By S.B. Goldsmith
“My husband told me he needed his space, so I locked him outside”.
-Rosanne Barr
When I was growing up the greatest safe space I had was anywhere outside of my house. I liked going outside. I liked going to school. It’s where I learned my first bad word. It’s where I got into fights. It’s where I got into trouble. It’s where I became a person. I learned to become a member of the human race by knowing that school was sometimes safe and sometimes not, sometimes fun, and mostly boring.
I couldn’t wait to get outside and play football with my friends. My freshman year in high school I was so small and underdeveloped, that I was a perfect candidate for steroids while I was on the football team. Yet, I showed up each day after school only to get my ass kicked. Over and over again. Despite this, I still went back to practice and I still completed the season.
The safe space movement, on the other hand is trying to script moments of serenity and peace in a place where you are inevitably going to get hurt. Yet that is how we learn. It’s how we grow. It’s how we learn to take a hit and keep going anyway.
The GI Bill was created to offer tuition assistance to GIs returning home after World War II. My uncle who was a World War II vet, used it to attend Northwestern after serving in the Philippines. I have personally met many brave men and women who served tours of duty in combat zones, such as Fallujah, Tikrit, and places in Afghanistan, who returned to the States to attend college. The impression I got from all of them was this: they wanted to be treated like every other college student. They wanted to fit in, to belong. They didn’t want special treatment. They wanted to receive their degree just like every other student in school.
I wonder if any purveyors of the safe space movement have thought about the Battle of the Bulge, Normandy, Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raid? Certainly, there were American survivors of those battles and attacks who went on to use their GI Bill and attend college. The notion of safe spaces wasn’t invented yet. But, the thought may have been absurd to those surviving Veterans.
I am a strong proponent of mental health care. Almost all colleges offer these services on campus and for those that do not, they contract with local organizations to provide this type of care for students. With the advent of SSRIs or Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, as well as anti-psychotics, the institutions for the mentally ill have ostensibly been delegitimized as long term housing. Many decades ago, the push to encourage the seriously mentally ill, to a level of functioning on par with the rest of the world was considered a ground-breaking notion. It was the concept that those who suffer from psychiatric maladies could lead happy, productive, and constructive lives just like everyone else. The concept is widely known as deinstitutionalization. There are outpatient mental health services available to nearly everyone in these United States, even if you don’t have health care.
Yet, safe space proponents are proposing that the entire world be one gigantic psychiatric ward. Or in the Mel Brooks movie, High Anxiety wherein there is a hospital with a sign that says, “Hospital for the very, very, very, very, very nervous”!
The notion that the world must provide a safe space for anyone is tantamount to an alcoholic being triggered by advertisements on a billboard. “I saw this billboard with alcohol on it. They should really know better”! So, the next time someone gets a DUI or worse, injures someone in an accident due to being intoxicated, they can just say, “It’s not my fault, it’s that dang billboard”!
The world at large, college campuses, work environments, any public property are never a guarantee of security. In fact, “triggers” are everywhere. The world is inherently dangerous, rife with troubled people, mean actors, racism, sexism, and disappointments. But, if you can’t acknowledge the downside of life, you’ll never know the upside. Life is a dichotomy of both good and evil. Or as educator David O. McKay said, “The greatest battles of life are fought out daily in the silent chambers of our soul”.
The next time a college student asks for a safe space or a trigger warning, hopefully they will pause and recall the veterans who have risked their lives and returned to the college campus with the simple goal of completing their college education – without special treatment, without a safe space, without a trigger warning – only the notion that they’re there to be a student, just like everyone else.