Hyper-sensitivity and political correctness were once merely annoying. Now they are killing people. And somewhere between being culpable of annoyance and being guilty of homicide, hyper-sensitivity started sapping the strength of a once proud American culture. Now we are bone dry.
Just look at these headlines:
- “7th graders suspended for playing with airsoft gun in own yard”
- “Kentucky bans postgame handshakes for high school athletes”
- “8-year-old Florida boy suspended for making gun shape with fingers: ‘It was a game.’”
- “Joseph Lyssikatos, 12, suspended over gun-shaped key chain”
- “New York school bans balls, tag during recess”
- “Tahoma High School students wear Confederate flags in alleged anti-gay statement”
And now this one:
Boy, 15, kills himself after ‘facing expulsion and being put on sex offender registry’ for streaking prank at high school football game
From the article:
“Christian Adamek hanged himself on October 2 and died from his injuries 2 days later – a week after he streaked at his high school football game. He was arrested and school district recommended he face a court hearing. If convicted of indecent exposure, he’d have gone on sex offender’s list.”
I’d like to say this incident was tragic, or that it was the sad result of an unfortunate circumstance. But this is the tired and insipid vocabulary of gutless school administrators and sociopathic local police chiefs. These are the tedious words the President might use, if he could bring himself to comment on the outrageous loss of a young boy who isn’t black.
Who is to blame?
The boy, for one, because he took his own life. It wasn’t as if he was helplessly gunned down on his way back from buying Skittles and iced tea (criminals and thugs don’t eat Skittles, or drink iced tea). He chose to hang himself. Maybe his family is somewhat to blame for not noticing the signs of his desperation, but that is purely speculative. Maybe I am to blame. I suppose I should have dedicated some more effort into cultivating a society that equally accepts Confederate flags, firearms, and streaking – whereby young children (exclusively males, you might have noticed) don’t have to fear being young children. Maybe you’re to blame.
Every time I lose the courage to say something that I believe, intimidated by the sick society of demagogues and automatons that surround me, I could be failing to give a suicidal 15-year-old the one glimmer of hope he needs to escape a desperate situation. That is why I will never choose to hide in the shadows while fools and knaves casually strip away the threads of our culture in broad daylight, unchallenged.
Have you heard the speech that Dr. Ben Carson gave at the National Prayer Breakfast in February of this year? It garnered national attention because the good Doctor critiqued a number of President Obama’s domestic policies while the President sat two chairs away from the speaker. In the first six minutes, Dr. Carson talks about political correctness and sensitivity, and he makes valuable points that are germane to this topic. I encourage you to watch the first six minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNCR2Ky_-kw
How can it be stopped?
This may be too little too late, but here is something I just wrote. I wish I’d known this kid, Christian, and I wish I could have been there in the moments before he decided to take his life, because this is what I would have said to him…
—
Christian, you probably don’t realize right now what you are dying for. I imagine you are so petrified that you haven’t thought of anything beyond yourself and the consequences of your actions, so I want to give you some perspective.
Unfortunately, I don’t know the exact circumstances of your situation, and since I can’t ask you, I’ll have to make some assumptions. Allow me assume you are planning to kill yourself primarily because you think your life is ruined. If you are convicted in court, you will be permanently added to the sex offender registry. You will be marked and known, everywhere you go, for the rest of your life. You won’t be able to get into colleges you want to attend. It will be incredibly difficult to hold jobs that don’t involve handing coffee and donuts through a window. You feel helpless, and the sociopath principal at your high school, Michael Campbell, isn’t giving you much hope:
“Campbell added that the incident was not just a prank and needed to be treated seriously.”
Here is the big picture. You are a victim, but you’re not the only one. There are many like you, and most of them are also men, young and old. You see, in this brave new society we’ve constructed, men are something like public enemies. By our nature, we can be violent, aggressive, and also courageous. But you live in a society that values none of those things. The conventional wisdom of the society you live in has created these platitudes that everyone must accept and repeat: violence is never a solution; do not be aggressive, be agreeable; do not be courageous, say only the things that everyone else says, do the things that everyone else does, and never cross the line.
You, my friend, crossed the line. Now, streaking isn’t the grandest form of civil disobedience. Or at least it shouldn’t be, but the seriousness with which your case is being treated now leads me to believe otherwise. If you brought a Confederate flag or a gun key chain to school, then you would be making a statement worthy of national media attention. Streaking sounds like a typical high school endeavor, perhaps worthy of a couple of days suspension. You probably thought the same thing before you pulled off your clothes and did the deed. But you, and I, have forgotten we live in a new world, where streaking might have offended someone. Your deed was seen no longer as mischief, but as a serious indicator of what you, and all men, are destined to become; crazed, violent, rapists who need to be put on a list.
There is no evidence for what I’m about to say, but I will bet you my wardrobe that your Principal, Michael Campbell, was put under some heavy pressure. Someone somewhere convinced him that your streaking was “more than a prank”. It was symbolic of something else, he was told. Perhaps he convinced himself of this fact; there is no telling how poisoned his own mind has become after years in the pressure cooker of modern academia.
But in either case, Michael Campbell believed that your prank went beyond mere mischief. Your prank was viewed in some way as an expression of male dominance. Perhaps he thought that in a few years time, you’d be just another sex offender like the rest of us men. Perhaps when you were streaking across the football field, feeling the wind on your bare man flesh, a single mother in the bleachers gasped and experienced an emotionally-forced flashback to her college years when she drank herself blind every weekend and throttled every young college buck in sight, including the one she didn’t remember raping her.
It is hard to pinpoint exactly from where these overreactions originate, but that is not the lesson. The lesson is that the society you live in has spent a lot of time cultivating an environment that allows psychotics, sociopaths, and the otherwise mentally disturbed to crucify transgressing dissenters who have offended someone, somewhere, for some reason. It does not matter how deranged the accuser is, or how flimsy the claim. It only matters that no one is offended, and to ensure that end, all of the most extreme measures will be taken.
Now that you have some perspective about the world you live in, let’s answer the question. For what, exactly, are you dying?
You are dying to appease a sick and broken society. Your death will be given a news article and some meaningless words of empty regret, but then you will be lost in memory, and the wheels will grind on. The hyper-sensitives will work tirelessly, without conscience, to makes examples out of people like you, and not one of those lunatics will consider the consequences of their actions. Your death will have no effect of them. You, only for a second, got in the way of their main goal to equalize, to kill rational thought, and to create an imaginary world where no one is offended ever.
Despite your death, those who cross the line will be continue to be nailed to their crosses. They will be put on display atop a high hill wearing their gun-shaped key chains, or their Confederate flag t-shirts, or in your case, nothing at all.
You have many years left to live, and you’ve done fantastic work so far for such a young age. If you manage through the remainder of your life without offending anyone, you will have gone through life without believing anything of consequence, fearful to step on the wrong toes. And that might be the worst thing you could do—even worse than streaking across a football field during your high school game.
Read More: Being Popular In School Is Overrated
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