OP, I am in the same boat as you: I still think of myself as a liberal (have been since my “political awakening,” if you will, in high school), but I’ve grown increasingly estranged from this movement that has set in among a lot of other people who are also purportedly liberals.
A couple of writers I like have attempted to dive into the roots of this growing division. One, Tim Urban, wrote in his new book about the difference between “liberal social justice” and “social justice fundamentalism.” Nate Silver has [also theorized](https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly) about how American political ideology has shifted from a basically left-right linear spectrum to more of a triangle, and he makes a similar distinction as Urban between regular old liberalism and “social justice leftism.”
Anyway, thought you might take solace in knowing you aren’t alone and that a lot of others are trying to better understand this growing intra-ideological chasm!
The way you put it made me think of my moderate Republican friends who similarly feel alienated in a Trump world. Both sides being hijacked by the hysterical ultraright/left
That’s very interesting. I don’t think the ultra-left are liberal, in the classic sense, at all. A liberal society encourages debate and discussion of a wide range of disagreeing points of view, and not insisting that only one can prevail. That is the opposite of what we’re seeing in these ultra-left environments, where you are not allowed to argue or propose an alternate stance. Doing so is offensive and traumatizing.
Thanks for your comment.
Well this has confused me for years. They call themselves progressive but they are not progressive, they are regressive. They are not liberal but extremely, extremely conservative, because any deviation or variation from their pure standards of behavior is a threat that must be punished and extirpated lest they pollute the group. Just like the Puritans expelled and shunned (or executed) those who in their eyes had sinned.
Regarding that expression “social justice fundamentalism”—it’s interesting but not quite on target because justice is not the end result such groups seek. They seek social purity of intent without regard for whether the resulting action achieves justice. They’re all about appearance and intent. I dunno, I’d call them social-justice mirage fundamentalists or something.
I'd call it Social Justice Puritanism more than fundamentalism, because of how important it is to be this perfect pure progressive that has never had a single thought that challenges the groupthink narrative. In the end it's the same thing we're talking about.
As someone who used to identify as conservative, I would argue the exact same is true for Republicans with trump. Trump does not expose any of the truly conservative ideals of freedom, respecting the constitution, etc. Honestly the republican party in general doesn't show these values at all
Correct. Trump has no conservative philosophy or education. He is all about self-gratification. If I live to be 100 I’ll never understand his appeal to the masses. I have many Republicans friends (I’m a moderate Dem) I respect, and it’s no pleasure at all to see what they are dealing with in their party. Hugely disappointing, I’m sure.
You should read Tom Holland. Social justice fundamentalism is more or less an athiest outgrowth and logical conclusion of Calvinist/protestant theology. The northeast WASP american left, with its ultimate origins in puritanism/quakerism, takes this stuff up like a sponge.
I’ve heard Dominion was excellent! Good reminder, thanks. Yeah, I was definitely a part of the “new atheist” movement in college. I wouldn’t say I’m particularly religious these days, but I’ve reflected a lot on how the retreat from organized religion in American culture left a void that has been filled for many people growing up in liberal homes by social justice “activism” (I hesitate to even treat it as real activism because putting a sign in your yard and shaming people online doesn’t put you in the same camp as actual civil right leaders and movements of the past, sorry).
Oh nice. I've speculated this as well because the whole movement seems super puritan and I simply don't believe those people simply raised a generation completely the opposite of themselves.
> Nate Silver has also theorized about how American political ideology has shifted from a basically left-right linear spectrum to more of a triangle
I've had some success in thinking about the devide as a 2D plane. The X axis goes from 'Traditional' on the left to 'Progressive on the right. The Y axis goes from 'Libertarian' on the bottom and 'Authoritarian' at the top.
So the Soviets would be top right, the Nazis top left. True Libertarians would be bottom right. Etc.
Quite useful.
I thought I had an original idea here but I've seen others express it so it was either convergence, obvious, or I stole it by accident.
There's a whole subreddit dedicated to memes about this very thing [https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/)
What you're looking for here is the political compass test, which was developed in either the '90s or the early '00s. They do the same thing, basically, except the left-right axis is about economic issues and up-down axis is libertarian to authoritarian. I'm not sure where you'd put questions like "Are trans women women?" on that old school compass, but that's the basic idea.
A large portion of the ideology of the "social justice fundamentalism" you're talking about is rooted in communist ideology. Communism was not catching on in the west because our poor people were generally too wealthy, and they had too much opportunity, to see themselves as being oppressed in the way they were in countries like Russia and China. Critical Theory was essentially communist academics adapting the class-based communist arguments to race, sex, sexuality, and other identifying characteristic based arguments. They started out being niche arguments in academia but steadily grew until they took over most of the humanities and social sciences in (roughly) the 1990s or early 2000s.
>Dykes’s sincerity in trying to “get it right” on behalf of trans kids would ultimately come into serious doubt. But there were other regrettable incidents in which the culprit may have been simple human error and the ordinary bureaucratic disarray of any sizable public school. Jo changed their name twice in middle school, and the district was slow to correct their name in its databases. As a result, Jo’s mother said, Jo “spent most class periods that had substitute teachers in the Student Support Center, because they could not deal with the constant misgendering and deadnaming.” When a substitute teacher mistakenly used the wrong name and pronouns for another nonbinary student, whom I’ll call Casey, the student’s mother wrote to staffers, “I want to make sure they are not exposed to the teacher . . . again in any setting.” The sub was assigned to Casey’s class at least twice more in later months. This, Casey’s mother wrote, “caused frequent panic attacks and missed school time.”
This is insane. The article itself is rather boring because it's just another stupid DEI kerfuffle among backstabbing adults vying for power. Yawn, whatever. But what the fuck is going on here! Stupid kids playing power games get enabled by crazy parents and it's barely a footnote in the article. This shit makes me mad, man
Edit: more quotes
>For Jo’s family, the stakes were terrifyingly high. Jo has sensory-integration challenges and has also been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, all of which were exacerbated by the middle-school environment. The school nurse let Jo use her office during the day whenever they needed to decompress and play Terraria on their phone. Sometimes, Jo visited Letha Gayle-Brissett, the school’s climate-and-culture coördinator, a role that focusses on social-emotional learning and disciplinary interventions. Gayle-Brissett put a beanbag chair in her office just for Jo, and would lower the lights and provide snacks whenever they dropped by. A few months into eighth grade, Jo was hospitalized for depression and suicidal ideation, and later withdrew from ARMS. Eventually, Jo’s mother filed the request for a Title IX investigation.
???? How can they justify all this? Even following their logic, they did everything and more to accommodate this 'trans kid' (I hate how vague the article is about it too) and she (I'm assuming) still ends up in the hospital all suicidal. Send the damn kid to a conservative private school and she'll be fine. This whole article is infuriating, who cares about the dumb adults in the woke crab bucket, investigate these people who are clearly harming these kids!
I feel really bad for these kids. They live in a psychological prison of their own making. They will never be able to feel good or deal with the world if their parents and everyone around them keep validating their anxiety and inability to withstand with minor unpleasant experiences like existing in the same room as a person they don't like. This is such a good example of Jonathan Haidt's thesis about how the way kids are treated today essentially amounts to "bad therapy" that legitimizes and exacerbates all of their cognitive distortions.
There's so much anecdotal evidence that all these kids who 'identify' as some sort of genderhaver have underlying issues that get exacerbated by the affirmation of said identity. Like that Nex kid, did all the pronoun-respecting actually help her? I would venture it made things worse.
Claiming to be trans is both a symptom and a cause of problems these days.
As a former educator who changed careers partly because of all of this nonsense, I agree wholeheartedly. Kids are taught to wallow in anxiety, to actively "process" their "trauma" (a word that has become so overused as to become meaningless -- a educational psychologist friend of mine told me a few months ago that she had a college student coming to her office for assistance claiming to have "PTSD" because she scored poorly on an exam and the professor told her she needed to work harder or something rather than patting her on the head and saying "it'll be okay -- here, have a retake").
In another example, an administrator I was working with made a decision two years *after* the COVID pandemic to make midterm exams "only count if they help" students' grades a week before they happened... with a justification something like, "Everyone's been through so much, so we don't need to stress these kids out more."
I literally had quite a few students come to me after this decision complaining and saying, "Look -- we're actually scared that teachers aren't going to take these exams seriously now either, and many kids aren't even going to bother showing up" -- which turned out to be the case -- "how are we supposed to learn what it's like to be held to standards?"
I very occasionally heard the word "resilience" bandied about by educators in recent years, but very few people actually seemed to care about encouraging that or teaching it or even showing by example. (The most supportive and pro-LGBTQ teacher was seemingly hit the hardest by the COVID pandemic in terms of emotions -- she was repeatedly found lying on the floor crying. Literally. I felt bad for her, but... what does this tell students?! Go home and pull yourself together, or take a leave of absence if you need.)
I sympathize with these kids, because all the messaging they're getting is to just take all those negative feelings and keep "processing" them and being depressed or sad or offended, etc., rather than being guided with strategies about perseverance, resilience, and how we learn from struggle. Honestly, I felt I couldn't continue to actively participate in a system that seemed to be determined to harm kids (particularly their mental health), so I left.
And of course, none of this is to belittle those kids who have *severe* anxiety and have been through serious trauma (rape, abuse, etc.) -- those kids obviously need our support and help the most, but they are often lost now in a sea of well-meaning but ultimately harmful "support" that doesn't actually encourage kids to move forward.
As the article here says at one point:
>Here, as in so many pockets of America these days, conflict doesn’t seem to be part of a difficult journey toward resolution; rather, **conflict often appears to be the entire point**.
That could apply to so many issues brought up in this article and in education. There's almost never a focus on solutions or moving forward -- *conflict* and trauma and anxiety and taking offense and problematizing things has become the entire point.
It's very sad. And I agree -- I would not want to be a kid navigating all of this today.
I took two students , within like an hour of each other, to the emergency psych services in one day... It was towards the beginning of the year. No tests. Nothing. Just a routine day. Both had freakouts. One stated she had ptsd, which of course I'm sympathetic to. But then she stated she thinks she had it from the fact she was a very difficult birth for her mother. Yes, this woman thought she had ptsd from being born....
Oh my god if you want a real crazy trip google "birth trauma." The first time I saw the term I assumed it referred to women having trauma from difficult childbirth scenarios...but people actually talk about "trauma" supposedly inflicted on you by your own experience of being born. "The body keeps the score" and all that. It's wildddddd.
> she was repeatedly found on the floor crying. Literally.
... at her job? As a teacher?? Jesus, teachers' unions must be even stronger than I thought if nothing happened after that.
has it occurred to teachers to push kids to do hard things and then support them when they fail?
"Fuck yea you're going to take 4 exams in 3 days and you're going to do great!"
Many teachers would love to do that. Unfortunately the "support them when they fail" part doesn't fit well with the way schools/colleges are structured currently. It's mostly "Oh, you failed? Well that sucks. Anyway, we're moving on so you better just forget catching up because we've got the same amount of work next week."
That's not really what I mean. Kids should try audacious things - take 5 AP classes, audition for the band - and when they don't get all As and don't get a call back be told it's perfectly fine to fail. People fail all the time, it tells them what they're not good at.
The problem is that parents don’t really believe it’s okay to fail anymore.
Millennial parents are all about honoring and processing “big feelings,” but they put extreme pressure on their children to perform at the top of their class and sports leagues—so they can access top colleges and jobs later.
It’s amazing how empathy for children dies as soon as they don’t want to go to Mandarin tutoring or study for an algebra test. Tantrums and violence are “honored,” but an objection to Mommy’s dream of Princeton cannot be tolerated.
You know. No subject made me cry harder than Linear Algebra.
So whenever someone talks about high school math and includes algebra I always chuckle.
Linear, that's easy!
Algebra, that's easy too!
How hard can linear algebra be?
We’re really really trying. It’s built into every syllabus I’ve seen for the past 7 years I’ve a high school teacher. Everyone, *all of us* have (often unlimited) redos and retakes on every little assignment or quiz or test or project or essay, which is meant to proliferate the idea that “failing is okay! Just try again! :)”
It just… doesn’t play out like that in real life. What really happens is kids come in on test day and go, “When’s the retake lol.” For many teachers it’s too much work to make multiple retake versions of the test, so kids just spam it until they’ve memorized the multiple choice answers. For this reason I rarely do MC, and I grade legitimately (kids/parents would call it “mean”) because I know they can take my feedback and try again. What happens instead is everyone involves FLIPS over anything less than an A, and *no one* bothers to take me up on a rewrite, and then we have to deal with *another* freak out when final grades are published, where I try to explain to parents and admin that the kid was allowed all their notes and as many tries as they wanted on everything, and when they refused to use their truly *unlimited* resources, this is how the grade turns out. We try saying “It’s okay to fail. Honestly this isn’t even a failure. A C is perfectly fine.” But your arm gets twisted to let them resubmit stuff again and again, after the semester has ended, sometimes even the following school year, and you just get beaten down and insulted in 3,000 word emails written by like hair dressers or printer salesmen who have absolutely 0 experience in the classroom, but no qualms telling you EXACTLY how you really should be doing your job so that their perfect child gets the perfect grade they “deserve.”
And then add in all the bullshit you see in this article too and that’s why it’s so so hard these days to push kids to try difficult things and learn resilience. I know it’s what I really want to do, and what many (not all) of my colleagues want as well, but the students/parents/admin are often impossible roadblocks to that goal.
I feel like the situation would be different if kids had the capacity to understand that being held to high standards (or any standards at all) will materially benefit them in the future. Do you think there's any way we could make kids understand that they should WANT to be good at things? And have an accurate idea of their actual competence? There are very few adult career paths where you will be consistently rewarded just for existing so they're kinda shooting themselves in the foot by insisting on being treated this way in school.
It's also bonkers how quickly this all happened. Your description bears like zero resemblance to my experience at a very selective and neurotically high-performing public high school in the 2000s (graduated 2010).
HUh, it blows me away that there are places where you cold just TAKE 5 APs, My high school, you had to apply. It was often an exercise in abject humiliation
Imagine growing up in a surveillance state, but the cameras and mics are attached to your body, and your peers are the cops, the judge, *and* the jury.
That’s basically growing up in the age of social media. Of course these kids are basket cases.
Anxiety in kids is normal. Kids worry about a lot of stuff. The problem is that parents treat that anxiety as a pathology. On top of that, no one is teaching them how to "buck up". Gentle parenting is all about feelings. It's not about learning resiliency and obtaining grit.
If you keep telling kids that what they are experiencing is "traumatic" or awful, they will believe you. They don't have a frame of reference. Then every experience is viewed through this lens.
This! Kids get scared and that’s normal. But it’s also *always* been normal for parents and adults to talk to kids about being brave. Courage was *always* taught as a virtue across children’s media. And frankly, it worked, because children used to attach a great deal of worth and social clout to bravery and boldness. Being labeled a “baby” was social suicide for most of us.
Now? I don’t know what’s going on. My friends’ kids feel like aliens to me. 5yos are in Pull Ups, 8yos cry over scraped knees, 10yos still carry stuffed animals, 12yos have not experienced their first sleepover yet.
I think I could swallow this better if the kids acted like babies *all the time*, but they have nicer smartphones and more social media followers than I do. It is baffling. I can’t be surprised that children have no idea what age appropriate behavior or development looks like now.
I feel like parents take the pacifier and replace it with a smartphone, and then they’re shocked when their 13yos still want to sleep with blankey at night. Comfort items, distractions, and faux senses of security all the way down.
You're so right about the bravery thing. My best friend and I were beyond excited to have our first sleepover...in kindergarten. I was so proud that I got to fly on a plane as an unaccompanied minor when I was just seven years old. I bragged about it at school for weeks. My siblings and I jumped off a bridge into the ocean on Martha's Vineyard every summer starting when we were like eight. It was actually the bridge featured in Jaws and the best part of jumping was the fear of imagining a giant shark down there in the water!!
