The Neverending Winter of Special Snowflakes

I'm sure by now everyone's seen or heard something about the rocket scientist offensive shirt outrage explosion. I won't even bother linking to a story; I'd feel like I'm just participating in the link-bait frenzy our media perpetually creates. My basic summary: guy who landed probe on comet wore shirt portraying scantily clad women, feminists screamed like banshees, guy tearfully apologized. And so, here we are in the aftermath.

The resulting Right vs Left issue is the same as usual. Left says the incident is indicative of a cultural prejudice against women in the workplace, Right says no, it's just a shirt, stop being so sensitive. There's much that could be said about modern feminism, but I'm leaving that specific topic alone for now. I want to address something slightly larger that I think pervades our culture as a whole.

We need to stop thinking we're so dang important.

That probably sounds weird coming from a conservative, but I'm not talking about individual rights and associated philosophical concepts. I'm talking about our strange proclivity toward making everything we, individually, don't like into National Issues that Need Addressing.

This isn't just a liberal thing, though I would contend that many liberal cultural strains thrive on outrage and overreaction. Conservatives can do the same thing with some issues, particularly in popular media. If, say, a TV show has content that some conservatives (particularly Christian conservatives) object to, these people can fall prey to the same "this shouldn't be on the air at all!" mentality they decry in liberals, rather than just watching something else. It's either a cultural thing or an innate human thing (I suspect a mixture of both).

On both sides of the aisle, people who say they just want to be left alone and allowed to do what they want often don't offer the same courtesy to others. I think a good example of this is the notion of boycotts. I find organized boycotts to be fundamentally strange. If I, an individual person, don't like a business's practices enough that I wish to avoid any of my money supporting them, I will stop purchasing the business's products. I might even inform other people of the questionable practices so that they might better suit their own consciences. Yet, for many, this is not enough. They are not satisfied until a large number of other people take the exact same action they do. Everyone has to stop giving money to this business, not just me.

It's this kind of conspicuous group affirmation that perplexes and concerns me. I'm not sure if it comes from insecurity, arrogance, or some other flawed motive, but so many Americans, the minute they dislike something, start handing out the torches and pitchforks. We can't just be upset, we need lots and lots of other people to be just as upset, if not more.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to change aspects of culture we think are harmful. I am saying that before we start screaming, we should step back, take a deep breath, and think, "is this really that important in the bigger picture?" Too often, I think we confuse things we're mad about with things that matter. We think our subjective reaction to something is the objective truth about it and shout down anyone who doesn't see what we see. In doing so, we ruin any chance of actually changing things for the better in lieu of endless, breathless screaming matches.

Going back to the #shirtgate incident, I would ask those angry feminists (who will probably never read this): is that shirt really that important? Even assuming that feminist premises are true (scientific workplaces are unfriendly to women, working environments are patriarchal in general, etc.), does one guy's dumb shirt really warrant a reaction so furious that it brought a man to tears?

I suspect the answer, if they were honest with themselves, would be no. When we're angry and offended, however, we don't stop to think about the reasonableness of our response. Let's start exercising more restraint and control over our anger. Let's pause and weigh the importance of issues before letting slip the dogs of outrage. And let's stop inflating our egos to the size of an entire country.