes true. 

But then along came #MeToo and the media could not stop presenting women as weak, vulnerable victims. Hmmm.

But, fear not, the mini minds of our elite intellectuals declared that great leaders should show their vulnerability, not to mention their capacity for empathy. It’s what happens when your leading intellectuals do not know how to think.

It ought to be well known that empathy is an excellent faculty when dealing with infants. Young mothers need an enhanced capacity for empathy and, wouldn’t you know it, their brains grow new empathy circuits during pregnancy. No such growths are seen in fathers’ brains.

Better yet, as ought to be known by now, Yale Professor Paul Bloom showed that empathy can make people into raging psychopaths. When you feel empathy for someone who is being victimized you will feel his feelings of anger and his wish to avenge the slight. Link here. 

It’s another of those-- be careful what you wish for-- moments.

Now, we see one Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Center for Disease Control going all whiny and mushy on us. Being a women and having gotten the memo about women’s emotional lability, Walensky issued forth a major league demonstration of weakness and vulnerability. 

She opened this way:

I’m speaking today not necessarily as your CDC director and not only as your CDC director, but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter, to ask you to just please hold on a little while longer….

Sniff, sniff. 

New York Magazine tells the story of her regrettable outburst. You would have hoped that she would have displayed more self-discipline and self-control-- qualities that are vastly more important in a leader than are public displays of vulnerability:

[Walensky] delivered an urgent and emotional call for Americans not to let their guard down amid a rising wave of coronavirus infections, saying in a briefing on Monday, “Right now, I’m scared.”

“When I first started at CDC about two months ago, I made a promise to you: I would tell you the truth even if it was not the news we wanted to hear. Now is one of those times when I have to share the truth, and I have to hope and trust you will listen,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said. “I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom.”

“We are not powerless,” she added, pointing to our biggest cause for optimism: vaccines. “We can change this trajectory of the pandemic, but it will take all of us recommitting to following the public-health prevention strategies consistently while we work to get the American public vaccinated.”

Guess what, team. Walensky’s recurring feelings are not science. They are not scientific fact. They are not the truth. A considerable number of scientists believe that we are fast approaching herd immunity. At the least, the issue is under debate.

Besides, she expects everyone to hang in there while she is quivering in her pumps-- and setting a bad example of irresolute cowardice.

One suspects that someone in the Biden administration told her to go out in public and make a fool of herself. It has something to do with a rather skewed view of girl power.