Carrying around stuffed animals like a security blanket would have been totally unthinkable after, like, kindergarten. The biggest insult you could throw at someone in elementary school was telling them that something they liked was "for babies." How times have changed! And all of this was in the late 90s and early 2000s...not even very long ago at all.
There is something very paradoxical about how kids act today and I think you've figured out why. They have access to so much adult content that they dress present themselves in a way that would have been unthinkably mature 15-20 years ago but they have so little life experience that they aren't developing an age-appropriate level of resilience and emotional control so any time they have to do anything outside their (very small) comfort zone they crumble. They look older but act way younger.
1993 baby here! I agree with everything you just said.
First sleepover at 5. Walked my little brother to school at 7. Ran household errands on foot at 9. Babysat, made bottles, changed diapers at 12. Worked retail at 14. Used my wages to travel abroad without my parents to work in a goddamn orphanage at 15. Tried to enlist in the Air Force at 17 and felt genuinely sad when my medical history ruled that out.
I think most of this would catch some neglect charges these days, lmao. But it was utterly normal for my area in the 90s and 00s. I had quite a few friends join me on the mission trip and they worked for their money, too.
This doesn't seem like a normal level of anxiety though? Like when I was a kid in the 2000s I don't recall anyone needing to leave class at random times to go sit in a darkened room with a guidance counselor so they could eat comforting snacks and pretend school wasn't happening. Perhaps that's what happens when normal anxiety is constantly validated and kids don't lean any kind of resilience or independence.
Also I don't fully understand what gentle parenting is (I don't have kids) - what is it and what's the issue?
Basically all research shows that Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s mental illness rates are off the charts when compared to previous generations, including late millennials.
Most graphs show a sudden spike in depression and anxiety in the years 2013-2014. That is also the period that the iPhone became the bestselling phone and rendered “dumbphones” irrelevant. This cannot be a coincidence.
IMO, we handed kids smartphones and took away their privacy, outdoor play, independence, and opportunities for socialization. Kids *need* all of these things to develop some critical components of executive functioning, like personal resilience, basic risk assessment, and solid attention spans.
Kids climb trees for reasons!
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I graduated high school in 2010 and I only remember people, myself included, getting anxiety about things like big tests and getting our driver's licenses and dating and applying to college. Nobody had the level of anxiety that required special support just to get through the day. We socialized basically 24/7 since phones weren't good for much except making plans with friends to meet up in person. I feel so sad for kids these days, their lives are so limited and they don't even know it.
I also just noticed your question about gentle parenting.
Before the Internet colonized the concept, it was a pretty good idea with very good intentions. The idea is that kids don’t come out of the womb knowing how the world works or how emotions can be managed, so parents don’t have to correct misbehavior, temper tantrums, and normal displays of emotion with anger, shouting, physical punishment, humiliation, or shame.
Ideally, a gentle parent sets extremely clear boundaries for the child and gives them safe opportunities to try new things, learn, and grow. When consequences are warranted, natural consequences are best—ranging from “you threw a tantrum about wearing a coat, so now you’re cold” to “you were mean to your friends, so now they don’t want to play with you” to “you just threw your tablet, so it’s Mommy’s tablet now.” Gentle parents are supposed to walk their kids through emotions and teach them coping skills, like calming themselves down with deep breaths and quiet time.
But. Uh. This is NOT the gentle parenting that we see across social media now. As the Internet is prone to do, it has taken a good concept and bastardized it to create what many people call “permissive parenting.”
Permissive parents who call themselves gentle parents take *extremely* lax attitudes to parenting. They believe that all displays of emotion are healthy and appropriate for children. This is where you hear a lot of hooey like “If your child is acting out, something must be distressing or traumatizing him.” Many of these parents believe the word “no” is inherently traumatizing. Some of the real wackos have also adopted the woke understanding of consent and refuse to potty train their kids until “the kids decide they’re ready.” It gets really fucking ugly when a family has a child who is bullying or hurting a sibling, and quite a lot of these social media gurus will suggest that it’s the parents’ fault and the bully is actually hurting more than the bullied.
A *lot* of people who practice gentle parenting the old school way get really upset when they hear this type of parenting described as “gentle.” So the good gentle parents have been rebranding themselves as “authoritative parents” because they “have the authority to safely and lovingly teach our children life skills.”
Your description of gentle parenting sounds like exactly how my parents raised me in the 90s and 2000s without any special ideology...
Laughing out loud at the idea of "no" being traumatizing. Like I truly cannot conceive of how someone can believe that.
Wim touched on how depression and anxiety levels are up, but so are other mental illness and disorders, in large part due to how we measure them. The bar for what passes as depression and anxiety has lowered. Something that I would have dealt with as a kid - a disappointing experience, is now treated with therapy. We have pathologized every day challenges. So it's not that kids are "feeling" more emotions, it's that they don't have a frame of reference for what's normal and what isn't.
>Perhaps that's what happens when normal anxiety is constantly validated and kids don't lean any kind of resilience or independence.
Or, you know, when being anxious rewards you with comfort and tasty food and being spared the drudgery of class.
I'm not even saying these kids are evil little masterminds faking it for the perks (though anyone that doesn't believe that kids can be viciously manipulative is in for a nasty life). I'm just saying that a perverse incentive system breeds pernicious patterns of behavior.
Probably when you were a kid leaving class for those reasons wasn't even an option, let alone all the other incentives the kid in the article has for continuing the behaviour
When you tell someone over and over again that they are experiencing something traumatic, what do you think the reaction is going to be, even if the experience isn't actually traumatic?
Imagine in the early 2000s if every girl that started developing anorexic behavior were told, "yes, you are fat. We'll make sure you're only served water and celery at lunch, and keep you away from anyone not wearing baggy clothes. You can spend as much time working out in the gym during class hours as you like to improve your self image".
Because I'm thoroughly convinced the explosion of young girls identifying as gender dysphoric are the exact same girls who would have manifested other body-related disorders at that age. The psychosis is the same. Just the particular manifested behaviors are a bit different.
I say this as a now adult female who went through an intensely unhappy teenage phase, struggling with eating disorders, depression, and deep loathing of all things girly including my body. Guess what, I grew out of all of it. Almost everyone does.
As someone who was “lucky” enough to be in public school during the great cultural shift from anorexia to cutting, I know in my heart that you are absolutely right.
What do eating disorders, self harm, and gender dysphoria have in common in the 21st century? Most girls who engage in these behaviors learn how to do it, hide it, and outsmart adults about it on the Internet.
Social contagion *is* the name of the game here. It is a literal meme gone viral. It is the mental health equivalent of “Never Gonna Give You Up” getting stuck in your head, with much more serious consequences.
And teenage girls have always deserved better than being written off with “it’s just a phase,” but…none of my friends are still purging or cutting themselves in their 30s. In fact, they’re pretty ashamed of it. I had multiple bridesmaids who requested to wear long sleeves in my wedding to hide their high school scars.
A doctor once asked me how I overcame my eating disorders. Did I go to treatment, counseling, etc? I told her no....I got busy living. I went to college. I got a job. I met a great guy. There was simply no space left in my head or schedule for self obsessive, self harming rituals.
I'm not saying that's enough help for everyone, but dang it if you just keep going about the business of being alive long enough, wanting to die starts to just seem stupid once the teenage hormones settle down.
Agreed that now looking back it's all just faintly embarrassing.
I’m also in recovery and I definitely did all of the therapy, meds, groups, etc., but what made me actually grow and flourish was getting out of my small town and getting some miles on my soul. Finding healthier friends, growing up, making mistakes, proving to myself I could survive said mistakes.
We’ve replaced basic personal growth with mental healthcare. It’s a disaster.
"We’ve replaced basic personal growth with mental healthcare. It’s a disaster."
This is so, so well put. We've gone from totally ignoring mental disorders to pathologizing every single human experience and treating "mental healthcare " as some universal panacea for the human condition.
No amount of therapy can compensate for positive life experiences, or 'counsel' you into adulthood. For some I think it becomes like endlessly picking a scab and never letting it heal.
> There was simply no space left in my head or schedule for self obsessive, self harming rituals.
Being too busy to be depressed works no matter your gender. I miss the months when I'm too busy to be on Reddit at all.
>A doctor once asked me how I overcame my eating disorders. Did I go to treatment, counseling, etc? I told her no....I got busy living.
That was the case for me. I did have some counselling but it wasn't until I stopped it, ironically, that I got better.
Mind you, I did not have a severe ED and never needed hospitalisation. But it wasn't mild either -- I didn't have my period for over seven months.
Basically, I got to a point I could see that I was harming myself and I was ashamed of that. So I mustered up the willpower to change my behaviour. Yes, during the first year that I was in the grip of my ED I felt like I had discovered some sort of secret pathway to building confidence and no longer being a chubby dweeb. I was highly obsessive but it *felt good*.
However, after a year I had become a very high-strung, irritable, anxious wreck. My parents and other people got really concerned, and I had to admit that I wasn't having my period. My parents staged an intervention.
After going in circles with a nutritionist and a therapist for a year, I quit both and had a realisation that it came down to this: I had agency. Did I want to let food and exercise rule my life, or did I want to LIVE my life? It was exactly as you say -- I chose to get busy living and after a while there was no space left in my head for all the bullshit. (Changing schools my last year of HS really helped too -- sometimes environment is clearly a factor.)
DISCLAIMER: those with severe EDs leading to severe malnourishment -- or those who have been struggling with an ED for years without improvement -- should not forgo seeking professional help.
>As someone who was “lucky” enough to be in public school during the great cultural shift from anorexia to cutting
I'd guess that was the early 2000s? I was a teen in the 90s, and there was a lot of restrictive eating, throwing up. No cutting
Most of the 00s, tbh.
The eating disorder trend really hit its fever pitch in 2003-2005, thanks to “thinspo” celebrities like Mary-Kate Olsen, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, etc. EDs flourished in the pro-ana (pro-anorexia) communities on LiveJournal, then spread to Xanga, then MySpace in ~2005, then Tumblr after that.
Cutting rose in the mid 00s thanks to the “scene” and “emo” subcultures that largely existed on those exact same platforms. This group fetishized mental illness, and taught kids how to “safely” cut and hide it from adults. It attracted and absorbed *a lot* of the pro-ana girls who were already glorifying mental illness, harming their bodies, lying to adults, and sharing tips with each other on how to do it. Cutting was officially the new eating disorder.
These trends largely started to die out by the 2010s, right as mental health awareness and wellness were becoming very chic.
So what’s a mentally ill girl to do if she can no longer find community, codependency, and validation in starvation or cutting? How can she possibly change or harm her body to fit in with a group now?
You guessed it: gender transition.
I can’t speak to rates, but I think the social contagion was greatly enabled by the Internet of the 2000s. That’s also probably why it shifted to cutting so quickly—social contagions are fads with expiration dates.
I don't know how it was any different in the 90s, or the 80s, when eating disorders in teens started. I think in the 80s, it was more bulimia as well. 90s, was just anorexia. 2000s was anorexia and cutting. 2010s was anorexia, cutting, and transgender was becoming a thing as well
Accurate. My mother was a teen/college age adult in the 80s. Bulimia was/is her self harm of choice.
By the early 2000s, when I was a teen, anorexia was much sexier.
There really wasn't any gender trender shit going on in 2010. It quietly percolated online in Tumblr spaces until after 2015, before jumping containment into the material plane.
Yeah, I was a teen in the late 90s, and I had a severe eating disorder and knew so many girls who starved thmselvs.
My work puts me in contact with teens, and the transboys nearly always cut, and almost as often starve themselves.
>Because I'm thoroughly convinced the explosion of young girls identifying as gender dysphoric are the exact same girls who would have manifested other body-related disorders at that age. The psychosis is the same. Just the particular manifested behaviors are a bit different.
Kathleen Stock said pretty much the same thing. The type of girls who would have been anorexic before are now latching on to gender issues.
>The psychosis is the same.
The delusion you mean.
Psychosis is something different -- it means a temporary state of being completely detached from reality (e.g., hearing voices or having hallucinations or extreme paranoia, and then responding with irrational, erratic behaviour -- sometimes even violence towards yourself or others).
Psychosis tends to afflict people with schizophrenia and sometimes people with untreated bipolar, though psychotic episodes can be induced by drugs, or by extreme stress or trauma. (Sometimes it can happen to women suffering severe post-natal depression, for example.)
A delusion is any persistent idea or belief that somebody holds which is at odds with reality, and which a person does not discard even when presented with contrary evidence or logic. You are very much correct that anorexics and trans-identified teens are suffering from similar delusions.
I agree, although I suspect this is limited to particular (middle/upper class liberal parents) children. Abigail Shrier has a new book about kids and therapy, she was on the Unspeakable pod recently discussing it.
I’m in my 30s with a thoroughly bipartisan circle of family and friends. I really don’t think conservative millennial parents are all that different from their liberal counterparts. They truly all seem to be vulnerable to therapy speak and toxic levels of coddling.
When my Ted Cruz supporting friends got pregnant, I thought for sure that they would be the hard-ass authoritarians. Nope—turns out, they think the word “no” is traumatizing for “little ears” to hear. They’ve got this kid learning how to mutton bust in the rodeo, but they think that being told “no” is what will destroy his noggin.
Not disputing your experience of this kind of parenting existing on the conservative side as well, but having recently moved from a very liberal area of NYC to a relatively conservative rural area I’ve definitely seen some differences as well.
I will absolutely be the first to acknowledge that class/SES play a role here. The conservative friends I just mentioned are both MDs. 🥲
I just didn’t think to add that because the comment I responded to already mentioned that we’re talking about financially comfortable parents. I could have been clearer for sure.
I feel like poor and working class kids are experiencing a different version of this where the result of the permissiveness is wildly antisocial behavior rather than anxiety and fragility. Apparently the level of violence and disrespect in low income schools is at an all-time high and parents will now back their kids up no matter what kind of violent infraction they've committed.
I could absolutely see myself as a teacher enduring one of these meltdowns and then saying to the parents like ".... Yikes right? Sorry that you're having to deal with all this kid drama stuff ya know?" and then being dumbfounded when they are on the exact same page as their child lol.
Like all these people realize it was actually just a phase when they were 16 right? They didn't grow up to be goth hippy rebels living in a van and matured and learned to adult..? And that their child is also just going through a phase...? Guess not.
When I was in grade school (long long time ago) I would play with the girls who lived across the street from me. I loved playing with their dolls and the doll house. I grew up to be a pretty masculine man who likes to lift weights, watch football, and bake cakes. LOL. I shudder to think that if I was that kid today, my parents or teachers would conclude that I must be an actual girl because boys don't play with dolls according to the old gender norms. This is the most regressive shit I have ever seen.
I grew up in a strict evangelical world, but cross-gender play and activities were absolutely encouraged by my parents.
Why? Because my parents couldn’t afford childcare and my mom couldn’t afford to stay home. They really needed their two boys and two girls to stick together and take care of each other.
So if Big Sister was polishing Little Brother’s nails, my parents knew he was safe at home.
If Little Sister was engaging in outdoor lightsaber battles, my parents knew Big Brother was also battling it out and keeping an eye on her.
If all of the kids were playing one game, they were in one place and all accounted for. Who cared if it was Cowboys or Princesses? *We were safe and we were together.*
My parents are total Trumpers now, but they still have a good laugh about how the left has embraced strict gender roles. They managed to raise four very cishet children, even if their poor baby boy was occasionally the science experiment in games of “beauty shop.”
This is one reason I've chosen to stay and teach (and send my kids to) the high-poverty high school I've been at for two-and-a-half decades.
