A highly qualified educator was offered a position as Superintendent of Easthampton Schools, in Massachusetts. Then he committed the unpardonable and heinous crime of addressing, in an email, the school board’s Chairwoman Cynthia Kwiecinski and Executive Assistant Suzanne Colby as “Ladies.”

Those ladies promptly rescinded the board’s offer as a result of that courtesy. It seems that simple, courteous salutations of respect are now microaggressions in those…persons’…fetid imaginations.

[The unhired educator Vito] Perrone said Kwiecinski told him that using “ladies” as a greeting was hostile and derogatory and that “the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem,'” he told the [Daily Hampshire] Gazette, adding that she also reprimanded him for using “ladies” as a microaggression.

Perrone’s reaction:

I was shocked. I grew up in a time when “ladies” and “gentlemen” was a sign of respect. I didn’t intend to insult anyone.

Nor did he insult anyone, or at least anyone worth taking seriously. The only ones insulted here are two folks in authority who spend their energy looking for ways to be offended rather than on ways to better educate the children of Easthampton.

Perrone dodged a bullet when that job offer was rescinded; Kwiecinski and Colby demonstrated very clearly the Precious and wrongly focused environment into which he almost stumbled.