Bartleby, the Safe-Spacer

Bartleby was broken twice, first by the weight of the world at the dead-letter room of the post office, and then by the realization that his worth in life was as a scribe. Note how he goes from hard-working to burnt-out as his days fill with the copying of somebody else's qualified work and original thoughts.

Discussing safe spaces without mentioning trauma and PTSD is evidence of disinterest in investigating the topic at best and deception at worst. The purpose of content warnings and taking care to use respectful language is not about shielding participants from learning that bad things happen or that our everyday language encodes bias about the relative value of human beings. The participants whose well-being it seeks to promote already have this knowledge to a greater degree than Colin Fleming ever will.

Content warnings about rape matter because almost every classroom has a few women who've been raped, very possibly by someone in the classroom. PTSD evokes strong physiological responses that are more likely to be manageable with advanced warning.

Similarly, derogatory language about LGBTQ people is often delivered with the threat of violence or actual violence. I don't know a queer person who hasn't experienced some anti-queer violence. My wife worked in a LGBTQ center and had to hit the floor when someone emptied a gun into it from a car. The initial trauma is deepened by subsequent threat and fear.

So what goes on in safe spaces? I'm a Boomer, so I don't spend much time in classrooms, but I do spend a lot of time in spaces like activist conferences. Let me tell you, none of the discussions I see elsewhere are as passionate or as vigorously contested. This is a benefit of safety, not a casualty of it. I see the same thing at work when I succeed in creating psychological safety for my teams: passionate discussion in engaged teams.

As Szasz points out, this is the basic attitude of modern psychiatry. "What the hell do we do with these depressed people? They should repair themselves and get lively in the world (that we have miserably abused)."

The author fits the 'safe space' narrative to the story, but it's a little difficult to discount that maybe young people are just tired of the awfulness.

I mean stuff like this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_among_LGBT_youth_...) - you have gay girls who are fleeing home because they're families are trying to "rape them straight".

The Hetrick-Martin Institute showed that among homeless queer girls aged 13–15 in New York City, that 50% of them were homeless because they were fleeing familial corrective rape.

So, yeah. Young people get defensive about how others use words because the world is terrifying. That makes perfectly rational sense to me and it seems pretty sad that the author can't see that.

Not to mention the huge uptick in gun violence or lack of mental (or any other healthcare) or lack of good paying jobs or the fact that half the country is addicted to Oxy or heroin.

But no, it's the youth of today that are wrong. /s