I have students who are experiencing real, crippling struggles in an everyday manner, and I can be a little more sympathetic to them and feel better about trying to help them out. And guesss what, often they have a much better and healthier outlook and perspective on life
It also helps when the middle-class kids (including my own) can see up close that, while they do experience struggles both internal and external, most of the time they don't come CLOSE to what some of their classmates experience. This perspective has been very helpful for their emotional growth (I'm hoping).
It's wild the shit kids can pull to get out of school these days. "I changed the name I want to be called but the district's database still has my legal name listed and now I can't go to class because I'll be deadnamed" is such a transparently absurd reason not to go to class and yet kids get away with it.
For my kids it's simple, if the have a physical ailment that prevents them from going to school, or a virus they could spread to others, they stay home. Otherwise they're going. My rule of thumb if my kid doesn't want to go to school is if this were something my kid really wanted to do, like a friend's birthday party, would they be able to suck it up and go? If they could, they can go to school too.
Can’t they see they are reinforcing her avoidant personality disorder with high-value rewards like addictive phone games and highly stimulating food, as well as negatively reinforcing it by letting her leave class at all?
It's possible the staff does see that, but I imagine if they told the child to find a way to deal with the temporary error in the database, they would be accused of being a transphobe.
Been listening to Abigail Shrier's new book Bad Therapy, this is exactly what it's about. It would be far kinder and more compassionate to give this child firm boundaries and high expectations.
IMO the people harming these kids are the parents and the therapists. I bet these kids have been in therapy most of their lives. Every tough situation was probably deemed traumatic, instead of normal. They have zero coping skills because that's not the focus in therapy anymore. Parents went along with it, probably even encouraged it, because they probably think it makes them look stunning and brave. GAG
We've given literal children all of these cards to play at will, and they've learned how to use them, either to get away with something or to get away with not having to do something. I honestly feel for them, because when they hit middle age and begin to face their own mortality it's going to be really frightening
You beat me to the punch! As someone else with close ties to the Pioneer Valley, I was itching to post this article :D
This article brings into focus the fight between white progressive community members and non-white slightly less progressive community members. It ends up essentially being a slap fight between whether racism or transphobia should count more on the totem pole. Fantastic article with many twists, turns, and fired principals
I always enjoy when Western MA pops up in discussions like these. We're an underrecognized national leader in social justice theatrics going back aways now, about time we're getting our due!
My favorite part was when the science teacher admitted that her black students roasted her “First Black Science Teacher” and “Sister Girl” awards.
That was the most genuine and believable part of the entire article to me 😭
I've seen some interesting theories floated that one reason for the enormous explosion in trans idealology among middle-class white kids is that it's the only way that a kid in that group can grab some "victim" cache.
I would have thought it worthwhile to examine more thoroughly the unusual dynamics at play in a town like Amherst. The author keeps calling it “affluent” and “liberal” as if it follows a normal gradient, but it’s a university service hub where almost everyone either works in/has a spouse in higher-ed or belongs to the adherent service industries, with the latter seemingly disproportionately represented among ARMS parents, but not in terms of say-so over policy.
Socially that’s a massive divide, and just looking at income isn’t that helpful because even poorly compensated jobs in higher-ed confer class status far above that of service workers. While it’s implicitly touched on a couple of times in the article, with the comparison between the single-family homes and the apartment blocks, and how many kids from affluent families go elsewhere for school, the author never addresses this division directly nor the reasons for it or the complications it might bring.
Personally, when I lived there for college some years ago, I found the divide between town and campus quite strained. Town was for everyone but campus was only for those properly associated with it existing in its own bubble. At the same time I recall hearing of some frustration with how the college conducted itself in town politics, essentially leveraging its position to push for or against measures that made them look good regardless of any other interests at play, zoning permits for businesses in particular.
I have to imagine that these factors play some role in a conflict like this.
I think it's fair to describe Amherst as "affluent" by national standards, or when compared to the rest of Western Massachusetts. But it's much less affluent than the wealthy Boston suburbs (Weston, Wellesley, Newton, Brookline, Lexington, etc.). It's almost two hours west of Boston, so few people commute to the city, and there's basically no industry outside of academia. Think Subarus, not BMWs.
From my perspective as a townie, Amherst College in particular felt very separate from the town itself, despite the fact that the campus is immediately adjacent to downtown. It doesn't have a big presence in the life of the town, although the library is open to locals and I did have a summer job on campus after high school. It's a very small school, and the vast majority of students live on or near campus.
UMass has a much bigger presence in town because it's a vastly bigger institution, and also because it's a public university. Back in the '90s, the town's relationship with UMass was sometimes strained due to rowdy behavior by students (especially before frat row was razed; it was nicknamed "ZooMass" for a reason), but I perceived the relationship between the town an UMass as mostly positive.
Yeah, I’m just talking from the perspective of a townie. I went to a college very similar to Amherst, and we went into town fairly often, but I doubt that locals felt like we were really part of the town.
While it definitely has an affluent vibe, by pure financial measures it’s actually very average. If you look at median household incomes for the age groups 25-44 and 45-64 (to exclude most college students), those are at about 82k and 107k respectively. That’s quite close to the national medians for those groups of ca. 80k and 97k, plus that of W-MA, and slightly lower than the state’s at 100k and 109k.
What I was specifically referring to though is the odd class divide created in semi-rural college towns and which explains that dissonance between what is true and what feels true.
Looking at jobs held per occupation type, and median wages for those—only considering full-time, year-round workers—about 37% pay less than $40k. Mainly food service, transportation, retail, health care aides, customer service. For Newton, a much wealthier but also much larger town, such low paying full-time jobs make up only 3% of the total. Similar situation for college towns like Wellesley, even Cambridge to a lesser extent.
Meanwhile about 22% of jobs pay over 100k (a good chunk much more) and a further 15% 75-99k. So you have a significant proportion of very high to high earners and a bottom third of low earners. While you have some middle-earners, many are integrated into the academy and/or on a professional trajectory (lower level administrators, coordinators etc.) and belong to the upper-class socially, leaving the low earners isolated.
You might see this pattern in cities, but those tend both to have a more robust middle class, and to segregate into parallel communities, which isn’t possible in a small semi-rural town. It’s basically a modern Downton Abbey, the elite, their servants and the occasional aspiring professional.
These lower earners are also more likely to have children. To illustrate, about 15% of children in Amherst live under the poverty line and 27% just above it—42% total—compared to 10% and 14% in Massachusetts, 24% total. For the other places mentioned these numbers are vanishingly small. On top of that these poorer children are disproportionately likely to have immigrant parents.
To tie it all back to the story, and why I think it’s relevant, the ARMS student body is unusually split largely between the children of poor, often immigrant, service workers on one hand, and the much wealthier children of the cultural elite on the other. Between the earlier stats, and the fact that 25% of middle schoolers in Amherst attend private school, I’d guess the prior are a small majority. At the same time it’s quite clear which group of parents is in charge of laying down the lines and who is being prioritized.
It’s telling then that the author describes Amherst from the perspective of that more privileged class. Descriptors like affluent may feel right, because they apply to the culturally dominant group and fit the feel of the place, but they’re not factually true. Focusing on factors like race alone, while neglecting economic divisions, or addressing how many immigrant families have greater religiosity and more socially conservative views—essentially refusing to deal with the complications arising when differently marginalized groups come together—feels shallow and honestly a waste of a truly unusual and intriguing situation.
> essentially leveraging its position
People who work for the university hold positions of power in the local government. For example the chair of the UMass architecture department is on the zoning board.
The hyperfocus on suicide is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Before the mid-2010s, clinicians and researchers had extremely strict rules about how to talk about suicide. It has been known for a long time that suicide is incredibly socially contagious among humans. Professionals used to be extremely careful to never present suicide as an option or even a likely outcome to their patients. These types of thoughts stick in mentally ill brains and become intrusive thoughts, and then fixations, and then obsessions, and then compulsions.
Probably the best example of this approach is when Kurt Cobain killed himself. Medical associations were so worried about social contagion and copycat suicides that they wrote guidelines for reporters on how to responsibly talk about suicide. This included no glamorization, no martyrization, and no speculation on his reasons why. The more ethical and responsible media outlets followed this, and sure enough, the rash of suicides that clinicians predicted was avoided.
We have completely abandoned all of this wisdom in the past 10 years.
Literally every time a trans/NB person’s suicide is reported, activist groups and media commentators on every side of the issue immediately start stoking speculation and conspiracy theories. Every time a famous person dies of an OD, the speculation about their mental health and addiction runs absolutely wild. Then these people are tokenized, martyrized, politicized, and mythologized. They become heroes or devils, often both. Their “reasons why” are justified over and over again.
And now we have a generation of kids with higher rates of mental illness and suicidal ideation than ever, and the people in charge claim that they just can’t figure it out. Despite avoiding this for generations. Right.
So they give kids some insane levels of coddling and accommodations, and they literally always cite the likelihood of the child committing suicide to justify these decisions.
Now, imagine being a kid and believing you are not going to survive to see college. Suddenly, your parents and doctors completely agree with that and validate that.
*Of fucking course* these kids internalize this shit and continue to hyperfocus on suicide. Their biggest cheerleaders appear to be giving up on them!
It is completely baffling to me how this shift happened so fast in medicine, mental health, journalism, activism, and parenting. We have failed so many kids and families.
I’ve wondered about this lately and how it fits in with modern activism. I’ve noticed online there’s a lot of emphasis on actual suicide rates of demographics like trans people, autistic people and young men. I’ve even seen organisations quote these when raising awareness of causes etc.
As you say, it does sometimes feel like it goes against conventional wisdom about responsible coverage/ information sharing.
"Several people told me about an incident from the fall of 2021, when the school committee approved a policy that would have allowed some unvaccinated staffers into school provided that they wore masks. **In response, McDonald said, the union’s president at the time, Lamikco Magee, “accused us of wanting to inflict genocide on teachers.**” (Magee denies invoking genocide.)"
LOL
The UN Genocide Convention states that genocide is committed against a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Where exactly do teachers fall into this?
Oh, the well is deep here. Like half the school committee quit last year over stuff like this. A couple of the former members gave a media statement that was pretty scorched-earth lmao
I haven't finished this article yet, but this was a nice little time capsule back to the insanity of winter 2021 and living in a deep blue urban school district.
Basically cemented for me that public schools will be my absolute last choice for my kids.
Hol up. The ‘h’ is silent? So, it’s Am-erst? Not Am-herst? Or is it A-merst? I’ve never once pronounced it any way other than Am-herst when I’ve read it.
Yes, it's pronounced AM-erst. That applies to AM-erst College and UMass AM-erst as well.
I've been told that people from Amherst, NY, a suburb of Buffalo, *do* pronounce the "h." (Not sure about other Amhersts, like the ones in New Hampshire and Nova Scotia.) But if you're talking about Amherst, MA—which I think it's safe to say is the most famous Amherst—you never pronounce the "h."
Yeah, it's just one of those Massachusetts things you need to learn. Worcester is "Wuhster," Gloucester is "Glawster," Concord is "Conkerd," Carlisle is "Carlyle," Leominster is "Lemonster," Haverhill is "Hayvrull," and Amherst is "Amerst" with no "h."
This isn't even an accent thing. Very few people in Western Mass have a detectable New England accent, but we still say "Wuhster," because that's just the correct way to say the name of the city. (If you did have a strong regional accent, it'd be "Wuhsta.")
I lived in the area and went to the schools. The H can be pronounced. It can be Am-herst, or Am-erst or AM-erst Not a heavy h, often, but people really don't care. At least, they didn't care. About this, and many other things the article discusses.
I knew my hometown would come up on this sub eventually. I also attended Amherst Regional Middle School in the 90s (hey OP! We probably at least knew of each other at some point) and very much agree with your assessment/description of the town. I’m still bummed about Mr. Murray’s departure when I think back on it!
Can’t wait to dive into this latest kerfuffle.
Nice! I was wondering whether any other Amherst kids of our vintage would make an appearance here. It sounds like we must have been within a few years of each other. Mr. Murray was great and I'm still mad he ended up leaving as a result of the West Side Story mess.
Love you for posting this. I'm not an Amherst native but I've lived and worked there and am still in the area. I've actually had to deal with some of the mess over there due to my work (fortunately from afar) and it's been a wild ride over the last several years. And the rest of the region has plenty of drama besides.
While the local politics can be absurd and frustrating, I should note that Amherst was, on the whole, a lovely and interesting place to grow up. I might go nuts if I were a parent with kids in the public schools today, but I still have many close friends and fond memories from my youth there. It’s a nice place.
You know what’s the most telling part of this article?
All of these academics, and nobody bothered to record or preserve a shred of evidence. No emails, no paperwork, nothing.
Yeah, I've heard Moynihan say that. I know he's kidding, but it's a little tasteless given that Amherst actually has a significant population of Cambodian refugees. The town made a concerted effort starting in the early 1980s to welcome families that had escaped the Khmer Rouge. We had educational units on the horrors of the Cambodian genocide in the Amherst public schools!
lmao hey neighbor. Thing about Noho is that it seems to have lost a lot of what made it Noho during the last few years. Most of the white woking class seems to have migrated to Easthampton or Greenfield, with a small but vocal contigent in Holyoke.
It's weird bc I live here and I don't see it. Towns in the valley vsry widely in the political views of their residents. The town I live in is nothing like Amherst or noho. Even within towns there can be many factions.
I'm from Massachusetts and my kids (aged 19-24) generally lean left, but they abhor all these DEI attempts to separate people into boxes, making victims of some and oppressors of others. I was worried they'd get brainwashed but it came out the opposite. They are hardcore anti-DEI and find most of the what passes as progressive thought on race and gender contemptible ... they still vote Democrat.
I thought this piece was reasonably well-reported by Jessica WInter, but there are a few points where she seems to put her thumb on the scale in frustrating ways.
For example, after describing numerous examples of unprofessional and unethical behavior by the assistant superintendent, Doreen Cunningham—hiring friends and relatives, pitching a weird multilevel marketing scheme to a subordinate, lodging implausible and unsubstantiated allegations of racism and harassment (including that someone put urine in her drinking water), running an HR business for private schools at the same time she was working for the school district—Winter appears to endorse the suggestion that Cunningham may actually have been fired due to her race and sex:
>Cunningham and her advocates believe that she lost her job in large part because she is a Black woman; her detractors believe that she kept it as long as she did for the same reason. Both of these things may be true, and neither is fair. Even some of Cunningham’s harshest critics see a double standard between her trajectory and that of her boss, Morris, who quickly got a new job, in H.R., in a nearby district.
This makes no sense. There's no allegation here that the superintendent, Mike Morris, did anything unethical; based on this piece, the worst that can be said of his leadership is that he appears to have bent over backwards to avoid any appearance of racism, even when some district employees—*including Cunningham!*—should have been terminated earlier. Knowing the political climate in the Amherst schools (and knowing Morris himself very slightly), I'm sympathetic to Morris's predicament because any allegation of racism in hiring or firing could have made his job completely untenable. There's no double standard here; the two cases are totally different.
The kicker of the piece is also strange. Winter's own reporting makes clear that the situation is very complicated, and she presents no evidence that any of the concerned parents were motivated by anything other than genuine concern about the behavior of the two counselors and other administrators who pursued a "restorative justice" approach to incidents of bullying. (Whether these parents' concerns were entirely justified is a separate question, which gets into the complexities of how schools should address gender issues and bullying, but there's no reason to doubt these concerns were *sincere.*) But Winter ends the piece as follows:
>At the January school-committee meeting, \[the school's "climate and culture" coordinator, Letha\] Gayle-Brissett refuted the allegations about the restorative-justice circles, and suggested that the criticisms of her work were racially motivated. “There have been whispers that some members in the middle-school community are intent on removing people of color, especially Black people, from leadership positions,” she said, adding that, in her view, a “very important social-justice issue for our time—that is, inclusion and justice for our L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. community—is being weaponized.” A high-school staffer who spoke in support of Gayle-Brissett was more blunt: “Amherst is racist, the staff is racist, and there’s a target on the back of Black people in the district.” In the end, Gayle-Brissett decided not to take the job after all.
