No Patriotism?

The planning board for the upstate town of New Paltz has voted against saying the Pledge of Allegiance at its meetings after one of its members called it a “total waste of time.”

Because it’s such a waste to honor one’s country.

Board Member Amy Cohen wanted the board to recite the pledge at its bi-monthly meetings.

This is a government building, we have a flag here. Personally, coming in off the street to do our governance…I feel that it helps me kind of transition.

Vice Chair Lyle Nolan demurred.

It’s a pressure type of thing, because if you don’t stand, it looks like you’re against it and I don’t think we need that. We’re all adults. We’re all here to do a job[.]

Imagine that.  Government officials—all adults—feeling pressure over an expression of patriotism.

And this from Board Member Lagusta Yearwood:

…reciting an oath to the US flag “goes against the principles this country was founded on.”

Because patriotism has nothing at all to do with this country.

This has been another story in the annals of the Nanny State.

Precious Snowflakes

A four-month investigation into a University of Kansas professor who used a racial slur in class has concluded the word was used in an educational context and not intended to be racist.

Assistant communication studies professor Andrea Quenette has been on paid leave since November, when a group of eight graduate students filed a discrimination complaint after she used the slur in response to a question in class.

Graduate students, no less.  Do they really let children into graduate school these days?

Quennette used whatever word it was—even Fox News shied away from saying what the word was as it reported the simple fact of its use in the article at the link (honky?  whitey? ??)—in the course of discussing events at another school in her—get this—communications class.

But the graduate school’s children—some of whom weren’t even present—spent their energies not on learning but on seeking out an excuse to feel offended.  They wrote in their…complaint…that

Dr Quenette’s deployment of racially violent rhetoric not only creates a non-inclusive environment in opposition to one of the University of Kansas’ core tenets, but actively destroys the very possibility of realizing those values and goals[.]

Apparently deploying actual education, arraying actual discussions of events, doesn’t produce safe spaces, but rather destroys the very possibility of realizing a serious education for these precious little ones.