Toddlers' Tyranny
Cornell University, founded in 1865, member of the Ivy League, and alma mater of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kurt Vonnegut, and Freeman Dyson, just removed a bust of President Abraham Lincoln and a bronzed Gettysburg Address plaque from one of its libraries.
This venerable and esteemed university, founded a mere eighteen days after the end of the Civil War, "cancelled" the man that freed the slaves and saved the Union.
Because someone complained.
Capitulating to a "heckler's veto," while bad idea, is usually the path of least resistance for big organizations, especially if the heckler is of a woke variety. Fear of the slavering Twitter horde has proven to be a strong motivator for those who align with contemporary progressivism.
Parents also know that capitulating to toddler's temper tantrums is the path of least resistance. But, most understand that they do have to resist their brat's whining from time to time, lest the brat become an unmanageable monster.
There must be many in the Cornell management hierarchy who've raised children. At least some of them must have stood up to their toddlers' hissy fits at one time or another. They can't all be oblivious to the peril of endless appeasement.
Yet, here we are, the Best-and-Brightest allowing some tempestuous twit to cancel one of the nation's greatest Presidents. Yeah, yeah, I know it's cool to dunk on Lincoln in certain circles. Yeah, yeah, I know he wasn't perfect. Jesus had something to say in that regard, if I recall correctly. So did Voltaire. Don’t be “that guy.” No one likes “that guy.”
If you appease bad behavior, you get more of it. Just ask Neville Chamberlain. In caving in to every puerile plaint, we invite nitwits to feed their need for external validation by coming up with even more absurd demands. Whining ninnies who spend their lives looking for stuff to complain about have infested our government, our culture, and our economy, and every time we give in, we invite even more of this garbage.
There is a remedy. It's simple, and it's effective. It's what you do with bullies, and with adult toddlers:
The alternative is endless concessions that incentivize ever-more picayune or absurd complaints. If one whiner can get Lincoln cancelled, the message that massive power is only a complaint away is delivered across the nation. It's the road to a tyranny of toddlers, where we are beset and besieged on all sides by full-size babies whose false fragility has been validated and emboldened.
Alas, I have learned over the past few years that Cornell has gone full-woke, so there lies little hope therein. Ditto for other formerly esteemed institutes of higher learning. We are left with having to deal with the endless tantrums of the woke-toddlers it releases into the world.
Someone blew up part of the Georgia Guidestones night-before-last, where I live, in rural Elbert Co., GA. I didn’t believe in the “hippy dippy whackadoodle” things sandblasted into the rock, but, their presence didn’t upset me whatsoever. This reminds me of the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas in Bamiyan in 2001.
https://youtu.be/drR9ZX40ckY
I've said as much about the C-suites of "woke" corporations - but at least these organizations are accountable to shareholders and customers, who righteously let their dissatisfaction with corporate wokism be known.
Universities, on the other hand, are unaccountable (apparently) to anybody. It's not as if the Lincoln bust was burnishing anybody's diploma or accruing to accreditation. So it's a "free move" from Cornell's perspective. And it gets rid of one complainer - for now. Eventually, as the Free Speech Movement in California's university system demonstrated in the 60s, the campus becomes dysfunctional and order breaks down for the students paying tuition and trying to gain an education. That's when you bring out the firehoses. Better to nip this crap in the bud than encourage it.