Social justice can be such hard work.
What with all the protesting, missing classes, and turning a deaf ear to other viewpoints, it’s a wonder these young college students — luckier than they realize — can relax at all.
That’s why UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) will soon be hosting a day-long “healing retreat” for social justice warriors.
The event is planned for Saturday, May 5, and promises aromatherapy and therapeutic creative writing workshops, according to the school’s website.
“The Bruin Resource Center’s Intergroup Relations Program presents TREAT YO’ SELF, a healing retreat for students involved in social justice advocacy,” it states. “Our purpose is to provide a positive and collaborative space for student leaders of color and allies to decompress and recenter themselves so that they may continue to do important work in their communities.”
LifeZette reached out to UCLA for its explanation of social justice advocacy — a term that is ever expanding in the Left’s intersecting vernacular.
UCLA’s response was nebulous at best: “The BRC’s Intergroup Relations Program defines social justice advocacy as efforts to create a more socially just society by raising awareness, enhancing understanding, and promoting actions that address the various inequities on our campus and in our communities,” Katherine I. Alvarado, assistant director of media relations, told LifeZette in an email.
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Laurie Higgins, a cultural affairs writer with the Illinois Family Institute (IFI), an independent, nonprofit ministry and family advocacy group, was able to fill in the blanks.
“The Left likes to think that every belief with which they disagree is a product of social conditioning, never questioning whether their ideology is a product of conditioning,” she told LifeZette by email. “Young people are being conditioned to affect a persona of ‘woundedness’ because doing so is an effective political tactic. It’s all fake.”
"Everybody is a ball of stress at UCLA so treat yo self" -stats professor
— ☠Mellow☠ (@S_Meli97) January 10, 2017
A mother of four children, Higgins knows how to recognize a bluff or two.
“No one is really ‘triggered’ by hearing dissenting views about race, gender, or biological sex,” she noted. “These young people are being trained to affect a public posture of being aggrieved and wounded. Anyone who has raised children recognizes the melodrama. And when they’re called on their fakery — [both] toddlers and ‘social justice warriors’ — like Rumpelstiltskin, they stamp their little feet in rage. Unfortunately, they don’t flee — never to be heard from again, or stamp themselves into a chasm in the ground, like he did.”
Still, despite fairytale allusions, universities like UCLA — funded by taxpayers — should encourage students to spin straw into gold, instead of embracing an ethos of victimhood or “various inequities,” in UCLA parlance.
“Young people are being trained to affect a public posture of being aggrieved and wounded.”
“It doesn’t help young people to feed the neurotic idea that exposure to diverse ideas is wounding,” added Higgins. “It helps young people to foster true tolerance for disagreement and resilience in the face of real adversity.”
Elizabeth Economou is a former CNBC staff writer and adjunct professor. Follow her on Twitter.
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