Um... toughen up Emory or life's gonna kick your ass.
I don't envy these kids. The arc of adolescence continues to grow longer and longer. My father's adolescence was shorter than mine, and my grandfather's was shorter than his. Eventually, food insecurity, war, and disease will revisit, and adolescence will be a luxury again. Their pain and fear is real, but their circumstance is historically rare.
Tony Judt argued that "adolescence" is a modern invention that has existed since about 1952. Your grandfather's may have been short, but his father's was nonexistent. I would also argue that "adolescence" is largely a socioeconomic construct as well. You don't get one if you're poor. Debutante's balls and quinceaneras are for people who can afford to throw big parties.
50 people in a whole university getting upset isn't so bad unless it's a really small university. I definitely had 50 questionably stable people at my college I guess they just didn't congregate. Having said that wtf. I mean I know people who support questionable politicians but it's not until after they start suggesting vigilante style genocide that I begin to worry. You can't just infer all this stuff from some chalk drawing of the guys name.
is anyone surprised they have drawn the conclusion that this sort of thing is normal/expected, thanks to the reactions to numerous other incidents on college campuses across the country if they had couched their "complaints" in slightly more self-aware terms, every newspaper which jumped on them, from the post on down, would be supporting them instead. this is our reality
Yup, there is quite a few other way they could have reacted to this better. They could have just focused on supporting their own candidate, they could have attempted to engage and educate the masses ( it's a university ffs) or they could have just grabbed their own chalk and added "sucks dick" to the end of Trump. Young people these days have no imagination.
I have a hard time believing that they really think that "Trump" is (by itself) a scary word. But outrage is a classic political tool, including feigned outrage. If you oppose something, then it stands to reason that the more strident the opposition the better. But only if you don't know how rhetoric works. So you know what... I agree with these people and I think it's good that they are politically engaged. If they are oversensitive, then so what, as TNG said, life's gonna kick their ass and then they'll get back up again. If they are bad at protest, then that's something they can work on. In any case, I feel like student politics is always going to be a bit messy. And yeah, I'm channelling the regret I feel at having never mustered the chutzpah to do this stuff when I was 18.
Minority groups have every right to be afraid of the supporters of a cis supremacist, straight supremacist, white supremacist, man supremacist.
If I saw that Trump Chalk, I might have tried to smear out that T and left only the Rump. Also I'm surprised so many people noticed the chalk and got scared. I mean most people would have just walked by and not noticed the sidewalk chalk. How many people notice the graffiti in their town and just stare upon it for hours? Most people might take a quick glance and just walk away.