COLLEGE: Paving way to pain

What is allowed at college becomes normalized in mainstream society. This axiom is being demonstrated in Seattle as Antifa is allowed to steal the Constitutional Rule of Law from their fellow Americans. This is a symptom of a far more dangerous pandemic than COVID-19.

Formerly bastions of free speech and thought, today’s universities are often intellectual gulags where one orthodoxy is taught. Students are encouraged to suppress the dictates of their individual conscience to conform to an ideological groupthink.

No longer is the world complex. All controversy is reduced to color, sex and class; victims and exploiters. This is bigotry.

Students are encouraged to take shortcuts to conclusions, without going through the messy process of personal evaluation. Alternative interpretations are largely ignored. Instead of leaving college with a broader mind, many graduate knowing that only the orthodox opinion is right and good.

When there is no curiosity about alternative viewpoints, it becomes easy to hate those who dissent. Further, it becomes both conceivable and even desirable to purge all heterodoxy, past and present. No statue to a past whose meaning transcends today’s slogans must stand untoppled. No words of heretics and apostates should be abided.

Inevitably, the group will demand that actions follow words. Utopia must be built on the corpses of unbelievers. I had never worried about an American kristallnacht where neighbors become a mob to harrow neighbors. Now, Americans have been taught that feeling is preferable to thinking. History repeatedly proves that such people are quite capable of genocide.

RALPH K. GINORIO

Coeur d’Alene