Another example of valuing feelings over facts
By American standards I am a severe socialist, by Canadian standards a gentle liberal, by British standards a Labourite. But the main thing I am is exhausted.
My hypersensitive liberal tribe wears me out. Things go along swimmingly — we agree health care must be fully funded, trees/bike lanes will save a city — and suddenly I’m flat on the floor, struggling to speak, my hands flapping to signal for water because once again my honest, decent cohort has done another own goal.
Here’s one example from this week: Michelle Jones and Chelsea Manning at Harvard. The New York Times, a newspaper I sometimes find excessively reasonable, ran a story by the admirable criminal justice Marshall Project on Jones, a black convict who wasn’t admitted to Harvard for her PhD studies.
The Times headline read “From Prison to PhD: The Redemption and Rejection of Michelle Jones.” Jones, 45, had served 20 years in prison for murder, while studying to become a paralegal, doing historical research, and writing dance competitions and plays.
Jones was accepted at almost every university she applied to — she decided on NYU — but was rejected by her first choice, Harvard. Among other problems, some professors noted that she had been found to have minimized her crime in her application “to the point of misrepresentation.” The details are easily googled. Jones had a baby named Brandon Sims, who goes almost unmentioned. He was born disabled with a condition that would cause early puberty and restricted height. Jones said she “did not want to raise a freak.”
She beat the little boy regularly, injuring him so badly that when she left him in his filthy room and came back a few days later, he was dead, covered in flies.
She told no one, including Bran- don’s father and family, put Brandon in a box, drove out to a wooded area and buried him. His body has never been found. Jones has offered no information.
Jones said of her Harvard application that she didn’t want the murder “to be the lens through which everything I’d done . . . was seen. I knew that I had come from this very dark place.”
But here’s where I and the furious liberals part company. They’re demanding that Harvard grovel for not admitting her. I — and presumably other irate applicants — say Harvard’s right.
On the other hand, Harvard is wildly wrong to disinvite brave and bright Chelsea Manning as a fellow and to retain Sean Spicer and Corey Lewandowski, leftover liars and thugs. (Spicer isn’t part of the university; he’s just visiting. Jones would have been a student.)
Jones came from a dark place, but Brandon’s in a darker one, a box deep somewhere in the Indiana dirt. His four years were filled with pain and terror. He has no tombstone.
Here’s the thing. Child-killers aren’t popular. They carry, dare I say it, a stigma. Yet smart American liberals I admire don’t appear to care.
On Twitter they are raining rage. Yet at no time in the liberal spleen machine is Brandon mentioned.
I see this reaction among good people who perceive injustice but haven’t thought it through. It’s often most vociferous in doubtful cases such as Jones’s. It’s Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate for good causes.
Another example: Britain has a commission inquiring into the immediate causes of the Grenfell Tower fire that killed at least 80 poor people in London this year. A second chapter will study the building’s previous disastrous refurbishment.
The inquiry began Thursday with its chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, being criticized for having a good education and a hyphenated last name, which signals posh.
The auditorium where he made his opening statement had fancy chandeliers, which apparently “glittered” too much. Thousands of documents would be reviewed and hundreds of witnesses interviewed, he said, and was criticized for being “legalistic” rather than “emotional.” Area residents found him “cold.”
Moore-Bick is an excellent and experienced judge, precise, not cuddly.
And this is the hallmark of liberal Two Minutes Hate. They value feelings over facts, “lived experience” over statistics. If something feels true, it must be true. Remember “truthiness?” We forget that piece of Colbert Nation wisdom at our peril.
Take another group that is always morally right en masse: city cyclists. Copenhagen and Amsterdam cyclists, dressed for daily life on their sturdy city bikes, are an asset, careful and serene. Toronto cyclists in Lycra, going through red lights on their sharp, thin bikes built for speed, moving on and off the sidewalks, banging on errant cars and threatening pedestrians, are not.
I call them the Gangs of Canada. You become a gang when you have a knee-jerk reaction that you know your tribe will share. Few of you will have considered all the angles. The extreme right aims to be cruel; liberals do it unintentionally.
Oh, liberals, my dearest liberals! People who want dogs in elementary school classrooms to comfort anxious children feel they are in the moral right. They demonize those who take the opposite view: children who fear or are allergic to dogs, teachers maintaining classroom order and early childhood educators cleaning up dog mess.
Dog people may be Canada’s biggest urban gang. They head to First Nations reserves and Texas flood zones to rescue dogs, not povertystricken humans. I call it shameful, they call it morally immaculate.
It is always like this, a pattern repeating like tartan or newsprint. It will never change. I sorrow for my people of the left. hmallick@thestar.ca.