Why is it Someone Else’s Problem if You’re Triggered?

The World Does Not Revolve Around Your Feelings and Neuroses

Not so long ago, I was with a group of friends at dinner and a guy who used to work at a hotel in Vegas was telling us about something that happened to him last year. He said he looks out the door and there’s a weird-looking guy who literally dropped trou, whipped out his penis, and was peeing on one of the hotel’s cars. He runs out the door and yells, “Sir, please stop that!” Instantly, the guy STARTS SOBBING. He calls the police and interestingly enough, the guy peeing on the car ALSO called the police to complain that he had been misgendered. So, the police do show up, talk to both of them, and… ultimately nothing really happens. You may think that’s an anti-climatic story, but actually, it’s representative of so much of what’s happening in America today.

We have people engaging in bad behavior who point the finger at everyone else in our society and expect them to fix their problems. In this case, we have a guy who believes he has a right to literally pee on other people’s cars, but on the other hand, he considers it to be a matter for the police when other people aren’t aware of his personal pronouns. In this country, far too many people have an inverted sense of personal responsibility. Now, when people have a personal problem created by their own choices or personal failings, it’s supposed to be everyone else’s responsibility to fix it. Meanwhile, if they impinge on someone else in the process, that’s too bad.

You decided to get loans to go to an expensive private college, but now that you have your degree, you decided the payments are too much, so you want everyone else to pay for it? You decided to dress like a woman and now you’re upset real women don’t want to share a locker room with a man pretending to be a woman? You’re so unhappy someone with an opinion you don’t agree with is allowed to speak on campus that you believe it’s fine for you to shout them down?

Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 @MrAndyNgo

At the University of North Texas in Denton, far-left activists shut down the Young Conservatives of Texas (@YctUnt) event featuring the father who lost custody of his trans child. The radicals pounded on the table & shouted, “F— you, fascist” over & over.

It goes on and on and on, but what we can say with certainty is that these are personal problems that aren’t everyone else’s responsibility to fix. No one forces you to take out a college loan or go to an expensive school. If you’re a man and you think you’re a woman, you have a mental issue that has a high likelihood of ruining your life if you don’t get it under control. Most people get over the fact that everyone doesn’t agree with them by the time they’re 4 or 5 years old. If it bothers you so much that a speaker disagrees with you that you have to attend a lecture and shout them down, your college should expel you without a refund, send you home to learn to be a better person, and let you enroll somewhere else.

The problem with this whole, “Everyone else needs to adjust to my personal preferences, neuroses, and weaknesses for me to function” mentality is that it’s not efficient, realistic, or even sustainable for the rest of society. There’s a reason every single person reading this column has heard some variation of this phrase:

Except in so many cases in America, we’re eternally acting as if the world DOES revolve around whoever claims to be hurt or offended. Here’s yet another example that I ran across just last night:

John Hawkins @johnhawkinsrwn

@NBCNews The world doesn't need to adapt to people that are "triggered." Instead, they have things they need to work out with a psychologist.

If someone is “triggered” by something, it means that THEY have a problem. When they ask everyone else to adjust to their problem, it either quickly becomes untenable or leads to hypocrisy on a mass scale. For example, if that’s “triggering” for people, why can’t I say the scene where Hans Gruber falls to his death in Die Hard is triggering to me as a white man?

Of course, I could do that, and people would quite correctly consider it ridiculous, but it’s no more ridiculous than crybaby Asian liberals claiming they’re triggered by POTENTIAL violence against an Asian. Let’s face it, we could do this kind of dumb, “Oh, I’m so triggered” nonsense all day long. “Oh, you can’t put out the Bee Movie! I was stung by a bee when I was 6 and I’ve never gotten over it!” “You can’t have a bonfire because the house next to me burnt down last month and I find it triggering!” “All people need to stop drinking vodka because I’m from Ukraine and vodka was invented in Russia. Well, probably. It doesn’t really matter because it triggers me!”

Am I saying that most people that claim to be “triggered” sound this silly? Yes, I am and if they’re really, honestly, “triggered” by this nonsense and are not trying to pretend to be victims, they should go to therapy because they have issues they’re making into everyone else’s issues.

Of course, some of you may be thinking, “That’s not really fair because some people have had some deep, dark, terrible things happen to them that could genuinely be ‘triggering.’”

That’s true and the solution for that is for those people to go to therapy. Stop. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Instead, go to therapy and work it out instead of asking the whole world to change instead. Because it’s not the rest of the world’s responsibility to adapt itself to anyone’s personal problems. The average person does not give a damn what your personal pronouns are, what triggers you, or why you believe being your college professor was right when he said that being asked to show up at 8 AM is a relic of colonialism that infringes on your personal sovereignty. Incidentally, they’re right not to care because ultimately the people who think this way don’t care about anyone else. They’re consumed with their own selfishness to such an extent that they expect the whole world to cater to weird idiosyncrasies.

I could give you a litany of things that are said or happen in our society that offend Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and most especially white Americans in all those categories, but we’re expected to put on our big boy pants, accept that not everyone agrees with us, and be adults about all of it. If you’re waiting for me to tell you how terrible that is, you’ll be waiting a long time because the real problem is that EVERYONE in American society isn’t treated like this. The reality is it’s perfectly okay to expect “insert your favorite supposedly disadvantaged and put-upon group here” to be held to the same standard.  

The sort of paternalism that says, “You’re too pathetic to be treated like an adult so we have to coddle you,” isn’t good for human beings. It makes them weak, whiny, dependent, and a drain on the rest of society. The people who are achieving things and doing something productive with their lives aren’t obsessing over what supposedly “offends” or “triggers” them. If you’re “triggered,” that’s your struggle. Get over it instead of trying to force the rest of the world to attend your pity party.

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