Using a 5-year-old girl under the false pretenses of a spontaneous outburst of emotion seems about as authentic as deliberately conflating legal immigration — the United States accepts more immigrants than does any other nation — with illegal immigrants who deliberately and knowingly break federal law to enter the U.S.
And remember 14-year-old victim hero Ahmed Mohammed
whose plight with local school authorities earned him global commiseration — and invitations to visit almost everyone from Barack Obama in the White House and Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook to the United Nations. How did teenager Ahmed become an international celebrity?
He supposedly spontaneously brought a “clock” to school that he had built from scratch. Soon after, Ahmed was alleged by his supposedly dim-witted school to have instead brought in something that appeared to look like, or perhaps even sound like, a bomb. After questioning, the young Edison was expelled — purportedly because he was presumed guilty as a son of Sudanese immigrants and a Muslim. Was Ahmed another innocent child victimized by the oppressive forces of traditional racist America?
Again, hardly. Almost everything that Ahmed and his family have alleged is being proved first fantasy, and, second, a likely set-up. One, his “clock” was no brilliant invention. Ahmed just took the plastic case cover off an old 1986 digital alarm clock and reinserted the insides into a pencil box — something any teenager could do, but probably would see no need to.
Then there was Columbia University’s “mattress girl,” Emma Sulkowicz. The Freudian-named coed spent an entire school year dragging a mattress around campus — as if it were emblematic of the university’s weak response to her allegations that she was once raped during a hook-up with another student, Paul Nungesser. Sulkowicz broke school rules by packing her mattress into the Columbia graduation ceremony, again winning her national attention as a truth-teller about the sexually oppressive atmosphere on campuses that endangers young women. Yet so far there has been no evidence that Sulkowicz, as she has alleged, was battered in the face, forcibly sodomized, and almost strangled to death. In fact, Nungesser, the accused, has so far been exonerated and is now suing Columbia for acquiescing to Suklowicz’s apparently constructed charges of savagery.
...Americans rarely work in the mines, plough behind a horse, or labor in a sweatshop for 12 hours a day. Twenty-first-century life is monotonously good. A victim like Mattress Girl is a product of an affluent, leisured postmodern America that can apparently subsidize such tomfoolery in a way never quite true of the last 2,500 centuries of Western civilization.
The fact that so often charges of religious prejudice, racism, and sexism under scrutiny break down and prove melodramatic, if not outright fabrications, suggests that there is a perception by the victims, at least, that there are not quite enough naturally occurring bigots to go around without having to invent some.
...There are careerist advantages to becoming a victim of religious, racial, or sexual prejudice. Ahmed Mohamed is now a global rock star; Mattress Girl is a leftist icon. No one much cares that “hands up; don’t shoot” was a complete myth.
...Life, it turns out, is something more than a career, a race, a sex, or a religion, but so often plays out according to an individual’s own decisions and efforts — and for most it is an anonymous and often disappointing struggle without anyone to blame for our outcomes but ourselves.
Apparently that crushing reality persuades some to seek a refuge from responsibility for their own fates by writing a false racist message, or constructing a fake racial identity, or concocting a savage and brutal frat rapist, or conjuring up a cadre of premodern Texan bigots masquerading as school officials who would destroy our next Steve Jobs simply because he is a Muslim.
Yet a politically correct fake world is still a fake world, and noble lies remain lies — nothing more, nothing else.
1 comment:
All people yearn to be oppressed. It's so....so romantic and cool!
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