We’ve all seen the stories about Harvard’s president Claudine Gay. Multiple instances of “duplicative language” have now been documented, and  Harvard alumnus Barack Hussein Obama was among those urging the board to retain her. Yet nobody is asking what is obvious to me: why isn’t she resigning? Ashamed?

I miss shame.

When our high-functioning autistic daughter was potty-training, she was still “locked-in” her own little world, staring at particles of dust in the sunlight while her two siblings quite literally ran circles around her laughing and playing. Understandably, we were having more trouble getting her out of diapers than we did her two siblings. None of the usual techniques and tricks worked. Then it occurred to me what the real problem was: she wasn’t ashamed. How do you potty-train a toddler who doesn’t care her pants are poopy and stinky?

Shame was the missing element.

Shame is what’s pervasively missing in our entire culture right now, and it’s been worsening since I was a girl in the self-esteem 70s. Remember? It began with (for the sake of argument) good intentions, as most bad things do. Everything was about a child’s self-esteem. The thinking was, essentially, if the child thinks he can, he can, so let him, or enable him, to think he can write well, sing well, run well, etc. Confidence was the key, we were told.

Of course, delusional overconfidence is what makes kids jump off rooftops thinking they can fly, so extrapolation clearly wasn’t a feature of this philosophy. (Progressives don’t extrapolate. It’s how they remain progressive.) This kind of neo-self-confidence felt good in the hangover from the “love the one you’re with” 60s. Loving the one you were with in the 60s resulted in the crying toddlers in the 70s. And if it feels good now and prevents or stops the crying, we’ll worry about later…  later. Well, later turned into a luge-like slippery slope with American culture as the Caribbean bob-sled team piled in a fractured heap at the bottom of the hill.

“Coexist” bumperstickers and the Jeffersonian live and let live ethos of ‘If it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, what do I care?’ has transmogrified from simple civil toleration, into “endorse it or you’re canceled.” Oh and you get the parting gift of being labeled with a scarlet letter denoting every “-ism” or “-phobia” imaginable. That slippery slope got slippery awfully fast didn’t it?

Participation trophies (which were bad enough) have now transmogrified into the elimination of valedictorians and magnet schools. Live and let live has transmogrified into “it’s not gonna lick itself” drag-queen story hour and the Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy effort to normalize child-genital mutilation. Abortion (also bad enough) from “safe, legal, and rare” into “shout your abortion.” 

Bring back shame. Let kids cry. If you tell a kid they suck at singing, they may take up painting and become the next Leonardo. Withhold criticism and you get the feline caterwauling of Yoko Ono. And which would you choose?

Image: frankieleon