College kids in the UK and America have been lambasted lately for their participation in what you probably know as safe spaces. Despite a fevered defense of free speech zones and safe spaces from academic leaders, the concept is undoubtedly a rejection of free expression.
There's no point in denying the reality that they are designed to mitigate the use of free speech. Outside of the rhetoric and the doublespeak, safe spaces are inherently totalitarian. They do not represent a revolution, nor do they represent all "liberals" or even all college students for that matter.
Since the airing of the South Park episode safe space, many groups have come out in almost a unanimous gut laugh at college kids, mostly stodgy conservative groups who've probably never actually been to a campus or have known any students.
In retaliation, the intellectual community started firing back at critics in what almost seemed like a defense of safe spaces.
The left pretty much got absorbed into the whole mess by proxy. They were defending the select students against "hate bait" sites who were using the safe space madness as an opportunity to undermine the left's fight for social tolerance. Guilt by association.
Rest assured, most thinkers on the left are embarrassed by safe spaces and do not support them.
The people who utilize and support safe spaces are a small, loud aggregation of politically correct absolutists. Their pc nature makes it particularly dangerous because militant, regressive, anti-freedom groups are exploiting the long traditions of "diversity" and "peace" on campus to piggyback its accepted validity in the community.
These idealists, if you can call them such, arbitrarily set the goalposts where they want them to be at any time. They do not appear to have a clear list of demands nor a concrete agenda, but they do know their adversaries, and nobody is seemingly safe from their attacks.
Some Conservatives like to imagine that it is one homogeneous group of liberals acting collectively toward some ultimate end. No surprise that they don't know much about it, but they're wrong. The tirade, unfortunately, is not a means, it is the end. A perpetual witch hunt against anything deemed to be damnable heresy to their ilk.
Being a leftist does not protect you from the vitriol and lunacy that spews from these groups. Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins (both famous liberals) found this to be true when they were cast out of their ranks as traitors and thought criminals for calling out political correctness.
I don't consider myself a liberal, but I do know a lot of people who do identify as such. They are bright, intelligent, reasoned people who do not advocate safe spaces or the destruction of free speech. Those who are rallying to kill free expression are a new generation of totalitarians who George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, and Lenny Bruce would have found ripe for contemptuous parody.
The truth is, this isn't new and these groups have always existed in our human history, just by different names.
You don't need this new obnoxious anti-freedom group to make you feel like you're living in an Orwellian nightmare. They've already all been here for a long time. There have always been special groups here to engineer society to their perfect model of purity at the expense of your liberty.
It's mind-blowing to me that a slew of assholes unwilling to navigate outside of their political or social identity would dare cast the first stone against the "special snowflakes". They must have been asleep at the wheel during the Bush Years when everybody who didn't want to blindly kill foreigners was lambasted as terrorists and anti-Americans.
And it doesn't matter which "era" you're living in.
Our society is a living breathing safe space no matter where you look. There is no place left in our culture that hasn't been confiscated by safe spacers. Where are these areas of true freedom and liberation where people exist in mutual respect of one another? Very few pockets in this world if any.
See, these college kids are an easy target. Yet, what makes you think that your safe space has been thoroughly penetrated? How often do you openly accept new ideas and let your little world come undone in favor of freedom? Think about it.
We live in a world where people sit comfortably day in and day out being exposed to anything they want to hear. You can turn on the radio, watch tv or pull up an internet website and have virtually anyone in the world agree with all of your points depending on where you look.
Hour after hour being bombarded with ideas and opinions that you take great delight and comfort in. People actively avoid the objectively real world in favor of social media echo chambers. Bump into somebody you disagree with in real life? It's okay, your Facebook and twitter pages all agree with you, and that's what counts.
When you step into the "real world", it's already been finely crafted and tailored to make sure that your sensibilities are seldom upset. Many hands are still at work eliminating things that might upset you in the future. You also have a voice and an open forum to remove those freedoms from other people that you do not want them to have.
The real world is just one giant safe space where thousands of people over time have cried and whined and bitched until they got their way. No true freedom exists. When people walk into the real world, they still want to be safely contained within their precious bubble that nobody is allowed to pop.
I laugh to myself when these moral monopolists point their finger at some 19-year-old kid to berate them mercilessly for being safe spacers while advocating that baggy pants, curse words, e-cigarettes, gambling, pit bulls, flag burners, immigrants, topless women, gay people, and pot smokers should be banished from existence.
I hope the irony isn't lost.