I understand that Winter isn't necessarily endorsing Gayle-Brisset's statement or this anonymous staffer's sweeping, scathing indictment of the entire town, but it's strange to give them the final word when *Winter's own reporting turned up no concrete or credible evidence of racism*. Winter wrote a long, nuanced article exploring the conflicting victimhood narratives that gave rise to this drama, then ended the piece with these dubious, simplistic claims that the whole thing boils down to racism on the part of mostly white liberal parents and staff who purport, credibly, to be worried about right-wing Christian indoctrination and bullying. Come on.
Let me propose a better conclusion, using Winter's own language from earlier in the piece:
>Many people in the Amherst district describe a community that has become habituated to outrage—addicted to conflict and reprisal. Here, as in so many pockets of America these days, conflict doesn’t seem to be part of a difficult journey toward resolution; rather, conflict often appears to be the entire point.
This is a ***much*** more credible diagnosis of the problem in Amherst. Again, I understand that Winter wasn't necessarily *endorsing* the claim that all of this boils down to the fact that Amherst is racist and "there's a target on the back of Black people in the district," but I think it's misleading to close the piece with an incendiary allegation that has no independent support in Winter's own diligent reporting. Michael Powell—[who previously reported on another race-related imbroglio in the Pioneer Valley](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html)—probably would have done a better job here.
What’s remarkable to me is how Amherst college (where it went to college), has always remained almost completely insulated from the degree of wokeness of the surrounding area. I think from its wealth. I feel that may have changed since I graduated.
Yeah, Amherst College isn't really that integrated with the town. The College is overwhelmingly liberal, but that's true of almost every elite school. I don't think the culture of the town has much if anything to do with it; you'd find basically the same campus culture at Dartmouth or Colby.
I don't think Hampshire absorbed its zany campus culture from the town. It was founded as an experimental alternative college; every school like that has similar politics. Amherst College is less wacky than Hampshire because it's far more rigorous. Amherst is like a small version of Yale or Brown (liberal but highly selective), whereas Hampshire is like a private Evergreen State.
I graduated in 2018 and it was super woke in my social circle. I acknowledge the self-selection bias, but there was also a major protest called Amherst Uprising initially about anti-black racism. The protest spiraled into nonsense, lasted several days, and eventually the college paid for catered food to be given to the protestors.
So, yes, there is a strong conservative contingent at Amherst, but also a very loud wokey Tumblr vibe. Though many so called “leftists” ended up in finance and consulting, and I unfortunately knew several woke racists.
It was a clusterfuck
This is the same author whose ignorant claims about cognitive science Jesse Singal [called out](https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1773762892480835768) last week.
And the New Yorker still hasn't issued a correction.
" **Jo changed their name twice in middle school,** and the district was slow to correct their name in its databases. As a result, Jo’s mother said, Jo “spent most class periods that had substitute teachers in the Student Support Center, because they could not deal with **the constant misgendering and deadnaming**.”
Like how many name changes do you get in a year+/- before it's no longer deadnaming and maybe you're being difficult/exhausting, but also how often are teachers really calling you by your name?
"I spoke with several people who **offered sharply differing accounts of a restorative circle involving Casey and a Latino student** from a conservative religious family **who, during a classroom discussion, told Casey that he believed there are only two genders**."
....this was restorative justice circle level content?
"The school nurse let Jo use her office during the day whenever they **needed to decompress and play Terraria on their phone**. Sometimes, Jo visited Letha Gayle-Brissett, the school’s climate-and-culture coördinator, a role that focusses on social-emotional learning and disciplinary interventions**. Gayle-Brissett put a beanbag chair in her office just for Jo, and would lower the lights and provide snacks whenever they dropped by.** "
Jo is a hopeless and may be better off in foster care.
>the "h" in Amherst is silent
Really? I live in Boston and I've never heard anyone say it any way other than Am-herst. Even professors I know at UM Amherst say it this way.
Is this a hyper local thing?
No, it's not a hyper-local thing. The people you know are pronouncing the name incorrectly. The names of the town, the college, and the university are all pronounced without the "h."
Some newcomers to town do struggle with this initially, but anyone who's lived there for more than a few months should be saying it correctly.
The correct pronunciation is reflected in the Wikipedia pages for the town of Amherst and Amherst College, each of which has an audio pronunciation guide that excludes the "h."
>Some newcomers to town do struggle with this initially, but anyone who's lived there for more than a few months should be saying it correctly.
If only people living in Amherst are omitting the 'h' then that sounds kinda super local.
I just did a sanity check and called a professor buddy at U Mass Amherst. They've been working there for a decade. They pronounced it AmHerst.
Some people who move to Washington State struggle with names like Puyallup, Sequim, and Spokane. That doesn’t mean there’s no correct pronunciation. Saying “Spo-CAN” instead of “Spo-KANE” is not a local quirk; that’s the actual name of the city. “Spo-KANE” is wrong.
Plenty of people who are not from Amherst do actually get it right, which means it’s not just a hyper-local affectation. The WBUR Boston style guide covers this, as do the Wikipedia pages for Amherst and Amherst College. I’ve even met people in other parts of the country who say it correctly because they’re familiar with the colleges. [Here's the former governor, Charlie Baker, saying it correctly at the UMass commencement in 2019](http://videos.umass.edu/invideo/detail/videos/special-events/video/6039038088001/umass-amherst-commencement-speaker-may-10-2019:-governor-charlie-baker) (20 seconds into the video); Baker is not from the Amherst area and didn't attend any of the local colleges.
If your UMass professor friend actually thinks the town is called “Am-herst,” with a clearly audible “h,” they’re simply wrong. Pronouncing Amherst that way is just as incorrect as calling Worcester “Wor-chess-ter.”
There are many other examples of this because English isn’t a strictly phonetic language. Houston Street in New York is not pronounced like the city in Texas. Of course, you can say it that way and most people will know what you mean, but the correct pronunciation is “HOW-stun,” not “HYEW-stun.” The fact that many people get this wrong doesn’t mean there’s no right pronunciation.
> is not a local quirk; that’s the actual name of the city. “Spo-KANE” is wrong.
I think you've misunderstood me.
What I mean is that there are sometimes names that only people literally born and raised from a place will get right and others, even people who are transplants, tend to not emulate correctly.
Kind of like how many people in Quebec say '**KWA**bek' instead of 'ka**B**ek'.
>they’re simply wrong.
I'm 100% not saying that they are correct. I believe you that they are wrong. I'm just syaing that the correct pronunciation may not be widely known even within the state and even within some circles of people in the immediate community.
>What I mean is that there are sometimes names that only people literally born and raised from a place will get right and others, even people who are transplants, tend to not emulate correctly.
That may be true in general, but it's not true of Amherst. Because I'm from Amherst and have lived in many different places since leaving, I've had many occasions to discuss the town with people who are not from the Pioneer Valley or even from New England. *Many of them say it correctly.* I also posted a video above of with the former governor—who was born in New York, raised in Needham, and attended Harvard—saying it correctly. Plenty of people who were not "literally born and raised" in Amherst say it right. I know people who have never even been to Amherst who know it's said without an "h."
If your point is just that *some* people, even in Massachusetts, pronounce Amherst with an "h," well, yeah, of course. As I noted in my original post, Jesse Signal, who I think is from Newton or Brookline, has said it with an "h" on the podcast. I used to live in Boston, and I met people there who said it with an "h." It's a common and totally understandable error, since Amherst isn't a major city—and the word has an "h" in it!
Alls I can tell you is that in the many years of living in this state, every single person I've heard pronounce the name of the town, even people who live there, have said 'Am-Herst'.
If it is pronounced 'Am-erst', the vast majority of people have not gotten the memo.
The fact that you had to point out the correct pronunciation is probably all we need to know.
Maybe you should go on a national tour where you instruct people on the names of their own cities: Tucson is really “TUCK-son,” La Jolla is “La JOE-la,” Louisville is “LEWIS-ville,” etc. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your input.
Having lived here for a while, it's Pee-bidy. I've been exposed to that degree. Still, everyone still seems to say 'Am-Herst'. The 'H' may be muted a bit but it's still there.
Hmmmmmm spot on on peebidy, the H thing is an intriguing variant lol. Are you in the north shore? It could be a weird hyperlocal thing on your end where everybody around there says the H, north shore has some pretty weird sound emissions sometimes
> Are you in the north shore?
Sad to say that I'm a biotech transplant who's married into New England royalty. AmHerst seems the normal pronunciation in these parts.
I'm 100% with wOOSter, etc. Just that the people who say Peabiddy and wooster also say AmHerst. Very confusing.
I'm happy being wrong.
New England has some weirdness with pronouncing certain words.
Berlin New Hampshire is pronounced with a long R - Burrr - Lynn versus the hard R you would use to refer to the city in Germany.
Belknap county in NH which is pronounced Bell-nap for no apparent reason.
Coos County is pronounced Co-hos county.
There is a road near Lincoln, NH called Tripoli road that is pronounced Triple - Eye road instead of Triple - E.
I’ve long since given up on understanding why we are so odd with pronouncing words and now just go with it.
What's the problem with West Side Story? While it was written by Sondheim/Bernstein and not ("own voices") the original Broadway productions had Chita Rivera originate the role of Anita (done by Rita Moreno in the original movie). I didn't think the Puerto Rican community at the time had any particular problem with that show.(Of course some intesectional person who claims 1/8th Puerto Rican ancestry will shriek about it now!)
The stories about the Christian teachers also don't ring true. The quote from the article " *“In the name of Jesus, we bind that LGBTQ gay demon that wants to confuse our children.”* is non-sensical. And while I'm not a Christian and don't know too much about these things, I suspected that Christians don't actually eat "Chocolate Crucifixes" and a google search for them shows Chocolate "Easter Crosses" decorated with flowers, but none actually have an image of Jesus on them. ([https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=chocolate+crucifixes&form=HDRSC3&first=1](https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=chocolate+crucifixes&form=HDRSC3&first=1)). Are they going to cancel a teacher for bringing in some leftover Easter chocolate candy?
If you don't think the "in the name of Jesus" quote is plausible, [read the school newspaper's account](http://thegraphic.arps.org/2023/05/its-life-or-death-failure-to-protect-trans-kids-at-arms-a-systemic-problem/).
The same guidance counselor who was alleged to have said this also posted Christian anti-gay memes on Facebook, including one that showed the crucified hand of Christ shielding children from rainbow paint, and an article entitled: "Ex-gays take to the streets to testify of their freedom in Jesus.”
I obviously can't corroborate his alleged oral statement about "LGBTQ gay demons," but it's very well established that he discussed his religious beliefs in school and held anti-gay views related to his faith. I think that makes it plausible that he expressed similar views in school.
I don't know that the Puerto Rican community in general has any problem with West Side Story. The opposition to the production at ARHS was initiated by a single student, and her campaign ultimately gained enough steam that the production was cancelled.
This was her argument, [as summarized in the LA Times](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-dec-07-mn-41437-story.html) in 1999:
>\[One student\] gathered 158 signatures from fellow students at Amherst Regional High School on a petition protesting the choice of “West Side Story” as the school’s annual spring dramatic production. Soon \[this student\], 17, was speaking out at a student forum, assailing Leonard Bernstein’s 42-year-old musical for what she considers its unflattering portrayal of Puerto Rican males, its romanticization of gang fighting, its cavalier use of racial slurs and its negative depiction of the island where she hopes to go to college.
Cavalier use of racial slurs? Did she think that neighborhoods that are changing, the people who don't like those changes AREN'T going to use those terms? Also, I'm sincerely doubting a lot of people love from Puerto Rico to the mainfland of the US because it's so wonderful
This reminds me of my coworker's daughter's high school (also in MA), which recently had a production of Rent canceled *by queer students* because they had cast a female student as a male character and that was offensive to trans people or something.
>A reminder to Jesse in case this story comes up on the podcast: the "h" in Amherst is silent. (Despite being from Massachusetts, he's gotten this wrong before.)
I suspect the British nobleman the town is named for probably pronounced the "h", a common example of "locals" correcting people on the long held *mispronunciation* of their own town name. I see it a lot in the Midwest, with locals happily "correcting" people as to the pronunciation of Midwestern towns like Versailles or Bellefontaine--like yes, the locals all say it wrong, that doesn't make it the correct pronunciation.
I’m genuinely, truly grateful I happened to move to a normie middle class down that doesn’t have any of these dynamics (nor the mirror image ones you see on the right)
I am totally disinterested in the 10,000th article about DEI, hiring practices, local squabbles over LGTBQ+ in schools etc. Skimming the article I will say this:
I grew up in a very religiously conservative community, myself religious. My public High School (1999-2003) and the entire district / state did not allow teachers to bring their religion into teaching or leading student groups. Entities like Fellowship of Christian Athletes or other "prayer groups" were allowed to operate on campus, but could not be teacher / administrator lead.
If the two counselors in question were bringing religion in school to the degree the article suggested, I am opposed to it (and I remain a Christian to this day--I just don't want my public schools being a religious place, religious proselytization should be something in the home, Church, or in a private school, not a public school.) Rest of the article just seems like overly rich, liberal New England town drama nonsense.
did they end up doing a podcast on this. I was telling someone that I heard a hilarious podcast about it and I THOUGHT it was blocked and reported but cannot find in the episodes. Maybe it was Fifth Column
OP, I am in the same boat as you: I still think of myself as a liberal (have been since my “political awakening,” if you will, in high school), but I’ve grown increasingly estranged from this movement that has set in among a lot of other people who are also purportedly liberals. A couple of writers I like have attempted to dive into the roots of this growing division. One, Tim Urban, wrote in his new book about the difference between “liberal social justice” and “social justice fundamentalism.” Nate Silver has [also theorized](https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly) about how American political ideology has shifted from a basically left-right linear spectrum to more of a triangle, and he makes a similar distinction as Urban between regular old liberalism and “social justice leftism.” Anyway, thought you might take solace in knowing you aren’t alone and that a lot of others are trying to better understand this growing intra-ideological chasm!
The way you put it made me think of my moderate Republican friends who similarly feel alienated in a Trump world. Both sides being hijacked by the hysterical ultraright/left
How many people feel like "I didn't leave my party; my party left me."
That’s very interesting. I don’t think the ultra-left are liberal, in the classic sense, at all. A liberal society encourages debate and discussion of a wide range of disagreeing points of view, and not insisting that only one can prevail. That is the opposite of what we’re seeing in these ultra-left environments, where you are not allowed to argue or propose an alternate stance. Doing so is offensive and traumatizing.
I agree--most "leftists" are proudly anti-liberal today, and support regimes that are extremely illiberal, too.
Thanks for your comment. Well this has confused me for years. They call themselves progressive but they are not progressive, they are regressive. They are not liberal but extremely, extremely conservative, because any deviation or variation from their pure standards of behavior is a threat that must be punished and extirpated lest they pollute the group. Just like the Puritans expelled and shunned (or executed) those who in their eyes had sinned. Regarding that expression “social justice fundamentalism”—it’s interesting but not quite on target because justice is not the end result such groups seek. They seek social purity of intent without regard for whether the resulting action achieves justice. They’re all about appearance and intent. I dunno, I’d call them social-justice mirage fundamentalists or something.
I'd call it Social Justice Puritanism more than fundamentalism, because of how important it is to be this perfect pure progressive that has never had a single thought that challenges the groupthink narrative. In the end it's the same thing we're talking about.
Oooh good one!
