American cry babies : Ruthie Blum
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=17647
Since last Wednesday, when Donald Trump was officially declared the winner of the U.S. presidential election, college professors across the country have been excusing their students from classes and exams to engage in a form of collective mourning not seen since the bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Psychological services were immediately made available to those young adults, who were old enough to vote for Hillary Clinton but too fragile to accept the victory of a candidate not to their liking.
No wonder these infants in adult bodies — the best and the brightest of the land of the free, whose mommies and daddies are forking out obscene sums for their higher education — had the nerve to take to social media and equate 11/9 with 9/11.
Not all students opted to stay home or stage protests with signs reading “Trump is not my president.” Some actually turned up on campus, to be coddled and embraced by like-minded teachers and administrators concerned for their mutual well-being. Tufts University in Massachusetts, for example, made an arts and crafts center available to students they thought might fare better with finger-painting than with a lecture on the Constitution and Founding Fathers.
The University of Kansas provided therapy dogs for the bereaved campus community. You know, the kind of canines that serve the war-wounded and shell-shocked who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and watched their fellow soldiers being blown to bits, while their peers back home were safe and sound in the halls of Harvard, dissecting the literary works of Bob Dylan.
To make the process of infantilization complete, the University of Michigan offered its devastated students Play-Doh, crayons and coloring books. Perhaps the instructors handing out the clay assuaged the fears of the poor darlings, who reportedly have been running out to stock up on birth control before Trump’s inauguration in January. But, given their behavior, they should probably be hoarding diapers for themselves instead.
Then there’s Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, which held a “cry-in,” during which faculty members distributed hot chocolate and tissues to their weepy charges. One hopes they didn’t forget the marshmallows. After all, there is only so much deprivation a person can tolerate in one fell swoop.
If the above sounds like a feature in “The Onion,” that’s because it ought to be. Sadly, in the United States led by President Barack Obama, art can no longer imitate life. Indeed, the current state of affairs in America — that which sealed Trump’s election — has made satire unnecessary, if not obsolete.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, girls younger than these college students are being kidnapped, married off, raped and slaughtered not only by terrorists, but by members of their own families. Nobody is handing them hot chocolate or tissues with which to dry their tears. These events are something their U.S. counterparts are too immature even to contemplate, let alone attempt to understand or do something about. But that would require actually learning about history, geography, religion and culture.
If these students and their professors are outraged by the Republican sweep that took the country by storm last Tuesday, they might want to stop whining and take a look in the mirror.
Watching their behavior from my perch in Israel reminded me of winters long ago, when my children were very young. Whenever snowfall was predicted, the nightly newscasters would announce that schools in affected areas would be closed the following day. Palestinian suicide bombers have never paralyzed the Jewish state, but a few inches of snow have always been a source of panic.
But then, since weather forecasts are about as reliable as polls, the predicted storms did not always materialize.
“It’s not fair!” my kids would wail in the morning, when informed that their prayed-for excuse not to get out of bed had been taken away. “Complain to God,” I would reply, hastily preparing their lunches and organizing their clothes — tasks that I, too, had hoped a snow storm would render unnecessary.
Twenty years later, one of those kids — by then a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem — was called up for reserve duty to fight in Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip, on the day he was supposed to have an exam for which he had studied very hard.
When the war was over, and he returned home to his pregnant wife, he was given a new date for the test, from which neither he nor any other of his fellow war-weary students was excused. And though Israelis from all over the country showered all of the soldiers with loving kindness and plenty of home-cooked meals, not one of those heroes was greeted on campus with hot chocolate and tissues. And no one yelled, “Not fair!”
American students did not suffer a loss last Tuesday. They were already losers
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