March 28, 2016
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It wasn’t quite the Kent State Massacre, but you wouldn’t know it from the students’ anguished wails.
Last Monday morning, students at Emory University here in Atlanta were emotionally triggered by messages scrawled in chalk throughout the campus. The messages were so horrifying and terrifying that by the afternoon a gaggle of 40 or so students stormed the Administration Building and began desperately chanting:
You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!…We have nothing to lose but our chains.
What exactly had sent them into such blind, flailing, fearful fury? Well, it wasn’t exactly Kristallnacht, but let’s call it “The Chalkening”: A vandal had scrawled “TRUMP 2016” on signs and stairs and walkways throughout this tony campus where parents waste a quarter-million dollars to send their progeny for a four-year course in how to be a soft-boiled ovum or a walking mangina.
A blogger for snopes.com claimed that numerous reports of students’ hysterical reactions to The Chalkening were “MOSTLY FALSE,” but I’ll provide some direct quotes from the quivering pupils themselves and let you decide:
“This wasn”t ordinary campaigning. It was deliberate intimidation. Some of us were expecting shootings. We feared walking alone….To us, the administration’s silence sanctioned the fact that this Nazi reincarnate [Trump] is threatening to deport our parents”to put us in concentration camps and kill us.”
“Sophomore Jonathan Peraza, pictured here leading easily aggrieved students in a round of collective self-pity
“I”m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here]. But this man [Trump] is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well….I don”t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”
“Unnamed student quoted in school paper the Emory Wheel
”[Faculty] are supporting this rhetoric by not ending it…people of color are struggling academically because they are so focused on trying to have a safe community and focus on these issues [related to having safe spaces on campus].”
“Another unnamed student quoted in the Emory Wheel who appears to not have ever considered that certain groups of color’s low mean IQ might be a contributing factor in their academic struggles
“My reaction to the chalking was one of fear….People still don”t understand that the protest yesterday served not only as an expression against one interpretation of the chalking, but also as a collective manifestation against the fear that a bigot leader can create.
“Freshman Amanda Obando
“I legitimately feared for my life. I thought we were having a KKK rally on campus.”
“Freshman Paula Camila Alarcon, quoted in the Daily Beast
“I think it was an act of violence. It was an active threat, intentionally meant to create opposition on campus and to segregate groups on campus that are already segregated.”
“Junior Lolade Oshin, also quoted in the Daily Beast
Behold the sad, glum faces of these easily triggered ambulatory fetuses, fearing they’ll be shipped back to truly “safe spaces” such as Mexico or the Middle East. Each one of them appears to be a flaming pain in the ass”an “Emorrhoid,” if you will.
Such mass eruptions of colicky college students are nothing new, although The Chalkening may mark a new level of absurdity. Last year University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe stepped down after black students threw a collective fit when a fecal swastika was spotted on campus and the black Student Body President falsely reported that the KKK was prowling the campus.
During the Mizzou nonsense, a black grad student went on a hunger strike to protest the oppression he allegedly suffered at the school merely for being black, even though in 2014 his daddy had raked in a cool $8.4 million in earnings.
I would kill to be so oppressed. And although Butler reportedly began stuffing his face mere minutes after the university president resigned, I believe I have the patience and fortitude to sit and calmly watch a hunger striker starve to death.
Also last year, a Japanese student at Oberlin wrote a scathing article about how the school cafeteria’s sushi was “appropriative.” At California’s Claremont McKenna College, the Dean of Students resigned after penning an apparently sincere email to a Latina student offering to help those who “don’t fit our…mold.” And a Yale lecturer who’d sent an email urging students to quit freaking the hell out over allegedly “offensive” Halloween costumes resigned amid the belching outrage that ensued, which included a shrieking She-gro publicly bitching out the lecturer’s hubby.
