"Take your legitimate medical issues and get out!"Īs for safe spaces, I'll just describe what they were where I went to school. Go hide in this special room so the bad words don't hurt your precious, fragile ears." What it doesn't mean - but what most people think it means - is, "We might mention something that will hurt your feelings. Some people just can't wrap their head around it. Please prepare accordingly." Those last three words are important, because that combat veteran or that rape survivor will likely actually prepare accordingly. A trigger warning is a simple note in the syllabus saying, "Hey, we're going to discuss something that may cause some of you to relive a traumatic life experience. Similarly, people who have survived rape may also be suffering from PTSD, and descriptions of sexual assault can trigger a traumatic episode. If a combat veteran attending college on a GI Bill is in a gen-ed history class, and there's video of, say, World War II combat, that could easily trigger that veteran's PTSD. This same thing happens in real life on college campuses. Unless those readers are bears, in which case, eat shit. We care too much about our readers for that. If a reader had been mauled by a bear or faced a similarly gruesome accident, that article could've triggered memories of their previous trauma, and maybe caused them to pass out or get hurt. But here's the reason we did that - that article is about folks who got mauled by bears. Some of our more frequent readers might be aware that Cracked only very rarely uses trigger warnings, and I wrote one of the very few articles we've slapped one on. 4 A "Safe Space" Or "Trigger Warning" Is Not Some Method Of Squashing Free Speech And it starts with a fundamental misunderstanding of what these things actually are. Instead, everyone from "grrrrrr, I'm angry" comedians to President Obama has told them to buck up and ditch the "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces." Universities aren't the bastions of education they used to be. Despite it being harder and harder to get into a lot of schools, the current climate of the country tends to show less respect and more ever-growing middle fingers for kids in college. The American university is quite the weird place to be right now.
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