Leftists love to signal their superior virtue by showing exaggerated concern over any event that could possibly upset one of the snowflakes. Such was the case at Georgetown recently. A message in an elevator triggered a “bias incident” report. Naturally, the whole university’s bureaucracy sprang into action, ready to help any students who might have been frightened.
In this Martin Center commentary, Georgetown professor John Hasnas wonders if the school’s reaction wasn’t way overboard, actually making things worse. Hasnas reflects on an old Simon and Garfunkel song about a pathetic man waiting for his chance to scrawl graffiti in a train station and writes, “There is little that we can do to eliminate this sort of behavior short of having 1984 style surveillance of all public spaces. There is much that we can do to increase the incidence of such behavior, however.”
Why not just cover over the graffiti — a swastika — and forget about it? Well, academic progressives need incidents like this so they can pretend that their world is terribly threatened by dark forces.
Hasnas continues,
Someone etched a swastika on an elevator wall. The University is using this occurrence as an opportunity to trumpet how strongly it condemns hatred, how committed it is to inclusiveness, how rigorous its Code of Student Conduct is, how accessible its Bias Reporting System and how professional its Bias Reporting Team is, how concerned with its students’ psychological well-being its Counseling and Psychiatric Services is, and generally how committed it is to all things good and noble. It is not clear how sending a broadcast e-mail to the entire University addresses the actual problem, but that does not seem to be the point of the exercise.
No — they just want to show that they’re utterly dedicated progressives.
In all likelihood, I think, this was another of the many hoaxes that have been perpetrated by college leftists to get attention. Are there actually any Nazis enrolled at Georgetown? The idea is absurd.
Hasnas concludes by asking, “So how about the next time someone etches a swastika in an elevator or writes a hateful or profane poem on a bathroom wall, we just quietly paint over it and go about our business?”