Vermont Selectboard Un-Candidate #27

     To help me with my phobias of attending meetings and public speaking, I started attending "Saturday Night Live" at the Methodist church next to my apartment. My phobias can be lessened by exposure to the phobia causing situation, but they've never been extinguished with the exception of my tunnel phobia. I hardly look forward to being in tunnels, but, so far, the panic has been gone for a long time. It went soon after appearing and probably didn't have a chance to be hard-wired.
     This reminds me of the disservice universities may be doing by building "safe spaces" for the coddled college students. They are enabling even encouraging the too sensitive. You students and you parents should be aware that coddling the fearful only helps the fear to become hardwired and could promote even greater fear. We are never static; things are either getting incrementally better or worse. Another thing for both groups of people to consider is that fear is contagious. You can be socially conditioned to be fearful, paranoid, and hallucinative. In looking at the un-American, totalitarian ways the crazed feminist male-hating Title IX bureaucrats are holding kangaroo courts on universities across the country and causing unconscionable mental, vocational, and cultural harm to men, their families, and friends, and ultimately to the nation, I have read Schiff's The Witches. As the hysteria widened from a core group of accusers, seven girls from eleven to seventeen, to include the entire town and village of Salem, Massachusetts, everyone seemed to be suddenly seeing witches. Even two dogs were accused of being witches and were unmanly shot. The only exception to the craziness was the solidity of father and son relationships. None of them, either way, accused the other of being witches. I believe that was a function of testosterone which inhibits emotional instability.
     I would suggest you hysterical students or since you are probably getting too much attention to give up your hysteria, you parents of skeered, hysterical daughters- sons too- consider testosterone supplementation. As far as I know, this suggestion originates with me. Be calm and measured about this instead of fashionably hysterical, loud, and hyperbolic. I'm making a lot of sense, if you even want sense instead of cheap emotionality.
     To return to the crazed campuses where teenage girls and young women are encouraged to see male rapists instead of witches flying around on sticks, I am
emotional myself about the absence of Betty Devos, the new Secretary of Education, from this fight over the lives of teenage boys and young men falsely convicted of sexual assault. What is she doing more important than this? I was led, editorial after editorial, in the Wall Street Journal that this was a woman of courage and high principles? Where the hell is she? She is an effing no-show!
Even I, the frightened rabbit, show up for Socialist Selectboard meetings in spite of double phobias. I haven't said anything about the discrimination they want to make in hiring the preferred race and sex, but I've shaken my head no, and made faces at the testimony of racists and sexists. I'm attending AA trying to work up the courage to verbally confront the selectboard tyrants. And I'm a nobody, DeVos! 
     Why hire a woman who is going to be a no-show, who's going to break down and cry, and blame others? Talking about testosterone!
Peter Nickerson, 62 Town Crier Drive, Apt. 10, Brattleboro, VT  352-359-0850
Don't call me. Lost cellphone. This is not cheap emotionalism. I have put in hours reading several books and the Journal editorials, other magazines and newspapers, and watching Fox News at the gym. I've got to be in the top five percent in preparation on this subject. This is dearly bought emotionalism. If you are mature about something, you can be emotional about it to a depth that shallow emotionalism, feeding on ignorance, cannot begin to reach. Dearly purchased emotionalism is good - the best- while easy emotionalism is a two year older having a tantrum.