I'm only a paragraph in, and barely at that, but it's already so fucking ironic to read an article about Oberlin proclaiming "Class and race mattered."

If you're a student at Oberlin, you got miles of privilege above the kids who actually feel the reality of that statement, any day.

Two bold section headers in and I posit discussions of privilege are inherently tied into an emotional Maslow's hierarchy: it is those who are fulfilled in most every other basic sense who can afford to make the most fuss about privilege. Not those who find themselves afforded the least.

More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester

Are you kidding me what the fuck. Do you think your employers are going to just let you skip out on work for a quarter because you are engaged in political protests? You think you should be excused failing grades because your political activism prevented you from doing your classwork? HAVE YOU TRIED SWITCHING TO A POLISCI MAJOR MAYBE THAT WILL HELP

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Ugh I can't even, this article is full of first world problems that are richer than double chocolate cheesecake. Talk to me when you are eating rice and beans

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I will add one more comment.

My parents raised me in an environment which they attempted to control and keep 'safe' every way they could.

The result was that when I went to college I was completely naive and unprepared for the realities of life without hovering, protective guardians.

That meant I got to make all the delicious awful mistakes for myself, a lot, alone.

I do not support the idea of keeping children safe, or college students, for that matter. I believe that people who are "safe" do not grow. They do not learn how to deal with trouble because it is kept apart from them. When they finally encounter trouble, they are spectacularly fucked in knowing how to deal with it.

My cat likes to bat at candle flames.

I let him.

If he doesn't learn that the flame will burn his paw first hand, he will not learn. Nothing I can do will stop him from liking the flame.

You can tell a kid the stove is hot as often as you want to but the kid is only going to really take it to heart once they touch it for themselves.