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.