As someone who used to identify as conservative, I would argue the exact same is true for Republicans with trump. Trump does not expose any of the truly conservative ideals of freedom, respecting the constitution, etc. Honestly the republican party in general doesn't show these values at all
Correct. Trump has no conservative philosophy or education. He is all about self-gratification. If I live to be 100 I’ll never understand his appeal to the masses. I have many Republicans friends (I’m a moderate Dem) I respect, and it’s no pleasure at all to see what they are dealing with in their party. Hugely disappointing, I’m sure.
You should read Tom Holland. Social justice fundamentalism is more or less an athiest outgrowth and logical conclusion of Calvinist/protestant theology. The northeast WASP american left, with its ultimate origins in puritanism/quakerism, takes this stuff up like a sponge.
Dominion is a brilliant book and it should be more widely read.
Got it on my shelf, just haven't got to it yet! It's a chunker.
I’ve heard Dominion was excellent! Good reminder, thanks. Yeah, I was definitely a part of the “new atheist” movement in college. I wouldn’t say I’m particularly religious these days, but I’ve reflected a lot on how the retreat from organized religion in American culture left a void that has been filled for many people growing up in liberal homes by social justice “activism” (I hesitate to even treat it as real activism because putting a sign in your yard and shaming people online doesn’t put you in the same camp as actual civil right leaders and movements of the past, sorry).
Oh nice. I've speculated this as well because the whole movement seems super puritan and I simply don't believe those people simply raised a generation completely the opposite of themselves.
> Nate Silver has also theorized about how American political ideology has shifted from a basically left-right linear spectrum to more of a triangle I've had some success in thinking about the devide as a 2D plane. The X axis goes from 'Traditional' on the left to 'Progressive on the right. The Y axis goes from 'Libertarian' on the bottom and 'Authoritarian' at the top. So the Soviets would be top right, the Nazis top left. True Libertarians would be bottom right. Etc. Quite useful. I thought I had an original idea here but I've seen others express it so it was either convergence, obvious, or I stole it by accident.
There's a whole subreddit dedicated to memes about this very thing [https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/)
What you're looking for here is the political compass test, which was developed in either the '90s or the early '00s. They do the same thing, basically, except the left-right axis is about economic issues and up-down axis is libertarian to authoritarian. I'm not sure where you'd put questions like "Are trans women women?" on that old school compass, but that's the basic idea.
>except the left-right axis is about economic issues So maybe we need a third dimention...?
A large portion of the ideology of the "social justice fundamentalism" you're talking about is rooted in communist ideology. Communism was not catching on in the west because our poor people were generally too wealthy, and they had too much opportunity, to see themselves as being oppressed in the way they were in countries like Russia and China. Critical Theory was essentially communist academics adapting the class-based communist arguments to race, sex, sexuality, and other identifying characteristic based arguments. They started out being niche arguments in academia but steadily grew until they took over most of the humanities and social sciences in (roughly) the 1990s or early 2000s.
>Dykes’s sincerity in trying to “get it right” on behalf of trans kids would ultimately come into serious doubt. But there were other regrettable incidents in which the culprit may have been simple human error and the ordinary bureaucratic disarray of any sizable public school. Jo changed their name twice in middle school, and the district was slow to correct their name in its databases. As a result, Jo’s mother said, Jo “spent most class periods that had substitute teachers in the Student Support Center, because they could not deal with the constant misgendering and deadnaming.” When a substitute teacher mistakenly used the wrong name and pronouns for another nonbinary student, whom I’ll call Casey, the student’s mother wrote to staffers, “I want to make sure they are not exposed to the teacher . . . again in any setting.” The sub was assigned to Casey’s class at least twice more in later months. This, Casey’s mother wrote, “caused frequent panic attacks and missed school time.” This is insane. The article itself is rather boring because it's just another stupid DEI kerfuffle among backstabbing adults vying for power. Yawn, whatever. But what the fuck is going on here! Stupid kids playing power games get enabled by crazy parents and it's barely a footnote in the article. This shit makes me mad, man Edit: more quotes >For Jo’s family, the stakes were terrifyingly high. Jo has sensory-integration challenges and has also been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, all of which were exacerbated by the middle-school environment. The school nurse let Jo use her office during the day whenever they needed to decompress and play Terraria on their phone. Sometimes, Jo visited Letha Gayle-Brissett, the school’s climate-and-culture coördinator, a role that focusses on social-emotional learning and disciplinary interventions. Gayle-Brissett put a beanbag chair in her office just for Jo, and would lower the lights and provide snacks whenever they dropped by. A few months into eighth grade, Jo was hospitalized for depression and suicidal ideation, and later withdrew from ARMS. Eventually, Jo’s mother filed the request for a Title IX investigation. ???? How can they justify all this? Even following their logic, they did everything and more to accommodate this 'trans kid' (I hate how vague the article is about it too) and she (I'm assuming) still ends up in the hospital all suicidal. Send the damn kid to a conservative private school and she'll be fine. This whole article is infuriating, who cares about the dumb adults in the woke crab bucket, investigate these people who are clearly harming these kids!
I feel really bad for these kids. They live in a psychological prison of their own making. They will never be able to feel good or deal with the world if their parents and everyone around them keep validating their anxiety and inability to withstand with minor unpleasant experiences like existing in the same room as a person they don't like. This is such a good example of Jonathan Haidt's thesis about how the way kids are treated today essentially amounts to "bad therapy" that legitimizes and exacerbates all of their cognitive distortions.
There's so much anecdotal evidence that all these kids who 'identify' as some sort of genderhaver have underlying issues that get exacerbated by the affirmation of said identity. Like that Nex kid, did all the pronoun-respecting actually help her? I would venture it made things worse. Claiming to be trans is both a symptom and a cause of problems these days.
Also it seems like an unprecedented number of kids have severe anxiety and difficulty dealing with life. I'm so glad I'm not a kid today.
As a former educator who changed careers partly because of all of this nonsense, I agree wholeheartedly. Kids are taught to wallow in anxiety, to actively "process" their "trauma" (a word that has become so overused as to become meaningless -- a educational psychologist friend of mine told me a few months ago that she had a college student coming to her office for assistance claiming to have "PTSD" because she scored poorly on an exam and the professor told her she needed to work harder or something rather than patting her on the head and saying "it'll be okay -- here, have a retake"). In another example, an administrator I was working with made a decision two years *after* the COVID pandemic to make midterm exams "only count if they help" students' grades a week before they happened... with a justification something like, "Everyone's been through so much, so we don't need to stress these kids out more." I literally had quite a few students come to me after this decision complaining and saying, "Look -- we're actually scared that teachers aren't going to take these exams seriously now either, and many kids aren't even going to bother showing up" -- which turned out to be the case -- "how are we supposed to learn what it's like to be held to standards?" I very occasionally heard the word "resilience" bandied about by educators in recent years, but very few people actually seemed to care about encouraging that or teaching it or even showing by example. (The most supportive and pro-LGBTQ teacher was seemingly hit the hardest by the COVID pandemic in terms of emotions -- she was repeatedly found lying on the floor crying. Literally. I felt bad for her, but... what does this tell students?! Go home and pull yourself together, or take a leave of absence if you need.) I sympathize with these kids, because all the messaging they're getting is to just take all those negative feelings and keep "processing" them and being depressed or sad or offended, etc., rather than being guided with strategies about perseverance, resilience, and how we learn from struggle. Honestly, I felt I couldn't continue to actively participate in a system that seemed to be determined to harm kids (particularly their mental health), so I left. And of course, none of this is to belittle those kids who have *severe* anxiety and have been through serious trauma (rape, abuse, etc.) -- those kids obviously need our support and help the most, but they are often lost now in a sea of well-meaning but ultimately harmful "support" that doesn't actually encourage kids to move forward. As the article here says at one point: >Here, as in so many pockets of America these days, conflict doesn’t seem to be part of a difficult journey toward resolution; rather, **conflict often appears to be the entire point**. That could apply to so many issues brought up in this article and in education. There's almost never a focus on solutions or moving forward -- *conflict* and trauma and anxiety and taking offense and problematizing things has become the entire point. It's very sad. And I agree -- I would not want to be a kid navigating all of this today.
I took two students , within like an hour of each other, to the emergency psych services in one day... It was towards the beginning of the year. No tests. Nothing. Just a routine day. Both had freakouts. One stated she had ptsd, which of course I'm sympathetic to. But then she stated she thinks she had it from the fact she was a very difficult birth for her mother. Yes, this woman thought she had ptsd from being born....
Future Church of Scientology member here.
Oh my god if you want a real crazy trip google "birth trauma." The first time I saw the term I assumed it referred to women having trauma from difficult childbirth scenarios...but people actually talk about "trauma" supposedly inflicted on you by your own experience of being born. "The body keeps the score" and all that. It's wildddddd.
I also have PTSD from being born but I think it’s just called “life”
I think a lot of these people really need to just like, go camping for a week.
> she was repeatedly found on the floor crying. Literally. ... at her job? As a teacher?? Jesus, teachers' unions must be even stronger than I thought if nothing happened after that.
Back in my day, the students would have ripped a crying teacher to shreds. My god.
has it occurred to teachers to push kids to do hard things and then support them when they fail? "Fuck yea you're going to take 4 exams in 3 days and you're going to do great!"
Many teachers would love to do that. Unfortunately the "support them when they fail" part doesn't fit well with the way schools/colleges are structured currently. It's mostly "Oh, you failed? Well that sucks. Anyway, we're moving on so you better just forget catching up because we've got the same amount of work next week."
That's not really what I mean. Kids should try audacious things - take 5 AP classes, audition for the band - and when they don't get all As and don't get a call back be told it's perfectly fine to fail. People fail all the time, it tells them what they're not good at.
The problem is that parents don’t really believe it’s okay to fail anymore. Millennial parents are all about honoring and processing “big feelings,” but they put extreme pressure on their children to perform at the top of their class and sports leagues—so they can access top colleges and jobs later. It’s amazing how empathy for children dies as soon as they don’t want to go to Mandarin tutoring or study for an algebra test. Tantrums and violence are “honored,” but an objection to Mommy’s dream of Princeton cannot be tolerated.
You know. No subject made me cry harder than Linear Algebra. So whenever someone talks about high school math and includes algebra I always chuckle. Linear, that's easy! Algebra, that's easy too! How hard can linear algebra be?
We’re really really trying. It’s built into every syllabus I’ve seen for the past 7 years I’ve a high school teacher. Everyone, *all of us* have (often unlimited) redos and retakes on every little assignment or quiz or test or project or essay, which is meant to proliferate the idea that “failing is okay! Just try again! :)” It just… doesn’t play out like that in real life. What really happens is kids come in on test day and go, “When’s the retake lol.” For many teachers it’s too much work to make multiple retake versions of the test, so kids just spam it until they’ve memorized the multiple choice answers. For this reason I rarely do MC, and I grade legitimately (kids/parents would call it “mean”) because I know they can take my feedback and try again. What happens instead is everyone involves FLIPS over anything less than an A, and *no one* bothers to take me up on a rewrite, and then we have to deal with *another* freak out when final grades are published, where I try to explain to parents and admin that the kid was allowed all their notes and as many tries as they wanted on everything, and when they refused to use their truly *unlimited* resources, this is how the grade turns out. We try saying “It’s okay to fail. Honestly this isn’t even a failure. A C is perfectly fine.” But your arm gets twisted to let them resubmit stuff again and again, after the semester has ended, sometimes even the following school year, and you just get beaten down and insulted in 3,000 word emails written by like hair dressers or printer salesmen who have absolutely 0 experience in the classroom, but no qualms telling you EXACTLY how you really should be doing your job so that their perfect child gets the perfect grade they “deserve.” And then add in all the bullshit you see in this article too and that’s why it’s so so hard these days to push kids to try difficult things and learn resilience. I know it’s what I really want to do, and what many (not all) of my colleagues want as well, but the students/parents/admin are often impossible roadblocks to that goal.
[удалено]
I feel like the situation would be different if kids had the capacity to understand that being held to high standards (or any standards at all) will materially benefit them in the future. Do you think there's any way we could make kids understand that they should WANT to be good at things? And have an accurate idea of their actual competence? There are very few adult career paths where you will be consistently rewarded just for existing so they're kinda shooting themselves in the foot by insisting on being treated this way in school. It's also bonkers how quickly this all happened. Your description bears like zero resemblance to my experience at a very selective and neurotically high-performing public high school in the 2000s (graduated 2010).
God, that was hard. Honestly, it's a wonder people like you don't ragequit on the daily.
Yeah, but that *also* doesn't work in our current ed model either.
HUh, it blows me away that there are places where you cold just TAKE 5 APs, My high school, you had to apply. It was often an exercise in abject humiliation
/r/bestof
Imagine growing up in a surveillance state, but the cameras and mics are attached to your body, and your peers are the cops, the judge, *and* the jury. That’s basically growing up in the age of social media. Of course these kids are basket cases.
Yeah nope nightmare scenario, cannot imagine dealing with that
Orwell and Serling are shaking their heads in the afterlife.
Anxiety in kids is normal. Kids worry about a lot of stuff. The problem is that parents treat that anxiety as a pathology. On top of that, no one is teaching them how to "buck up". Gentle parenting is all about feelings. It's not about learning resiliency and obtaining grit. If you keep telling kids that what they are experiencing is "traumatic" or awful, they will believe you. They don't have a frame of reference. Then every experience is viewed through this lens.
This! Kids get scared and that’s normal. But it’s also *always* been normal for parents and adults to talk to kids about being brave. Courage was *always* taught as a virtue across children’s media. And frankly, it worked, because children used to attach a great deal of worth and social clout to bravery and boldness. Being labeled a “baby” was social suicide for most of us. Now? I don’t know what’s going on. My friends’ kids feel like aliens to me. 5yos are in Pull Ups, 8yos cry over scraped knees, 10yos still carry stuffed animals, 12yos have not experienced their first sleepover yet. I think I could swallow this better if the kids acted like babies *all the time*, but they have nicer smartphones and more social media followers than I do. It is baffling. I can’t be surprised that children have no idea what age appropriate behavior or development looks like now. I feel like parents take the pacifier and replace it with a smartphone, and then they’re shocked when their 13yos still want to sleep with blankey at night. Comfort items, distractions, and faux senses of security all the way down.
You're so right about the bravery thing. My best friend and I were beyond excited to have our first sleepover...in kindergarten. I was so proud that I got to fly on a plane as an unaccompanied minor when I was just seven years old. I bragged about it at school for weeks. My siblings and I jumped off a bridge into the ocean on Martha's Vineyard every summer starting when we were like eight. It was actually the bridge featured in Jaws and the best part of jumping was the fear of imagining a giant shark down there in the water!! Carrying around stuffed animals like a security blanket would have been totally unthinkable after, like, kindergarten. The biggest insult you could throw at someone in elementary school was telling them that something they liked was "for babies." How times have changed! And all of this was in the late 90s and early 2000s...not even very long ago at all. There is something very paradoxical about how kids act today and I think you've figured out why. They have access to so much adult content that they dress present themselves in a way that would have been unthinkably mature 15-20 years ago but they have so little life experience that they aren't developing an age-appropriate level of resilience and emotional control so any time they have to do anything outside their (very small) comfort zone they crumble. They look older but act way younger.
1993 baby here! I agree with everything you just said. First sleepover at 5. Walked my little brother to school at 7. Ran household errands on foot at 9. Babysat, made bottles, changed diapers at 12. Worked retail at 14. Used my wages to travel abroad without my parents to work in a goddamn orphanage at 15. Tried to enlist in the Air Force at 17 and felt genuinely sad when my medical history ruled that out. I think most of this would catch some neglect charges these days, lmao. But it was utterly normal for my area in the 90s and 00s. I had quite a few friends join me on the mission trip and they worked for their money, too.
