Dear Tell All: My daughter came home for Thanksgiving a different person. This fall she started college at a small liberal arts school and has drunk the Kool-Aid of the campus radicals.
She was always liberal, like my husband and me. He and I both worked for good causes during our college years at UW-Madison, including disinvesting from South Africa and slowing the nuclear arms race. But I’d like to think we maintained a sense of perspective in the midst of our activism. She most definitely hasn’t.
At Thanksgiving, she hounded us when we tried to have a civil discussion about transgender rights, Black Lives Matter and other causes she’s obsessed with. If we expressed the slightest skepticism about her extreme positions, she treated us like the enemy.
We are not the enemy! I’m sympathetic to these causes, but I cringe at her inflexibility and self-righteousness. I resent, for example, that she considers us racists for not seeing discrimination everywhere. We had a huge blowup over the unrest at Yale, where students are calling for the head of an administrator who expressed a mild point of view about Halloween costumes.
I have my theories about what has happened to my daughter: falling in with the wrong group of people, reading only opinion pieces that support her positions, and getting swept up in a form of left-wing political correctness that echoes the right-wing anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s.
I’m bracing for an even more unpleasant Christmas break.
The Enemy
Dear Enemy: Your list overlooks one obvious reason for your daughter’s transformation: She’s 18. You refer to your own righteousness in college, so I’m surprised you don’t recognize a kindred spirit.
I’ll leave the raging campus debates to those who know more about the First Amendment and civil rights than I do. But I take a backseat to no one in my insight into parent-child relations, and I think that is the key to your conflict, not ideology.
Think about it. Your daughter is away from home for the first time, testing the waters of adulthood. Part of that rite of passage is distinguishing herself from you. That’s a healthy thing — and you should be glad she’s doing it in a positive way, rather than dabbling in self-destructive behavior. I applaud your daughter for wanting to make campus—and the world—a more welcoming place for everybody.
As for the more annoying behavior that comes with her crusade, I repeat: She’s 18. Be patient and supportive and I trust that you will eventually turn from Enemy to Friend.
Do you have a question about life or love in Madison?
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