Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

There is a dreadful malaise festering in our midst and it as dangerous to the modern world (really, the western world) as the bubonic plague was to the medieval world. Witness the two recent happenings we just lived through: the massacre at Virginia Tech and the life-altering debacle of the Duke “non-rape” case. Both events, although dissimilar, are nonetheless related clinically when viewed through the prism of political correctness, the slippery slope – The Waste Land – of the 21st century.

Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech, was a troubled, manifestly delusional individual who left a trail of deeply rooted psychotic markers, red flags of warnings from one end of the campus to the other:

· Campus police were called when two coeds complained he was stalking them

· The police told him to stop and left

· A few hours later he e-mailed a classmate that he might as well kill himself

· The police were called again and Mr. Cho was sent to an off –campus mental health facility, where a counselor recommended involuntary commitment

· A judge, deemed Mr. Cho a danger and sent him for an evaluation at Psychiatric Hospital

· There the doctor declared him mentally ill, but not an imminent threat and the judge then allowed him to seek outpatient treatment

Back in class, his behavior and writings was so irrational that Professor Lucinda Roy, then head of the English Department, notified the campus police and the student counseling service. In fact, the professor was so unnerved that she had a code alerting her assistant to call security. He told a classmate that he was going to vacation in North Carolina with Vladimir Putin. Several coeds dropped out of a poetry class they were taking with him, when he started to take pictures of them with his cell phone from beneath his desk. Then there was Stephen Davis, one of Cho’s classmates in a playwriting course who said after reading one of his dark plays, “This is the kind of guy who is going to walk into a classroom and start shooting people.”

Yet despite all this, Cho remained free and unfettered on campus. And while there is no question that bureaucratic bungling is amongst the usual suspects that are rounded up when a catastrophe strikes, the overarching culprit in this case is, political correctness and there are several factors in play:

· Universities are wary of the federal law (1974) protecting the privacy of students. School administrators are damned if they do notify parents of a student about his/her mental problems thus running afoul of the privacy laws and thereby enabling the student to sue or damned if they don’t make the notification, in which case the school will be brought into court by the parents of a student who committed suicide and sued for negligence. Heaven only knows what might NOT have happened had the parents been made privy to the problems.

The Duke non-rape case is a classic example of the due process of law competing with political correctness, which in today’s climate the rule of law consistently loses out. Consider the cast of characters: a young black woman violated by a group of young, white upper class males. This is the stuff that goes into the libretto of today’s tangled American opera of sex, race and privilege, yet another version of the Tawana Brawley fiasco, but not enough to call off the political correctness police. Universal condemnation followed in the media (led by The New York Times, of course) and the Gang of 88 Duke professors who pointedly said in an open letter that, “what is apparent every day now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday.” Case closed! Guilty until proven innocent, which is exactly where the case stood until North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper took over and proclaimed that the accused students, Collin Finerty, David Evans and Reade Seligmann are, “totally innocent of all charges!” and dismissed the case.

May America continue to be blessed with people such as Roy Cooper who will stand up for what is right and let the political chips fall where they may. ?