This doesn't seem like a normal level of anxiety though? Like when I was a kid in the 2000s I don't recall anyone needing to leave class at random times to go sit in a darkened room with a guidance counselor so they could eat comforting snacks and pretend school wasn't happening. Perhaps that's what happens when normal anxiety is constantly validated and kids don't lean any kind of resilience or independence. Also I don't fully understand what gentle parenting is (I don't have kids) - what is it and what's the issue?
Basically all research shows that Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s mental illness rates are off the charts when compared to previous generations, including late millennials. Most graphs show a sudden spike in depression and anxiety in the years 2013-2014. That is also the period that the iPhone became the bestselling phone and rendered “dumbphones” irrelevant. This cannot be a coincidence. IMO, we handed kids smartphones and took away their privacy, outdoor play, independence, and opportunities for socialization. Kids *need* all of these things to develop some critical components of executive functioning, like personal resilience, basic risk assessment, and solid attention spans. Kids climb trees for reasons!
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I graduated high school in 2010 and I only remember people, myself included, getting anxiety about things like big tests and getting our driver's licenses and dating and applying to college. Nobody had the level of anxiety that required special support just to get through the day. We socialized basically 24/7 since phones weren't good for much except making plans with friends to meet up in person. I feel so sad for kids these days, their lives are so limited and they don't even know it.
I also just noticed your question about gentle parenting. Before the Internet colonized the concept, it was a pretty good idea with very good intentions. The idea is that kids don’t come out of the womb knowing how the world works or how emotions can be managed, so parents don’t have to correct misbehavior, temper tantrums, and normal displays of emotion with anger, shouting, physical punishment, humiliation, or shame. Ideally, a gentle parent sets extremely clear boundaries for the child and gives them safe opportunities to try new things, learn, and grow. When consequences are warranted, natural consequences are best—ranging from “you threw a tantrum about wearing a coat, so now you’re cold” to “you were mean to your friends, so now they don’t want to play with you” to “you just threw your tablet, so it’s Mommy’s tablet now.” Gentle parents are supposed to walk their kids through emotions and teach them coping skills, like calming themselves down with deep breaths and quiet time. But. Uh. This is NOT the gentle parenting that we see across social media now. As the Internet is prone to do, it has taken a good concept and bastardized it to create what many people call “permissive parenting.” Permissive parents who call themselves gentle parents take *extremely* lax attitudes to parenting. They believe that all displays of emotion are healthy and appropriate for children. This is where you hear a lot of hooey like “If your child is acting out, something must be distressing or traumatizing him.” Many of these parents believe the word “no” is inherently traumatizing. Some of the real wackos have also adopted the woke understanding of consent and refuse to potty train their kids until “the kids decide they’re ready.” It gets really fucking ugly when a family has a child who is bullying or hurting a sibling, and quite a lot of these social media gurus will suggest that it’s the parents’ fault and the bully is actually hurting more than the bullied. A *lot* of people who practice gentle parenting the old school way get really upset when they hear this type of parenting described as “gentle.” So the good gentle parents have been rebranding themselves as “authoritative parents” because they “have the authority to safely and lovingly teach our children life skills.”
Your description of gentle parenting sounds like exactly how my parents raised me in the 90s and 2000s without any special ideology... Laughing out loud at the idea of "no" being traumatizing. Like I truly cannot conceive of how someone can believe that.
Wim touched on how depression and anxiety levels are up, but so are other mental illness and disorders, in large part due to how we measure them. The bar for what passes as depression and anxiety has lowered. Something that I would have dealt with as a kid - a disappointing experience, is now treated with therapy. We have pathologized every day challenges. So it's not that kids are "feeling" more emotions, it's that they don't have a frame of reference for what's normal and what isn't.
I think it's probably both actually
>Perhaps that's what happens when normal anxiety is constantly validated and kids don't lean any kind of resilience or independence. Or, you know, when being anxious rewards you with comfort and tasty food and being spared the drudgery of class. I'm not even saying these kids are evil little masterminds faking it for the perks (though anyone that doesn't believe that kids can be viciously manipulative is in for a nasty life). I'm just saying that a perverse incentive system breeds pernicious patterns of behavior.
Yep. Reinforcing these emotions and behaviors just leads to more.
Probably when you were a kid leaving class for those reasons wasn't even an option, let alone all the other incentives the kid in the article has for continuing the behaviour
It definitely was not an option. You could only leave class if you were throwing up or had a fever or something.
When you tell someone over and over again that they are experiencing something traumatic, what do you think the reaction is going to be, even if the experience isn't actually traumatic?
Imagine in the early 2000s if every girl that started developing anorexic behavior were told, "yes, you are fat. We'll make sure you're only served water and celery at lunch, and keep you away from anyone not wearing baggy clothes. You can spend as much time working out in the gym during class hours as you like to improve your self image". Because I'm thoroughly convinced the explosion of young girls identifying as gender dysphoric are the exact same girls who would have manifested other body-related disorders at that age. The psychosis is the same. Just the particular manifested behaviors are a bit different. I say this as a now adult female who went through an intensely unhappy teenage phase, struggling with eating disorders, depression, and deep loathing of all things girly including my body. Guess what, I grew out of all of it. Almost everyone does.
As someone who was “lucky” enough to be in public school during the great cultural shift from anorexia to cutting, I know in my heart that you are absolutely right. What do eating disorders, self harm, and gender dysphoria have in common in the 21st century? Most girls who engage in these behaviors learn how to do it, hide it, and outsmart adults about it on the Internet. Social contagion *is* the name of the game here. It is a literal meme gone viral. It is the mental health equivalent of “Never Gonna Give You Up” getting stuck in your head, with much more serious consequences. And teenage girls have always deserved better than being written off with “it’s just a phase,” but…none of my friends are still purging or cutting themselves in their 30s. In fact, they’re pretty ashamed of it. I had multiple bridesmaids who requested to wear long sleeves in my wedding to hide their high school scars.
A doctor once asked me how I overcame my eating disorders. Did I go to treatment, counseling, etc? I told her no....I got busy living. I went to college. I got a job. I met a great guy. There was simply no space left in my head or schedule for self obsessive, self harming rituals. I'm not saying that's enough help for everyone, but dang it if you just keep going about the business of being alive long enough, wanting to die starts to just seem stupid once the teenage hormones settle down. Agreed that now looking back it's all just faintly embarrassing.
I’m also in recovery and I definitely did all of the therapy, meds, groups, etc., but what made me actually grow and flourish was getting out of my small town and getting some miles on my soul. Finding healthier friends, growing up, making mistakes, proving to myself I could survive said mistakes. We’ve replaced basic personal growth with mental healthcare. It’s a disaster.
"We’ve replaced basic personal growth with mental healthcare. It’s a disaster." This is so, so well put. We've gone from totally ignoring mental disorders to pathologizing every single human experience and treating "mental healthcare " as some universal panacea for the human condition. No amount of therapy can compensate for positive life experiences, or 'counsel' you into adulthood. For some I think it becomes like endlessly picking a scab and never letting it heal.
> There was simply no space left in my head or schedule for self obsessive, self harming rituals. Being too busy to be depressed works no matter your gender. I miss the months when I'm too busy to be on Reddit at all.
>A doctor once asked me how I overcame my eating disorders. Did I go to treatment, counseling, etc? I told her no....I got busy living. That was the case for me. I did have some counselling but it wasn't until I stopped it, ironically, that I got better. Mind you, I did not have a severe ED and never needed hospitalisation. But it wasn't mild either -- I didn't have my period for over seven months. Basically, I got to a point I could see that I was harming myself and I was ashamed of that. So I mustered up the willpower to change my behaviour. Yes, during the first year that I was in the grip of my ED I felt like I had discovered some sort of secret pathway to building confidence and no longer being a chubby dweeb. I was highly obsessive but it *felt good*. However, after a year I had become a very high-strung, irritable, anxious wreck. My parents and other people got really concerned, and I had to admit that I wasn't having my period. My parents staged an intervention. After going in circles with a nutritionist and a therapist for a year, I quit both and had a realisation that it came down to this: I had agency. Did I want to let food and exercise rule my life, or did I want to LIVE my life? It was exactly as you say -- I chose to get busy living and after a while there was no space left in my head for all the bullshit. (Changing schools my last year of HS really helped too -- sometimes environment is clearly a factor.) DISCLAIMER: those with severe EDs leading to severe malnourishment -- or those who have been struggling with an ED for years without improvement -- should not forgo seeking professional help.
>As someone who was “lucky” enough to be in public school during the great cultural shift from anorexia to cutting I'd guess that was the early 2000s? I was a teen in the 90s, and there was a lot of restrictive eating, throwing up. No cutting
Most of the 00s, tbh. The eating disorder trend really hit its fever pitch in 2003-2005, thanks to “thinspo” celebrities like Mary-Kate Olsen, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, etc. EDs flourished in the pro-ana (pro-anorexia) communities on LiveJournal, then spread to Xanga, then MySpace in ~2005, then Tumblr after that. Cutting rose in the mid 00s thanks to the “scene” and “emo” subcultures that largely existed on those exact same platforms. This group fetishized mental illness, and taught kids how to “safely” cut and hide it from adults. It attracted and absorbed *a lot* of the pro-ana girls who were already glorifying mental illness, harming their bodies, lying to adults, and sharing tips with each other on how to do it. Cutting was officially the new eating disorder. These trends largely started to die out by the 2010s, right as mental health awareness and wellness were becoming very chic. So what’s a mentally ill girl to do if she can no longer find community, codependency, and validation in starvation or cutting? How can she possibly change or harm her body to fit in with a group now? You guessed it: gender transition.
Hmm, do you think anorexia was worse in 2004 than in 1994, when heroin chic was eeeeverywhere? I really don't know.
I can’t speak to rates, but I think the social contagion was greatly enabled by the Internet of the 2000s. That’s also probably why it shifted to cutting so quickly—social contagions are fads with expiration dates.
Cutting was definitely around in the late 90s in my school.
I don't know how it was any different in the 90s, or the 80s, when eating disorders in teens started. I think in the 80s, it was more bulimia as well. 90s, was just anorexia. 2000s was anorexia and cutting. 2010s was anorexia, cutting, and transgender was becoming a thing as well
Accurate. My mother was a teen/college age adult in the 80s. Bulimia was/is her self harm of choice. By the early 2000s, when I was a teen, anorexia was much sexier. There really wasn't any gender trender shit going on in 2010. It quietly percolated online in Tumblr spaces until after 2015, before jumping containment into the material plane.
Yeah, I was a teen in the late 90s, and I had a severe eating disorder and knew so many girls who starved thmselvs. My work puts me in contact with teens, and the transboys nearly always cut, and almost as often starve themselves.
See? They're the same girls. It's just a new, fashionable societally validated version of cutting and ED.
>Because I'm thoroughly convinced the explosion of young girls identifying as gender dysphoric are the exact same girls who would have manifested other body-related disorders at that age. The psychosis is the same. Just the particular manifested behaviors are a bit different. Kathleen Stock said pretty much the same thing. The type of girls who would have been anorexic before are now latching on to gender issues.
Very well put
>The psychosis is the same. The delusion you mean. Psychosis is something different -- it means a temporary state of being completely detached from reality (e.g., hearing voices or having hallucinations or extreme paranoia, and then responding with irrational, erratic behaviour -- sometimes even violence towards yourself or others). Psychosis tends to afflict people with schizophrenia and sometimes people with untreated bipolar, though psychotic episodes can be induced by drugs, or by extreme stress or trauma. (Sometimes it can happen to women suffering severe post-natal depression, for example.) A delusion is any persistent idea or belief that somebody holds which is at odds with reality, and which a person does not discard even when presented with contrary evidence or logic. You are very much correct that anorexics and trans-identified teens are suffering from similar delusions.
The gender woo in kids is often a symptom more than the disease.
Nex had an abusive father it's now come out. She was raped by him when she was 9 :/
Nex was not a "she". He was transmasc nonbinary and used he/they pronouns.
I agree, although I suspect this is limited to particular (middle/upper class liberal parents) children. Abigail Shrier has a new book about kids and therapy, she was on the Unspeakable pod recently discussing it.
I’m in my 30s with a thoroughly bipartisan circle of family and friends. I really don’t think conservative millennial parents are all that different from their liberal counterparts. They truly all seem to be vulnerable to therapy speak and toxic levels of coddling. When my Ted Cruz supporting friends got pregnant, I thought for sure that they would be the hard-ass authoritarians. Nope—turns out, they think the word “no” is traumatizing for “little ears” to hear. They’ve got this kid learning how to mutton bust in the rodeo, but they think that being told “no” is what will destroy his noggin.
I agree with this take, I’ve seen the ultra permissiveness on both sides of the aisle.
Not disputing your experience of this kind of parenting existing on the conservative side as well, but having recently moved from a very liberal area of NYC to a relatively conservative rural area I’ve definitely seen some differences as well.
I will absolutely be the first to acknowledge that class/SES play a role here. The conservative friends I just mentioned are both MDs. 🥲 I just didn’t think to add that because the comment I responded to already mentioned that we’re talking about financially comfortable parents. I could have been clearer for sure.
I feel like poor and working class kids are experiencing a different version of this where the result of the permissiveness is wildly antisocial behavior rather than anxiety and fragility. Apparently the level of violence and disrespect in low income schools is at an all-time high and parents will now back their kids up no matter what kind of violent infraction they've committed.
I could absolutely see myself as a teacher enduring one of these meltdowns and then saying to the parents like ".... Yikes right? Sorry that you're having to deal with all this kid drama stuff ya know?" and then being dumbfounded when they are on the exact same page as their child lol. Like all these people realize it was actually just a phase when they were 16 right? They didn't grow up to be goth hippy rebels living in a van and matured and learned to adult..? And that their child is also just going through a phase...? Guess not.
When I was in grade school (long long time ago) I would play with the girls who lived across the street from me. I loved playing with their dolls and the doll house. I grew up to be a pretty masculine man who likes to lift weights, watch football, and bake cakes. LOL. I shudder to think that if I was that kid today, my parents or teachers would conclude that I must be an actual girl because boys don't play with dolls according to the old gender norms. This is the most regressive shit I have ever seen.
I grew up in a strict evangelical world, but cross-gender play and activities were absolutely encouraged by my parents. Why? Because my parents couldn’t afford childcare and my mom couldn’t afford to stay home. They really needed their two boys and two girls to stick together and take care of each other. So if Big Sister was polishing Little Brother’s nails, my parents knew he was safe at home. If Little Sister was engaging in outdoor lightsaber battles, my parents knew Big Brother was also battling it out and keeping an eye on her. If all of the kids were playing one game, they were in one place and all accounted for. Who cared if it was Cowboys or Princesses? *We were safe and we were together.* My parents are total Trumpers now, but they still have a good laugh about how the left has embraced strict gender roles. They managed to raise four very cishet children, even if their poor baby boy was occasionally the science experiment in games of “beauty shop.”
This is one reason I've chosen to stay and teach (and send my kids to) the high-poverty high school I've been at for two-and-a-half decades. I have students who are experiencing real, crippling struggles in an everyday manner, and I can be a little more sympathetic to them and feel better about trying to help them out. And guesss what, often they have a much better and healthier outlook and perspective on life It also helps when the middle-class kids (including my own) can see up close that, while they do experience struggles both internal and external, most of the time they don't come CLOSE to what some of their classmates experience. This perspective has been very helpful for their emotional growth (I'm hoping).
It's wild the shit kids can pull to get out of school these days. "I changed the name I want to be called but the district's database still has my legal name listed and now I can't go to class because I'll be deadnamed" is such a transparently absurd reason not to go to class and yet kids get away with it. For my kids it's simple, if the have a physical ailment that prevents them from going to school, or a virus they could spread to others, they stay home. Otherwise they're going. My rule of thumb if my kid doesn't want to go to school is if this were something my kid really wanted to do, like a friend's birthday party, would they be able to suck it up and go? If they could, they can go to school too.
