Whose sensitivies?

This is a time of super-sensitivity in American culture.  A lot of our leaders are proclaiming they want to protect (white) students from any uncomfortable feelings, even to the point of banning books, which is always an alarming omen of a possible theocracy or dictatorship on the rise.  One political party seems much more interested in and disturbed by what bathrooms and pronouns people use than in coming up with, let's say, affordable health care.

I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately, and of course am distressed and disgusted by the trend toward censorship and the imposition of supposedly Biblical standards in schools.  And it has occurred to me that it's not really children these political leaders are trying to protect.  It is themselves; it is their own discomfort they are trying to legislate away.

It is an uncomfortable and disturbing time, after all.  Four years of Trump and the ensuing political rancor and divisiveness, the normalization of lying, mass shootings on the rise, Covid still and permanently among us, technology becoming more a more pervasive, invasive part of our lives, racial tension, sexual identity tension, the glut of information, disinformation, lies, rumors, and gossip available on the Internet.  It can feel for us elders as though everything we're used to is being upended.  I certainly feel it, the bewilderment of navigating a world that isn't mine any more, a world so changed as to feel almost unrecognizable.

During the late 60's and early 70's, when the women's liberation movement was right up there with the antiwar protests, the gay rights movement, and the social justice movement as a vehicle for change, I remember my dad saying that he didn't know if he was going to insult a woman by holding the door for her or not holding the door for her.  The etiquette he had learned was being torn to pieces.  Language was changing ("It's fire fighter, not fireman!"), mores were changing ("Why shouldn't two men get married?"), and it must have felt to my parents like an upside down world.  And let's face it: change is upsetting.

The trouble is that some of our elected leaders, rather than helping the rest of this through these changes with grace and wisdom, are instead using their positions of power to make laws and pass bills meant to make the world more comfortable for them.  They don't really care about kids (although they are wildly fond of fetuses); they just want to feel better themselves, want the world to feel safer and more familiar.  It's kind of sad, really and I could feel sorry for them if they weren't such power-hungry imbeciles.