Beautiful, Delicate, and Unique: Victims All

I read Elliot Lusztig's angry demand to stop referring to people as "snowflakes," because the word is an insult to "college kids," an expression of "psychological abuse" created by "Trump supporters."

Lusztig linked to this recent article in the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/09/generation-snowflake-not-failing-us-self-harm-competition?CMP=share_btn_tw

I reply:

The term "snowflake" arose from a reference to everyone being treated as though they were unique individuals. The use of the term goes back at least to the 1970's -- and possibly earlier.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross said in 1975, “Life is richest when we realize we are all snowflakes. Each of us is absolutely beautiful and unique. And we are here for a very short time."

Her saying circulated widely throughout the late 1970's and early 1980's. By 2005 the analogy to the supposed uniqueness of snowflakes was generally accepted. It appears in "help-section" books like "The Rejection Syndrome" (by Margaret Rogers van Coops).

Kenneth Martin's saying from 1992 gained currency over the past ten years: "We are all like snowflakes: delicate, vulnerable and no two alike...Put into the wrong environment, we melt away."

This subjection of the human will to the environment is what conservatives have rejected. The mere assertion that snowflake "is a term of psychological abuse" proves what the conservatives are saying: that the current generation views themselves largely as victims of their surroundings rather than as conquerors.

It's Building Omega Again!

From "Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," by Richard P. Feynman:

All during the war, and even after, there were these perpetual rumors: “Somebody’s been trying to get into Building Omega!” You see, during the war they were doing experiments for the bomb in which they wanted to get enough material together for the chain reaction to just get started...a very dangerous experiment!

Naturally, they were not doing this experiment in the middle of Los Alamos, but off several miles, in a canyon several mesas over, all isolated. This Building Omega had its own fence around it with guard towers. In the middle of the night when everything’s quiet, some rabbit comes out of the brush and smashes against the fence and makes a noise. The guard shoots. The lieutenant in charge comes around. What’s the guard going to say—that it was only a rabbit? No. “Somebody’s been trying to get into Building Omega and I scared him off!”

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Now with everyone afraid of technology, and with rumors flying that major national players like China and Russia have been hacking our computers (and for no good reason, feeding information to Julian Assange), all of a sudden the CIA says "Somebody's been trying to get into Building Omega and I scared him off!" Seriously, we need to stop paying attention to tabloid scandal-mongering -- regardless of the source.