RUTHFULLY YOURS

A friend whom I love told me yesterday that his teenaged daughter cried herself to sleep when Trump won and that in school (a private and tony school… natch) “counselors” comforted the students in their grief. This was repeated throughout the city in public as well as private schools and in colleges.

He was quite outraged at my scorn, having expected more empathy. When I asked how she felt about the senatorial and congressional election — after all, Congress can halt those dreadful actions that a Trump “dictatorship” would enact… it was clear that neither father nor daughter knew who ran and on what issues.

After that jarring conversation I reflected on those things that affected me at her age, although I generally don’t engage in smarmy nostalgia.

When I was a teenager the words “iron lung” terrified us as we saw schoolmates maimed and felled by a raging polio epidemic. We had to absorb a genocide that killed one of every three Jews in the world, including my grandparents and all my cousins, uncles, and aunts. We were affronted by racial laws that discriminated against Negroes in the South and denied hiring and educational opportunities throughout the rest of the country; signs that said “no dogs and no Jews”; poverty and joblessness that afflicted and rendered whole families homeless as their possessions were placed on the sidewalks following their evictions; and the banning of books, films, and music.

But we did have the freedom to engage in debate and to differ with one another and agree on protesting the foregoing policies that were inimical to a proper democracy. And we did pass around clandestine copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer — both banned for their explicit sex.

At the Bronx High School of Science, we argued over Eisenhower versus Stevenson, over the use of nuclear weapons to end the war in Japan, over the death penalty for the Rosenbergs, over the Korean War and the firing of General MacArthur, over the threat of Communism, over local and national policies and politics and foreign policy.

Our debates were loud but civilized. When Adlai Stevenson lost the election to General Dwight Eisenhower many students were in shock that the “intellectual” lost to a military man. The faculty, which was very liberal, offered no safe spaces and no counseling. We did not need them.

What has happened to these coddled and spoiled and illiberal young people today?

Pediatricians have speculated that too many antibiotics have produced some allergies and immune problems among young people.

Liberal parents and teachers and schools have indoctrinated a whole generation of young people with immunities to debate, freedom of speech, and anything that rattles their ability to think outside of the box.

Where is their outrage at real voter intimidation with threats of violence at the polls? Are they so indifferent to the reverse racism of #Black Lives Matter? Do they care a whit about the growing anti-Semitism in academia which is more malignant than residential restrictions of the past?

What, besides the potty politics of the mandatory transgender bathrooms, are their rights that are threatened by the advent of a Trump presidency? Can they name a single achievement of the Obama administration that has made the lives of the poor, immigrants, or blacks any better? How have Democrats ameliorated the hardships of single mothers and grandmothers who are rearing three generations of children of unwed teenagers?

Can they name a single foreign policy success of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State?

Well, they really don’t know, and they are just parroting the blather they hear from their parents and teachers.

They will soon be consumed by applications to colleges and their liberal parents who are such fierce advocates of affirmative action will hire tutors to navigate them through competitive exams.

When they get to those colleges there will be deans for counseling for microaggressions, sexual identities, perceived insults to their self-esteem, and cultural identity…

And there are always co-ed crying sessions to get them through the ordeals of growing up rich and spoiled and traumatized by the sorrow of cheap sneakers.