Dancing to the Darkness

"I am honestly scared for the future of this country, and am seriously considering moving to a different country..."

"This country is doomed!"

"I am so disgusted, sad and disturbed by the results tonight.  I am afraid and sad for the future of our country... too many stupid people."

"Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble... like never before."

"I can't stop crying... you people are idiots."

"America died."

These are posts by people who reacted strongly to election results that did not go the way they had hoped.  The election had been long and vicious, guaranteeing the country would remain divided.  Having invested so much into the campaign and believing the end was near if their candidate didn't win, voters were left despondent and desperate.

If you didn't know better, you would have thought they were posted by people reacting to Trump's victory on November 8th.  But they're not.  They're from Tuesday, November 6, 2012.  The night that Obama was sent back to Washington D.C. for his second term as President of the United States. 

I'm sure I was telling my wife that America was finished back in 2012.  That everything that made America great was under assault when Ohio's 20 electoral votes went to Obama, and I, in frustration, turned off the television and reached for the sleeping pills.  We had hoped that this great country had seen through the "historic" BS of 2008 and realized its mistake -  Omabacare, higher taxes and a struggling economy.  Surely, voters would respond to Romney's message and turn leadership of the country over to a businessman with experience.  But no.

So four long years later, the shoe is on the other foot.  You can say some things never change.  Every year, we are led to believe candidate A is the only reasonable choice.  Candidate B will bring an end to our way of life as we know it.  However, despite predictions, the sun always rises the next day --  and the doom and gloom slowly dissipate like the smell of cooked liver and onions from two days ago.  

Or does it?

The one thought that NEVER occurred to me was to riot in the streets and protest the legitimate results of an election that clearly indicated a winner.  Obama was not my candidate, but the people had spoken and I was forced to accept the fact that for one night in 2012, more people who saw things differently voted for someone else.  And that's all that mattered.

Maybe being in sales prepared me for failure.  Or maybe being a Badger fan while going to college in Madison prepared me for some difficult times (fortunately, Barry Alvarez's arrival was just a short six years away). 

So what's different now?  What's so hard about accepting our nation's first female nominee for president being beaten by some brash New York pussy grabber?  Why claim "Trump is not MY president" when  the election clearly says he is?  What's driving young people into the streets and out of the classroom?

First, my upbringing didn't evolve around social issues like gay marriage, racial injustice and global warming.  Youth today have been led to believe those things are the most important issues in America.  Not freedom from terrorism, not better jobs that pay well, and not protections given to us under the U.S. Constitution.  And it doesn't seem like Chemistry, Math or Economics are very important either.

Young people today have been attending the College of Social Justice since kindergarten.  Some are being taught to question the fairness of race relations, while ignoring law and order.  It's surprising how important climate change is to them, to the degree that they will not listen to reason (no amount of facts will change it).  Captain Planet has completely, and I mean completely, obliterated rational thought on the impact of carbon burning fuels on good ol' Mother Earth.  

Their passion for global warming can only be matched by their defense of gay and transsexual lifestyles.  Being a heterosexual male who is crazy about the opposite sex, I can only imagine why.  Perhaps they have been told we shouldn't be judgmental, or that they want the same things we all do.  That's fine, but being forced to accept a lifestyle that is counter to what my religion teaches is a little hard to handle.  Worse, I'm being told that I'm a bad person if I don't agree.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite the small number of gays actually in our country, you would think heterosexuals were in the minority.  Within a span of a few months, our country chucked thousands of years of tradition and declared the old definition of marriage was dead.  As I said before, if you disagreed, you are attacked and made to walk the "walk of shame."  Ask the bakers in Oregon, or the state legislatures in Indiana and North Carolina how it feels to be on the wrong side of the LGBT coalition.

Social issues like gay marriage led our youth into believing other archaic traditions would fall next.  Eight years of Obama's "change" had many believing the country was going to break that glass ceiling and elect Hillary as the first female president in November.  The social issues tsunami would not be denied!

And then November 8th happened.  Oops...



Trump's election is more than just the defeat of Hillary.

For the first time in at least 8 years, his coming presidency is a real challenge to these social issues that have been gaining ground.  So should we be surprised that their reaction is one of fearful overreaction?  Or rage?  Of course not -- and yet I am.

For many college students, this is their first election and first encounter with the unexpected twists and turns of a presidential election.   Compounding the problem is how students don't have the necessary coping skills to deal with results that fall outside of their self-imposed safe zones.

