Students are sick and tired of being called special snowflakes

Cornell may be blanketed in snow for a sizable part of the year, but “snowflakes” is anything but an accurate description of its students. Or any college student for that matter.

When I walk to class in the morning, I don’t see delicate snowflakes floating around (other than the actual snow Cornell gets covered in). I see hundreds of students finding their place in the world, each of them dealing with their own challenges. From rowers training in the freezing cold at six in the morning to architecture students who spent their entire night in the studio, students working in order to help pay their college bills to clubs fundraising on Ho Plaza for charity so that they can try to make a difference to people’s lives. So no, I don’t see anyone who needs coddling.

Nor do we need anyone telling us how thin-skinned and easily offended we are. Trust me, if we made it to college, we’re not thin-skinned. We’ve dealt with inevitable rejections from universities some of us dreamed of going to. We’re intellectually challenged every day, in and out of class. We deal with ideas we don’t agree with all the time, and the fact that we don’t agree with those ideas and we protest them does not make us cry-babies. Safe spaces don’t make us thin-skinned, they give us a break, they allow us to organize and to develop our own views without being attacked for it. They allow people to express emotion without feeling threatened, and that’s a good thing, everybody should be able to express their feelings and emotion for the sake of our sanity and mental health.

So I was appalled when I heard people criticize the Cry In hosted at Cornell after Trump’s election. Do you think there is something wrong with handling your emotion with tears? Or do you take offense at public displays of emotion? Maybe you didn’t take the election personally, or perhaps you’re not threatened by racism or homophobia, but there are some people who are and you shouldn’t find the way someone handles their emotion offensive. It’s rather thin-skinned to be offended by tears isn’t it?

Likewise, what is so offensive about a protest? When Cornell students staged a walk-out to protest the election we weren’t smothering the voices of others with different opinions. We listened to the points made during the seemingly endless election, and everybody reached their own conclusion on what it meant to them. But for those of us who disagreed with it, a protest was our way of replying, of saying we don’t agree with you, that the values represented in the White House don’t represent us. Criticizing protesters by telling them they should move on and get over it goes against our democratic values. It’s our right to protest our government and telling us to stop is akin to limiting our freedom of speech, which seems to be the same issue our critics have with safe spaces. It’s a bit hypocritical that when the snowflakes express an opinion, we’re told to be quiet. But when we set up a space to discuss our opinions, we’re attacking your rights.

Referring to college students as easily offended is just false. Firstly, no-one has the right to tell anyone what they should or should not be offended by. If you told me you wanted to raise taxes, I wouldn’t be offended. If you told me feminism was cancer, I would be very offended. When people take offense in what someone said, it’s because they took it personally. I’m not saying you shouldn’t say anything that could be construed as offensive, but when you say something which could offend someone, don’t be surprised when they get offended. It doesn’t make them thin-skinned, it means they have values.

So why don’t we stop calling college students delicate snowflakes that need taking care of? For that matter, no one should be insulted just because they express emotion or offense at current affairs. Diversity of opinion is what makes democracies work, so let’s stop attacking people for having and expressing different opinions. Let’s stop insulting people just to trigger them and get a reaction.

College students are definitely not snowflakes, we’re more like a glacier that will be running society in a few years.