A continued defense of snow, safe spaces

Tufts students everywhere look up at the sky as the clouds open. “When will this accursed pestilence end?” they murmur to each other as the snow begins to fall.

OK, nobody actually talks like that, with the potential exception of drama majors, but this is absurd. It’s practically mid-April. I’m Russian -- I’m basically contractually obligated to appreciate snow -- but even I must ask: when does it end? How long must we suffer under the tyranny of things we cannot control? When will Tufts finally use our lavish tuition expenses for something useful and build a giant weather-controlled dome above Medford-Somerville?

Last week, I wrote an op-ed about how the New York Times’ Judith Shulevitz recently misunderstood safe spaces, while also painting an entire generation in broad, negative strokes in an article. Now that I’ve had some excellent discussions with people who disagreed with me, I shall endeavor to make myself more clear.

All joking aside, this is a serious issue, and I’m going to invoke my aforementioned dome as a metaphor: Shulevitz, and many others, see the ideas of safe spaces and trigger warnings as ever-expanding, terrifying threats to that most American of values, freedom of speech. They see the dome and fear that it’s going to trap everyone inside and keep everyone else outside.

Those of us who are advocates for safe spaces and trigger warnings know that, in fact, there is no dome. In fact, while a dome might be a nice idea in theory, it’s totally unfeasible in practice. Other attempts to control the weather, or indeed, public opinion on a mass scale, are equally frightening -- nobody wants to actually accidentally plunge the world into endless snowy winter a la "Snowpiercer" (2013) or endless dry summer a la "Wall-E" (2008). Similarly, nobody wants to “protect” all college students from all ideas they are averse to by making everywhere that is “unsafe” into places which are “safe.”

That said, if it’s snowing outside, nobody’s going to begrudge someone a coat, even though they are free to not wear one. Some of us like to walk around in the rain without an umbrella; some of us do not. Some people wear sunblock in the summer and others don’t have to or don’t want to. If you’re mocking someone for wearing sunblock, you’re not pushing them to be a stronger person, you’re just being a jerk. We also have temperature-controlled buildings which offer temporary respite from the weather, but eventually we must all go outside and brave the elements.

Safe spaces are like this -- they’re not the dome, they’re buildings. They’re individual pockets where people go to do certain things or discuss certain topics. Inside a building, the weather doesn’t impact you. That’s explicitly what buildings are for. If you go into a building and start spraying people with water bottle spritzers and proclaiming that they need to be ready for anything, that makes you inconsiderate.

By the same token, trigger warnings are our coats, umbrellas, and sunblock -- some people use them, some don’t, but they are generally available and don’t prevent anyone from interacting with anything. If a professor puts a trigger warning on an assignment or class, that doesn’t mean people are going to stay home and “hide from [the] scary ideas” being put forth, it means they’ll be prepared. In this way, trigger warnings are a completely reasonable precaution. Continuing with my metaphor, which is probably overstretched by this point: It’s generally considered a good thing for people to know what the weather will be like before they go outside so that they can adequately prepare.

There is a proverb that is typically attributed to the Scandinavian region that goes, “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.” My mother liked to say this to me when I was younger, and it’s true. Nobody can control what they’re going to encounter when they walk out their front door into the big bad world, whether in terms of weather or in terms of public opinion. I say once more: there is no dome.

However, we’ve got buildings and coats and sunblock, and safe spaces and trigger warnings, so that we do have our small oases of control and reprieve, and nobody should begrudge others that.