The Birth of Snowflakes

So a day or two back, Donald Trump, the president-elect, was speaking on his "Thank You Tour" in Wisconsin, amusing the audience with a reprise of some of the basics -- he always spoke in basics -- that he had used in his campaign.

My best girl was watching a news show where a clip of the speech was being shown, and her immediate comment was not about the speech, or any part of it, or even about Mr. Trump himself.

No, it was about the podium.  And that's where we start this morning.

The podium and stage, as you may have readily seen, were festooned with Christmas-season things, trees in the background, and the words "Merry Christmas USA" unmistakably writ large across the front of the podium.  You couldn't have missed it.

And my best girl did not miss it, which got her to thinking, and often that is a good thing as it was in this case.  Now, it did not fall on blind eyes that, to have a president making a speech from a podium with the words "Merry Christmas USA", was a reversal of at least eight years of contemptible secularism from our current administration and from society in general.

Certainly the news programs at least momentarily pointed out that it was not a white-bread, generic "Happy Holidays" message.

So the Missus observed this, and mentioned that she thought the dynamic was going to be interesting.  Donald Trump was elected in a specifically politically-incorrect, or at least a specifically not dogmatically politically correct campaign.  So this means that a peck of politically correct actions from years recent was going to be eliminated in a very short time.

What she noticed was the dynamic.  These little chip-aways had taken place over a long period of time, the result of one person here and there claiming being offended at this or that thing, and then another person a few months later.  Over the years, an accumulated pattern of claimed offense by this or that offended person led to a pattern of utter neutrality.

That neutrality is hammered home in the college campus, where the left breeds, sort of like bacteria in the kitchens of one of those taverns that Jon Taffer fixes on on Bar Rescue.

But her point was that the catering to the offended had been a pick, pick, pick thing over many years, while the expected reversal under Mr. Trump is going to be a fairly all-encompassing effect in a fairly short time -- a year maybe.  The left works that way, she pointed out.  Push the extremes one by one until what we thought was stupid -- not saying "Merry Christmas" -- becomes mainstream.

But all that politically correct stuff over the years had stiffened the opposition, and was absolutely a big factor in the election of Mr. Trump, a very plain talker who made it clear what he thought was right and wrong.

It finally occurred to both of us that it was the children of the pick, pick left who started growing up thinking that they had a right not to be offended by anything, who had become the snowflakes of today.  Nurtured first in the homes of parents who felt that they had to be good little Democrats and go along, and then radicalized on campuses, to the point where the Ft. Hood murders were "workplace violence" and the Ohio State terrorist attack was a "misunderstanding", they became the entitled generation.

When we no longer nurture a "right not to be offended", and the cessation of that acceptance at the Government level happens fairly abruptly, it will be as if a flood of rationality refreshes the USA.  The "pick, pick, pick" that had happened over years had, in fact, been irritating reasonable adults for years at the same time.  The genie is out of the bottle, and the left may never be able to put it back.

Barren of actual productive ideas for governing that have ever worked, the left will first retrench into screaming matches (e.g., the attempt to nullify the election whose results, they fear, would crush them into oblivion for years).  What they do next is anyone's guess.  The colleges, after all, are still there, you know.

Mr. Trump will need to be suitably advised as to who his enemy is and how they may come after him during his administration.  Once the election stuff dies down, the left will have to figure out how to reinstate the political correctness that cost them the 2016 election in the first place.  After all, that's what they want; a compliant population that will mutely allow them to be the ruling class without argument.

But the genie is out of the bottle.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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