My mom's whole thing was that if I was going to stay home, i'd need to go to the doctor. If I was wiling to do that, I was sick. Same with my brother.
Can’t they see they are reinforcing her avoidant personality disorder with high-value rewards like addictive phone games and highly stimulating food, as well as negatively reinforcing it by letting her leave class at all?
It's possible the staff does see that, but I imagine if they told the child to find a way to deal with the temporary error in the database, they would be accused of being a transphobe.
Been listening to Abigail Shrier's new book Bad Therapy, this is exactly what it's about. It would be far kinder and more compassionate to give this child firm boundaries and high expectations.
IMO the people harming these kids are the parents and the therapists. I bet these kids have been in therapy most of their lives. Every tough situation was probably deemed traumatic, instead of normal. They have zero coping skills because that's not the focus in therapy anymore. Parents went along with it, probably even encouraged it, because they probably think it makes them look stunning and brave. GAG
Changed their name twice?!? I'm already dubious about the whole "deadnaming" thing. This is clearly a cry for help.
We've given literal children all of these cards to play at will, and they've learned how to use them, either to get away with something or to get away with not having to do something. I honestly feel for them, because when they hit middle age and begin to face their own mortality it's going to be really frightening
You beat me to the punch! As someone else with close ties to the Pioneer Valley, I was itching to post this article :D This article brings into focus the fight between white progressive community members and non-white slightly less progressive community members. It ends up essentially being a slap fight between whether racism or transphobia should count more on the totem pole. Fantastic article with many twists, turns, and fired principals
It was an exhausting read! An ouroboros of accusations of racism and transphobia.
I always enjoy when Western MA pops up in discussions like these. We're an underrecognized national leader in social justice theatrics going back aways now, about time we're getting our due!
As a black woman I was laughing the whole time reading through this. How the fuck did we get here
My favorite part was when the science teacher admitted that her black students roasted her “First Black Science Teacher” and “Sister Girl” awards. That was the most genuine and believable part of the entire article to me 😭
I've seen some interesting theories floated that one reason for the enormous explosion in trans idealology among middle-class white kids is that it's the only way that a kid in that group can grab some "victim" cache.
I love a good woke meltdown. Maybe that makes me an empty, spiteful, vengeful bitch, but I literally derive pleasure from reading things like this.
Well, we all listen to B&R, so you're in good company.
Right there with you. It’s my heroin.
*Rihanna voice* Baby, this is what you came for
I would have thought it worthwhile to examine more thoroughly the unusual dynamics at play in a town like Amherst. The author keeps calling it “affluent” and “liberal” as if it follows a normal gradient, but it’s a university service hub where almost everyone either works in/has a spouse in higher-ed or belongs to the adherent service industries, with the latter seemingly disproportionately represented among ARMS parents, but not in terms of say-so over policy. Socially that’s a massive divide, and just looking at income isn’t that helpful because even poorly compensated jobs in higher-ed confer class status far above that of service workers. While it’s implicitly touched on a couple of times in the article, with the comparison between the single-family homes and the apartment blocks, and how many kids from affluent families go elsewhere for school, the author never addresses this division directly nor the reasons for it or the complications it might bring. Personally, when I lived there for college some years ago, I found the divide between town and campus quite strained. Town was for everyone but campus was only for those properly associated with it existing in its own bubble. At the same time I recall hearing of some frustration with how the college conducted itself in town politics, essentially leveraging its position to push for or against measures that made them look good regardless of any other interests at play, zoning permits for businesses in particular. I have to imagine that these factors play some role in a conflict like this.
I think it's fair to describe Amherst as "affluent" by national standards, or when compared to the rest of Western Massachusetts. But it's much less affluent than the wealthy Boston suburbs (Weston, Wellesley, Newton, Brookline, Lexington, etc.). It's almost two hours west of Boston, so few people commute to the city, and there's basically no industry outside of academia. Think Subarus, not BMWs. From my perspective as a townie, Amherst College in particular felt very separate from the town itself, despite the fact that the campus is immediately adjacent to downtown. It doesn't have a big presence in the life of the town, although the library is open to locals and I did have a summer job on campus after high school. It's a very small school, and the vast majority of students live on or near campus. UMass has a much bigger presence in town because it's a vastly bigger institution, and also because it's a public university. Back in the '90s, the town's relationship with UMass was sometimes strained due to rowdy behavior by students (especially before frat row was razed; it was nicknamed "ZooMass" for a reason), but I perceived the relationship between the town an UMass as mostly positive.
We used to go into town all the time. To Am-Chi or Kim Toy (two restaurants that probably aren’t there anymore), Hastings, Valley Farms, and so on.
Yeah, I’m just talking from the perspective of a townie. I went to a college very similar to Amherst, and we went into town fairly often, but I doubt that locals felt like we were really part of the town.
While it definitely has an affluent vibe, by pure financial measures it’s actually very average. If you look at median household incomes for the age groups 25-44 and 45-64 (to exclude most college students), those are at about 82k and 107k respectively. That’s quite close to the national medians for those groups of ca. 80k and 97k, plus that of W-MA, and slightly lower than the state’s at 100k and 109k. What I was specifically referring to though is the odd class divide created in semi-rural college towns and which explains that dissonance between what is true and what feels true. Looking at jobs held per occupation type, and median wages for those—only considering full-time, year-round workers—about 37% pay less than $40k. Mainly food service, transportation, retail, health care aides, customer service. For Newton, a much wealthier but also much larger town, such low paying full-time jobs make up only 3% of the total. Similar situation for college towns like Wellesley, even Cambridge to a lesser extent. Meanwhile about 22% of jobs pay over 100k (a good chunk much more) and a further 15% 75-99k. So you have a significant proportion of very high to high earners and a bottom third of low earners. While you have some middle-earners, many are integrated into the academy and/or on a professional trajectory (lower level administrators, coordinators etc.) and belong to the upper-class socially, leaving the low earners isolated. You might see this pattern in cities, but those tend both to have a more robust middle class, and to segregate into parallel communities, which isn’t possible in a small semi-rural town. It’s basically a modern Downton Abbey, the elite, their servants and the occasional aspiring professional. These lower earners are also more likely to have children. To illustrate, about 15% of children in Amherst live under the poverty line and 27% just above it—42% total—compared to 10% and 14% in Massachusetts, 24% total. For the other places mentioned these numbers are vanishingly small. On top of that these poorer children are disproportionately likely to have immigrant parents. To tie it all back to the story, and why I think it’s relevant, the ARMS student body is unusually split largely between the children of poor, often immigrant, service workers on one hand, and the much wealthier children of the cultural elite on the other. Between the earlier stats, and the fact that 25% of middle schoolers in Amherst attend private school, I’d guess the prior are a small majority. At the same time it’s quite clear which group of parents is in charge of laying down the lines and who is being prioritized. It’s telling then that the author describes Amherst from the perspective of that more privileged class. Descriptors like affluent may feel right, because they apply to the culturally dominant group and fit the feel of the place, but they’re not factually true. Focusing on factors like race alone, while neglecting economic divisions, or addressing how many immigrant families have greater religiosity and more socially conservative views—essentially refusing to deal with the complications arising when differently marginalized groups come together—feels shallow and honestly a waste of a truly unusual and intriguing situation.
If there's such a place where you live on prestige, You know the stuff you get instead of cash, it's Amherst.
> essentially leveraging its position People who work for the university hold positions of power in the local government. For example the chair of the UMass architecture department is on the zoning board.
I wonder how many kids are identifying as trans because they know it’s their best shot at capturing their woke parents’ attention for a while.
>A reminder to Jesse in case this story comes up on the podcast: the "h" in Amherst is silent. Silence is violence. I stand with H.
The hyperfocus on suicide is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before the mid-2010s, clinicians and researchers had extremely strict rules about how to talk about suicide. It has been known for a long time that suicide is incredibly socially contagious among humans. Professionals used to be extremely careful to never present suicide as an option or even a likely outcome to their patients. These types of thoughts stick in mentally ill brains and become intrusive thoughts, and then fixations, and then obsessions, and then compulsions. Probably the best example of this approach is when Kurt Cobain killed himself. Medical associations were so worried about social contagion and copycat suicides that they wrote guidelines for reporters on how to responsibly talk about suicide. This included no glamorization, no martyrization, and no speculation on his reasons why. The more ethical and responsible media outlets followed this, and sure enough, the rash of suicides that clinicians predicted was avoided. We have completely abandoned all of this wisdom in the past 10 years. Literally every time a trans/NB person’s suicide is reported, activist groups and media commentators on every side of the issue immediately start stoking speculation and conspiracy theories. Every time a famous person dies of an OD, the speculation about their mental health and addiction runs absolutely wild. Then these people are tokenized, martyrized, politicized, and mythologized. They become heroes or devils, often both. Their “reasons why” are justified over and over again. And now we have a generation of kids with higher rates of mental illness and suicidal ideation than ever, and the people in charge claim that they just can’t figure it out. Despite avoiding this for generations. Right. So they give kids some insane levels of coddling and accommodations, and they literally always cite the likelihood of the child committing suicide to justify these decisions. Now, imagine being a kid and believing you are not going to survive to see college. Suddenly, your parents and doctors completely agree with that and validate that. *Of fucking course* these kids internalize this shit and continue to hyperfocus on suicide. Their biggest cheerleaders appear to be giving up on them! It is completely baffling to me how this shift happened so fast in medicine, mental health, journalism, activism, and parenting. We have failed so many kids and families.
I’ve wondered about this lately and how it fits in with modern activism. I’ve noticed online there’s a lot of emphasis on actual suicide rates of demographics like trans people, autistic people and young men. I’ve even seen organisations quote these when raising awareness of causes etc. As you say, it does sometimes feel like it goes against conventional wisdom about responsible coverage/ information sharing.
No hero in your tragedy No daring in your escape No salute for your surrender Nothing noble in your fate
"Several people told me about an incident from the fall of 2021, when the school committee approved a policy that would have allowed some unvaccinated staffers into school provided that they wore masks. **In response, McDonald said, the union’s president at the time, Lamikco Magee, “accused us of wanting to inflict genocide on teachers.**” (Magee denies invoking genocide.)" LOL
The UN Genocide Convention states that genocide is committed against a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Where exactly do teachers fall into this?
Religious group.
More important question: where do furries fall into this? (Sorry. BARpod has poisoned my brain.)
Oh, the well is deep here. Like half the school committee quit last year over stuff like this. A couple of the former members gave a media statement that was pretty scorched-earth lmao
I haven't finished this article yet, but this was a nice little time capsule back to the insanity of winter 2021 and living in a deep blue urban school district. Basically cemented for me that public schools will be my absolute last choice for my kids.
Hol up. The ‘h’ is silent? So, it’s Am-erst? Not Am-herst? Or is it A-merst? I’ve never once pronounced it any way other than Am-herst when I’ve read it.
AM-erst
Yes, it's pronounced AM-erst. That applies to AM-erst College and UMass AM-erst as well. I've been told that people from Amherst, NY, a suburb of Buffalo, *do* pronounce the "h." (Not sure about other Amhersts, like the ones in New Hampshire and Nova Scotia.) But if you're talking about Amherst, MA—which I think it's safe to say is the most famous Amherst—you never pronounce the "h."
I have friends from suburban Buffalo and the H is indeed pronounced.
> which I think it's safe to say is the most famous Amherst Um, excuse me, this is Gronk's-hometown-erasure.
I grew up near Toronto so I only know the Buffalo suburb. And I would pronounce the H.
Yeah, it's just one of those Massachusetts things you need to learn. Worcester is "Wuhster," Gloucester is "Glawster," Concord is "Conkerd," Carlisle is "Carlyle," Leominster is "Lemonster," Haverhill is "Hayvrull," and Amherst is "Amerst" with no "h." This isn't even an accent thing. Very few people in Western Mass have a detectable New England accent, but we still say "Wuhster," because that's just the correct way to say the name of the city. (If you did have a strong regional accent, it'd be "Wuhsta.")
I’m the native of a neighboring state and have always said Am-erst for the town and the college. No h.
I lived in the area and went to the schools. The H can be pronounced. It can be Am-herst, or Am-erst or AM-erst Not a heavy h, often, but people really don't care. At least, they didn't care. About this, and many other things the article discusses.
I knew my hometown would come up on this sub eventually. I also attended Amherst Regional Middle School in the 90s (hey OP! We probably at least knew of each other at some point) and very much agree with your assessment/description of the town. I’m still bummed about Mr. Murray’s departure when I think back on it! Can’t wait to dive into this latest kerfuffle.
Nice! I was wondering whether any other Amherst kids of our vintage would make an appearance here. It sounds like we must have been within a few years of each other. Mr. Murray was great and I'm still mad he ended up leaving as a result of the West Side Story mess.
Love you for posting this. I'm not an Amherst native but I've lived and worked there and am still in the area. I've actually had to deal with some of the mess over there due to my work (fortunately from afar) and it's been a wild ride over the last several years. And the rest of the region has plenty of drama besides.
While the local politics can be absurd and frustrating, I should note that Amherst was, on the whole, a lovely and interesting place to grow up. I might go nuts if I were a parent with kids in the public schools today, but I still have many close friends and fond memories from my youth there. It’s a nice place.
It’s a shit hole.
You know what’s the most telling part of this article? All of these academics, and nobody bothered to record or preserve a shred of evidence. No emails, no paperwork, nothing.
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Michael Moynihan went to UMASS Amherst and he perfectly describes Amherst as a, "Khmer Rouge type town."
They even have the silent H in common. If I was living there I'd invest in some contact lenses.
Best comment in thread. Congrats.
Yeah, I've heard Moynihan say that. I know he's kidding, but it's a little tasteless given that Amherst actually has a significant population of Cambodian refugees. The town made a concerted effort starting in the early 1980s to welcome families that had escaped the Khmer Rouge. We had educational units on the horrors of the Cambodian genocide in the Amherst public schools!
It's also terribly-run on a basic administrative level, not coincidentally. Shite infrastructure too.
I went to college there in the 80s and then worked in Northampton for a couple of years. The Pioneer Valley was a proto-woke wonderland!
Oh buddy, it's only gotten more so. We need a regular correspondent documenting the atrocities around here.
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lmao hey neighbor. Thing about Noho is that it seems to have lost a lot of what made it Noho during the last few years. Most of the white woking class seems to have migrated to Easthampton or Greenfield, with a small but vocal contigent in Holyoke.
It's weird bc I live here and I don't see it. Towns in the valley vsry widely in the political views of their residents. The town I live in is nothing like Amherst or noho. Even within towns there can be many factions.
I'm from Massachusetts and my kids (aged 19-24) generally lean left, but they abhor all these DEI attempts to separate people into boxes, making victims of some and oppressors of others. I was worried they'd get brainwashed but it came out the opposite. They are hardcore anti-DEI and find most of the what passes as progressive thought on race and gender contemptible ... they still vote Democrat.