For most schools and universities,  failure is a dirty a word.  As dirty as those found in MAD Magazine and National Lampoon in the 60's and 70's.  Our teaching institutions -- ironically -- have failed our children in preparing them for real life.

Early on, awarding participation awards to kids in sports and other competitions was thought of as a way to strengthen their self esteem.  Making winners out of losers was supposed to foster success, help them engage in activities, deal with challenges and interact with others.  Self esteem was the genie in a bottle -- providing the building blocks for school success, and a firm foundation for future learning.

I never bought into self esteem; that's not to say that you shouldn't feel good about yourself.  Because we are all much more productive when feeling confident.  The trouble is too many people are doing nothing to warrant that feeling.  Feeling good about yourself -- or feeling like you are on the right side of an argument -- needs to be earned or it's a hollow victory.

I think Vince Lombardi once said, "It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up again."  Participation ribbons aren't teaching our children anything.  Take it from Vince -- failure is the greatest teacher of success and it's a lesson that needs to be taught again and again, and students need to experience it every time they are wrong.

Ooooh, but that's so harsh!

Today's students don't know how to confront opposing opinions.   Videos I have seen -- students screaming at each other during class meetings and in response to guest speakers who were invited to speak on campus -- are embarrassing.  Our school's adherence to the PC culture has left students shell-shocked whenever they hear someone challenge their collective views of social justice and fairness.

Since they were first exposed by their kindergarten teacher through readings of "Tango Makes Three," and later through required viewings of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" for science class,  students have been molded into a pajama-wearing, identity-driven, racially-sensitive student body that schools have been able to control.  Political correctness is being used to silence dissent and debate on campus.  No longer institutions of greater learning, they have become an experiment in safe zones, balloons, play-do and puppies.  Instead of graduating students capable of dealing with real world issues, this hyper-sensitivity is teaching students to claim grievous harm in nearly any circumstance and after any affront. 

Examples abound --

Feminism has led women to expect free contraception.  Any challenge to it is an attack on women's health.

Atheism has forced schools to ban God from sporting events, and restricted certain clothing or jewelry from campus.  Religious references are considered unconstitutional and a violation to the separation between church and state.

Racism I can be found on colleges where black students are forced to live with unreasonable expectations -- like going to class, learning how to speak and write, and pass a class.  This leads to attaching "white privilege" to everything from test results and course studies, to -- God help us -- walking past a campus building "that was built on the backs of black people".

According to Ebony McGee, who is an assistant professor of diversity and urban schooling at Vanderbilt, all of these politically incorrect assaults have students feeling "anxiety, stress, depression and thoughts of suicide, as well as a host of physical ailments like hair loss, diabetes and heart disease."

And here I thought it had something to do with passing exams and graduating.



Where do we go from here?

I'd say go back to the basics, but I honestly don't see the culture on campus changing.  Teachers will continue to berate students who voted for Trump, and students will continue to search for equality where none exists.  If anything, teachers have lost control of the students, and there is no putting THAT horse back in the barn.  It's like the bad guys on Walking Dead coming face to face with the zombies that they have kept locked in the basement.  Through some unforeseen development, the bad guys fall victim to the very monsters they helped create.

It's time we give up on our feelings and start looking at what we know.  The nonsense that can be found at Google where you can indicate how you are feeling highlights one of the problems we face.

Our election has uncorked the bottle that held many people in check.  It's not just the college aged kids protesting in the streets, of course.  Paid, professional protesters like those bused in to Fergusson, MO and Madison, WI continue to love the media attention and spotlight.  And the money is good.   Anarchists have existed for decades and they aren't going away either.  Like Mystique from the X-Men movies, the One Percent protests have mutated into Black Lives Matter, who will evolve into something when another protest is needed.

But it's a good bet that they all share something in common.  Somewhere along the line, they learned everything they needed from a sociology class like the one on heterogeneous team-building (whatever that is) found in the Urban Studies 101 section of Race Relations.

It concerns me that these young protesters are excelling at heterogeneous team-building, but failing in math, reading and science.  Our country is on average with -- or below --  the rest of the world in test results from those three subjects.  How do we correct institutions that are graduating classes with students closer to Lebanon and the Dominican Republic than to students from Singapore?  Our universities have become a joke to the rest of the world.

Despite giving out coloring books and bubbles to 20-year-old students in designated safe places, it is reported that forty-four percent of America's college students are suffering from depression.  The social experiment that began with self-esteem is failing our students, and there doesn't seem to be any answer except more coddling and ways to avoid feeling bad.

Kids, it's time to put away the coloring books and pick up one on conflict resolution.