Matt Walsh hits the nail squarely on the head (apologies to all those concerned with nail rights and violence against nails who might find my metaphor offensive). From Matt Walsh, at theburningplatform.com:
Sorry, but it’s your fault if you’re offended all the time
I truly believe that we are the most whiney, sensitive, thin-skinned, easily offended society in the history of the world.
Nobody has ever been as prolific at getting offended as we are.
Nobody cries over insignificant nonsense as loudly and consistently as us.
It’s the one thing we seem to do better than everyone else on the planet. We corner the Offended Market, and it’s not even close. Modern Americans love to get offended more than we love eating Cinnabon or talking about our fitness goals. If it was an Olympic sport, we’d grab the gold, silver, and bronze every year. If it was a job, we’d all be millionaires. In fact, we have turned it into a job, and the people who do it professionally are millionaires (Al Sharpton, etc). It is our calling card, our national pastime. It is the battle we fight and the banner we wave.
We get offended faster and more efficiently than anyone. And it’s not just our speed that separates us from the rest — it’s our endurance. We have a limitless capacity for offendedness. Every week there are dozens of new national outrages and boycott campaigns and social media crusades to raise awareness about some offensive thing, or to get someone fired for saying some offensive thing, or to teach people that some previously non-offensive thing has now become offensive.
Most of all, I find myself positively dazzled by the dexterity and athleticism with which we get offended. We can juggle six or seven outrages all at once, and then drop them and pick up new ones in the blink of an eye.
Our creativity and meticulousness are also quite notable here. We can look at any situation and extract hundreds of offensive factors that an untrained eye probably would have overlooked. We conjure up more fabricated outrages and controversies in a month than past civilizations could have mustered in a thousand years.
Do you remember what everyone was super worked up about four weeks ago? Yeah, me neither. That’s the point. We move on to the new outrage so quickly and the old ones are buried and forgotten. Well, whatever it was way back then, I’m sure it was REALLY bad and we were REALLY upset.
It’s always something. We have located the Fountain of Eternal Indignation, and we drink it by the gallon.
So then it is no wonder that this is the climate which has given rise to a concept called microaggressions.
To continue reading: The Most Whiney Society in the World
