empowered 90's businesswoman

My coworkers complain that our Muslim students get to leave class to pray Salat at noon. Like, we have maybe one Muslim student every two or three years - thus far, all extraordinarily respectful and lovely kids! - and they slip quietly out of class to pray.

My coworkers find all this infuriating. “Imagine,” they cry, “If a Christian kid asked to do that.”

I calmly explain, every single time, that a Christian kid would never HAVE to do that, because every single Christian holy day is a day off school. Good Friday. Easter Sunday. Christmas day. Our entire country interrupts its financial and educational systems - schedules its WEEKS - around the Christian prayer customs and seasons.

One of my service learning classes involved work at a local homeless community center, helping people write resumes and cleaning bathrooms.

Our instructor told us to expect to see the bathrooms trashed a lot–like you will clean the bathroom and immediately someone will wreck it.

And it’s not because they disrespect your work or don’t value having access to clean bathrooms or whatever, but because of control.

When you feel like you have no control over your life or your environment, your brain is going to want to assert control however it can.

Which results in trashed bathrooms.  It’s control exercised over the one small part of your environment that you still have the power to affect.

I see kids on tumblr using the language of social justice as cudgels on people who actually do care about and listen to them

or holding the creators within their communities to an impossibly high standard that they never apply to mainstream media properties.

I just see trashed bathrooms. ‘These are the people my voice will reach,’ they rationalize, ‘so these are the people I’ll hurt.’