The New Trauma

Thoughts on “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings.”

My sympathy for your suffering, whether that suffering was real or imaginary, ended when you demanded I change my life to avoid bringing up your bad memories. You don’t seem to have figured this out, but there is no “I must never be reminded of a negative experience” expectation in any culture anywhere on earth.

If your psyche is so fragile you fall apart when someone inadvertently reminds you of “trauma”, especially if that trauma consisted of you overreacting to a self-interpreted racial slur, you need therapy. You belong on a psychiatrist’s couch, not in college dictating what the rest of society can’t do, say or think. Get your own head right before you start trying to run other people’s lives. If you expect everyone around you to cater to your neurosis, forever, you’re what I’d call a “failure at life”. And you’re doomed to perpetual disappointment.

Good thing people aren’t putting themselves into hopeless levels of undischargeable debt to get so “educated.”

Oh, wait.

[Update a while later]

This seems related, somehow: Advice for shy, male nerds:

[Update Monday morning]

Here is a guy who will never get laid:

Obviously, Parton must have been really hurt, perhaps even more hurt than when people ask him to say “Cool Whip.” But because he’s a really sensitive guy, he did not “blame her one bit” for not understanding.

In fact, he said her calloused response made him realize that he might have committed a microaggression against another person at some time in his life without even realizing he was doing it!

“I am afraid because microaggressions aren’t harmless — there’s research to show that they cause anxiety and binge drinking among the minority students who are targeted,” he writes.

I’ve got a better solution to binge drinking. Lower the drinking age.

4 thoughts on “The New Trauma”

  1. Now there’s a man!

    Agree with him 100%. I’m sick of these special snowflakes.

    As for the girl whose widdle feewings were hurt when asked a simple question because she was “too poor” to go to Europe, I was poor too, but I somehow managed to work hard and save and go there, then ended up living and working there for three years. Because I wanted to.

    You can do anything you really set your mind to; apparently Widdle Miss Snowflake has set her mind to being a professional victim.

    Congratulations on your “success,” cookie. Now shaddup.

  2. While I can certainly agree with much of what is said here, the concept of not bring up distasteful things in polite company is a culture moor that is slowly dying and I wish wasn’t. The assumption that no-one you know has suffered physical abuse (for example) is not carte blanche for you to talk about it while we’re trying to enjoy dinner. That goes for suffers of physical abuse as much as it does for idiots who wouldn’t know the first thing about it. There’s a time and place to be a uncivilized jerk and we call it the Internet.

    1. I agree, Trent. But I don’t think the special snowflakes are worried about dinner conversation.

      What little exposure I’ve had to them (and I try to limit it as much as possible) makes me believe they object to any word spoken anywhere in any context that they’ve decided will make them “feel bad” (because the world revolves around them, dontcha know).

      I could say, “My cat has 2 black paws, a black ear, and a cute little black eye” and they’d start whining about my making light of domestic violence (of which of course they’ve been a victim sometime because a boyfriend was mean to them once) because I think black eyes are cute.

      Spare me. I prefer adult company, at dinner or otherwise.

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