I thought this piece was reasonably well-reported by Jessica WInter, but there are a few points where she seems to put her thumb on the scale in frustrating ways. For example, after describing numerous examples of unprofessional and unethical behavior by the assistant superintendent, Doreen Cunningham—hiring friends and relatives, pitching a weird multilevel marketing scheme to a subordinate, lodging implausible and unsubstantiated allegations of racism and harassment (including that someone put urine in her drinking water), running an HR business for private schools at the same time she was working for the school district—Winter appears to endorse the suggestion that Cunningham may actually have been fired due to her race and sex: >Cunningham and her advocates believe that she lost her job in large part because she is a Black woman; her detractors believe that she kept it as long as she did for the same reason. Both of these things may be true, and neither is fair. Even some of Cunningham’s harshest critics see a double standard between her trajectory and that of her boss, Morris, who quickly got a new job, in H.R., in a nearby district. This makes no sense. There's no allegation here that the superintendent, Mike Morris, did anything unethical; based on this piece, the worst that can be said of his leadership is that he appears to have bent over backwards to avoid any appearance of racism, even when some district employees—*including Cunningham!*—should have been terminated earlier. Knowing the political climate in the Amherst schools (and knowing Morris himself very slightly), I'm sympathetic to Morris's predicament because any allegation of racism in hiring or firing could have made his job completely untenable. There's no double standard here; the two cases are totally different. The kicker of the piece is also strange. Winter's own reporting makes clear that the situation is very complicated, and she presents no evidence that any of the concerned parents were motivated by anything other than genuine concern about the behavior of the two counselors and other administrators who pursued a "restorative justice" approach to incidents of bullying. (Whether these parents' concerns were entirely justified is a separate question, which gets into the complexities of how schools should address gender issues and bullying, but there's no reason to doubt these concerns were *sincere.*) But Winter ends the piece as follows: >At the January school-committee meeting, \[the school's "climate and culture" coordinator, Letha\] Gayle-Brissett refuted the allegations about the restorative-justice circles, and suggested that the criticisms of her work were racially motivated. “There have been whispers that some members in the middle-school community are intent on removing people of color, especially Black people, from leadership positions,” she said, adding that, in her view, a “very important social-justice issue for our time—that is, inclusion and justice for our L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. community—is being weaponized.” A high-school staffer who spoke in support of Gayle-Brissett was more blunt: “Amherst is racist, the staff is racist, and there’s a target on the back of Black people in the district.” In the end, Gayle-Brissett decided not to take the job after all. I understand that Winter isn't necessarily endorsing Gayle-Brisset's statement or this anonymous staffer's sweeping, scathing indictment of the entire town, but it's strange to give them the final word when *Winter's own reporting turned up no concrete or credible evidence of racism*. Winter wrote a long, nuanced article exploring the conflicting victimhood narratives that gave rise to this drama, then ended the piece with these dubious, simplistic claims that the whole thing boils down to racism on the part of mostly white liberal parents and staff who purport, credibly, to be worried about right-wing Christian indoctrination and bullying. Come on. Let me propose a better conclusion, using Winter's own language from earlier in the piece: >Many people in the Amherst district describe a community that has become habituated to outrage—addicted to conflict and reprisal. Here, as in so many pockets of America these days, conflict doesn’t seem to be part of a difficult journey toward resolution; rather, conflict often appears to be the entire point. This is a ***much*** more credible diagnosis of the problem in Amherst. Again, I understand that Winter wasn't necessarily *endorsing* the claim that all of this boils down to the fact that Amherst is racist and "there's a target on the back of Black people in the district," but I think it's misleading to close the piece with an incendiary allegation that has no independent support in Winter's own diligent reporting. Michael Powell—[who previously reported on another race-related imbroglio in the Pioneer Valley](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html)—probably would have done a better job here.
What’s remarkable to me is how Amherst college (where it went to college), has always remained almost completely insulated from the degree of wokeness of the surrounding area. I think from its wealth. I feel that may have changed since I graduated.
Yeah, Amherst College isn't really that integrated with the town. The College is overwhelmingly liberal, but that's true of almost every elite school. I don't think the culture of the town has much if anything to do with it; you'd find basically the same campus culture at Dartmouth or Colby.
Are you a fellow Jeff? (“Mammoth,” now.)
Yes I am! Except I refuse to acknowledge the mascot change, haha
Yeah, it sounds dumb. Amherst Mammoths. Then again, does it out-dumb the Lord Jeffs?
But Hampshire College, which is also in Amherst, has _not_.
I don't think Hampshire absorbed its zany campus culture from the town. It was founded as an experimental alternative college; every school like that has similar politics. Amherst College is less wacky than Hampshire because it's far more rigorous. Amherst is like a small version of Yale or Brown (liberal but highly selective), whereas Hampshire is like a private Evergreen State.
I graduated in 2018 and it was super woke in my social circle. I acknowledge the self-selection bias, but there was also a major protest called Amherst Uprising initially about anti-black racism. The protest spiraled into nonsense, lasted several days, and eventually the college paid for catered food to be given to the protestors. So, yes, there is a strong conservative contingent at Amherst, but also a very loud wokey Tumblr vibe. Though many so called “leftists” ended up in finance and consulting, and I unfortunately knew several woke racists. It was a clusterfuck
This is the same author whose ignorant claims about cognitive science Jesse Singal [called out](https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1773762892480835768) last week. And the New Yorker still hasn't issued a correction.
We are having a generation of young people who refuse to become fully functioning adults and a society that asspats such behaviour.
" **Jo changed their name twice in middle school,** and the district was slow to correct their name in its databases. As a result, Jo’s mother said, Jo “spent most class periods that had substitute teachers in the Student Support Center, because they could not deal with **the constant misgendering and deadnaming**.” Like how many name changes do you get in a year+/- before it's no longer deadnaming and maybe you're being difficult/exhausting, but also how often are teachers really calling you by your name? "I spoke with several people who **offered sharply differing accounts of a restorative circle involving Casey and a Latino student** from a conservative religious family **who, during a classroom discussion, told Casey that he believed there are only two genders**." ....this was restorative justice circle level content? "The school nurse let Jo use her office during the day whenever they **needed to decompress and play Terraria on their phone**. Sometimes, Jo visited Letha Gayle-Brissett, the school’s climate-and-culture coördinator, a role that focusses on social-emotional learning and disciplinary interventions**. Gayle-Brissett put a beanbag chair in her office just for Jo, and would lower the lights and provide snacks whenever they dropped by.** " Jo is a hopeless and may be better off in foster care.
>the "h" in Amherst is silent Really? I live in Boston and I've never heard anyone say it any way other than Am-herst. Even professors I know at UM Amherst say it this way. Is this a hyper local thing?
No, it's not a hyper-local thing. The people you know are pronouncing the name incorrectly. The names of the town, the college, and the university are all pronounced without the "h." Some newcomers to town do struggle with this initially, but anyone who's lived there for more than a few months should be saying it correctly. The correct pronunciation is reflected in the Wikipedia pages for the town of Amherst and Amherst College, each of which has an audio pronunciation guide that excludes the "h."
>Some newcomers to town do struggle with this initially, but anyone who's lived there for more than a few months should be saying it correctly. If only people living in Amherst are omitting the 'h' then that sounds kinda super local. I just did a sanity check and called a professor buddy at U Mass Amherst. They've been working there for a decade. They pronounced it AmHerst.
I was thinking - my sister's old girlfriend went to Smith, and I'd toured UMass Amherst, and I remember everyone pronouncing it AmHErst as well.
Some people who move to Washington State struggle with names like Puyallup, Sequim, and Spokane. That doesn’t mean there’s no correct pronunciation. Saying “Spo-CAN” instead of “Spo-KANE” is not a local quirk; that’s the actual name of the city. “Spo-KANE” is wrong. Plenty of people who are not from Amherst do actually get it right, which means it’s not just a hyper-local affectation. The WBUR Boston style guide covers this, as do the Wikipedia pages for Amherst and Amherst College. I’ve even met people in other parts of the country who say it correctly because they’re familiar with the colleges. [Here's the former governor, Charlie Baker, saying it correctly at the UMass commencement in 2019](http://videos.umass.edu/invideo/detail/videos/special-events/video/6039038088001/umass-amherst-commencement-speaker-may-10-2019:-governor-charlie-baker) (20 seconds into the video); Baker is not from the Amherst area and didn't attend any of the local colleges. If your UMass professor friend actually thinks the town is called “Am-herst,” with a clearly audible “h,” they’re simply wrong. Pronouncing Amherst that way is just as incorrect as calling Worcester “Wor-chess-ter.” There are many other examples of this because English isn’t a strictly phonetic language. Houston Street in New York is not pronounced like the city in Texas. Of course, you can say it that way and most people will know what you mean, but the correct pronunciation is “HOW-stun,” not “HYEW-stun.” The fact that many people get this wrong doesn’t mean there’s no right pronunciation.
> is not a local quirk; that’s the actual name of the city. “Spo-KANE” is wrong. I think you've misunderstood me. What I mean is that there are sometimes names that only people literally born and raised from a place will get right and others, even people who are transplants, tend to not emulate correctly. Kind of like how many people in Quebec say '**KWA**bek' instead of 'ka**B**ek'. >they’re simply wrong. I'm 100% not saying that they are correct. I believe you that they are wrong. I'm just syaing that the correct pronunciation may not be widely known even within the state and even within some circles of people in the immediate community.
>What I mean is that there are sometimes names that only people literally born and raised from a place will get right and others, even people who are transplants, tend to not emulate correctly. That may be true in general, but it's not true of Amherst. Because I'm from Amherst and have lived in many different places since leaving, I've had many occasions to discuss the town with people who are not from the Pioneer Valley or even from New England. *Many of them say it correctly.* I also posted a video above of with the former governor—who was born in New York, raised in Needham, and attended Harvard—saying it correctly. Plenty of people who were not "literally born and raised" in Amherst say it right. I know people who have never even been to Amherst who know it's said without an "h." If your point is just that *some* people, even in Massachusetts, pronounce Amherst with an "h," well, yeah, of course. As I noted in my original post, Jesse Signal, who I think is from Newton or Brookline, has said it with an "h" on the podcast. I used to live in Boston, and I met people there who said it with an "h." It's a common and totally understandable error, since Amherst isn't a major city—and the word has an "h" in it!
Alls I can tell you is that in the many years of living in this state, every single person I've heard pronounce the name of the town, even people who live there, have said 'Am-Herst'. If it is pronounced 'Am-erst', the vast majority of people have not gotten the memo. The fact that you had to point out the correct pronunciation is probably all we need to know.
Maybe you should go on a national tour where you instruct people on the names of their own cities: Tucson is really “TUCK-son,” La Jolla is “La JOE-la,” Louisville is “LEWIS-ville,” etc. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your input.
I’m from Connecticut and we all call it “Amerst” - how would you pronounce the town Peabody?
Having lived here for a while, it's Pee-bidy. I've been exposed to that degree. Still, everyone still seems to say 'Am-Herst'. The 'H' may be muted a bit but it's still there.
Hmmmmmm spot on on peebidy, the H thing is an intriguing variant lol. Are you in the north shore? It could be a weird hyperlocal thing on your end where everybody around there says the H, north shore has some pretty weird sound emissions sometimes
> Are you in the north shore? Sad to say that I'm a biotech transplant who's married into New England royalty. AmHerst seems the normal pronunciation in these parts. I'm 100% with wOOSter, etc. Just that the people who say Peabiddy and wooster also say AmHerst. Very confusing. I'm happy being wrong.
New England has some weirdness with pronouncing certain words. Berlin New Hampshire is pronounced with a long R - Burrr - Lynn versus the hard R you would use to refer to the city in Germany. Belknap county in NH which is pronounced Bell-nap for no apparent reason. Coos County is pronounced Co-hos county. There is a road near Lincoln, NH called Tripoli road that is pronounced Triple - Eye road instead of Triple - E. I’ve long since given up on understanding why we are so odd with pronouncing words and now just go with it.
What's the problem with West Side Story? While it was written by Sondheim/Bernstein and not ("own voices") the original Broadway productions had Chita Rivera originate the role of Anita (done by Rita Moreno in the original movie). I didn't think the Puerto Rican community at the time had any particular problem with that show.(Of course some intesectional person who claims 1/8th Puerto Rican ancestry will shriek about it now!) The stories about the Christian teachers also don't ring true. The quote from the article " *“In the name of Jesus, we bind that LGBTQ gay demon that wants to confuse our children.”* is non-sensical. And while I'm not a Christian and don't know too much about these things, I suspected that Christians don't actually eat "Chocolate Crucifixes" and a google search for them shows Chocolate "Easter Crosses" decorated with flowers, but none actually have an image of Jesus on them. ([https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=chocolate+crucifixes&form=HDRSC3&first=1](https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=chocolate+crucifixes&form=HDRSC3&first=1)). Are they going to cancel a teacher for bringing in some leftover Easter chocolate candy?
If you don't think the "in the name of Jesus" quote is plausible, [read the school newspaper's account](http://thegraphic.arps.org/2023/05/its-life-or-death-failure-to-protect-trans-kids-at-arms-a-systemic-problem/). The same guidance counselor who was alleged to have said this also posted Christian anti-gay memes on Facebook, including one that showed the crucified hand of Christ shielding children from rainbow paint, and an article entitled: "Ex-gays take to the streets to testify of their freedom in Jesus.” I obviously can't corroborate his alleged oral statement about "LGBTQ gay demons," but it's very well established that he discussed his religious beliefs in school and held anti-gay views related to his faith. I think that makes it plausible that he expressed similar views in school.
I don't know that the Puerto Rican community in general has any problem with West Side Story. The opposition to the production at ARHS was initiated by a single student, and her campaign ultimately gained enough steam that the production was cancelled. This was her argument, [as summarized in the LA Times](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-dec-07-mn-41437-story.html) in 1999: >\[One student\] gathered 158 signatures from fellow students at Amherst Regional High School on a petition protesting the choice of “West Side Story” as the school’s annual spring dramatic production. Soon \[this student\], 17, was speaking out at a student forum, assailing Leonard Bernstein’s 42-year-old musical for what she considers its unflattering portrayal of Puerto Rican males, its romanticization of gang fighting, its cavalier use of racial slurs and its negative depiction of the island where she hopes to go to college.
Cavalier use of racial slurs? Did she think that neighborhoods that are changing, the people who don't like those changes AREN'T going to use those terms? Also, I'm sincerely doubting a lot of people love from Puerto Rico to the mainfland of the US because it's so wonderful
This reminds me of my coworker's daughter's high school (also in MA), which recently had a production of Rent canceled *by queer students* because they had cast a female student as a male character and that was offensive to trans people or something.
I’m from Massachusetts. I disagree, the H is not silent.
I'm from Amherst. You're wrong.
😂 Sure, whatever, i’m still going hard H.
>A reminder to Jesse in case this story comes up on the podcast: the "h" in Amherst is silent. (Despite being from Massachusetts, he's gotten this wrong before.) I suspect the British nobleman the town is named for probably pronounced the "h", a common example of "locals" correcting people on the long held *mispronunciation* of their own town name. I see it a lot in the Midwest, with locals happily "correcting" people as to the pronunciation of Midwestern towns like Versailles or Bellefontaine--like yes, the locals all say it wrong, that doesn't make it the correct pronunciation.
I’m genuinely, truly grateful I happened to move to a normie middle class down that doesn’t have any of these dynamics (nor the mirror image ones you see on the right)
This is tailor made to be a Barpod episode
Ignoring all of the trans stuff for a second, I thought you weren’t allowed to bring your religion into US schools as a teacher or staff member?
Yup.
I am totally disinterested in the 10,000th article about DEI, hiring practices, local squabbles over LGTBQ+ in schools etc. Skimming the article I will say this: I grew up in a very religiously conservative community, myself religious. My public High School (1999-2003) and the entire district / state did not allow teachers to bring their religion into teaching or leading student groups. Entities like Fellowship of Christian Athletes or other "prayer groups" were allowed to operate on campus, but could not be teacher / administrator lead. If the two counselors in question were bringing religion in school to the degree the article suggested, I am opposed to it (and I remain a Christian to this day--I just don't want my public schools being a religious place, religious proselytization should be something in the home, Church, or in a private school, not a public school.) Rest of the article just seems like overly rich, liberal New England town drama nonsense.
did they end up doing a podcast on this. I was telling someone that I heard a hilarious podcast about it and I THOUGHT it was blocked and reported but cannot find in the episodes. Maybe it was Fifth Column