Running on Empty

History shows that the veneer of civilization is thin. A moral vacuum makes it thinner.

The “Greatest Generation” freed people from terrible places. This generation gets confused over which bathroom to use. Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

I was sitting around coffee with friends a few mornings ago when the subject of Trump’s tariffs came up, prompted, no doubt, by the temporary decline of our 401(k)s. My coffee crew and I mostly agree in our views on Trump, and those can be summed up as not getting too worked up about him simply because of what came before. I’m far from crazy about the guy, but we live in a remarkable age. Standards just aren’t what they used to be. That’s evident all around.

I think that the majority of Americans saw things roughly the same way last November when they cast their votes for Trump in the presidential election. While Trump and Harris each represented different sides of whatever is worse than awful, at least Trump wouldn’t be encouraging boys to participate in girls’ sports behind their parents’ backs and then mandate counseling for the kids and encourage termination of parental rights for objectors.

It’s a low bar, but he does have that going for him.

None of this is fiction. It’s not paranoia. It’s just the 21st century. It’s a brave new world, and things that would have seemed insane just a few years ago are now commonplace. Trump as president is one of the lesser crazy things I wrestle with from day to day.

Consider the controversy surrounding Lia Thomas, a man formerly known as William Thomas, who joined the University of Pennsylvania men’s swim team in his 2017 freshman year. In 2019, Thomas began transitioning with hormone therapy to “identify” as female and came out as a trans woman shortly thereafter.

Around this time, members of UPenn’s women’s team started hearing rumors that Thomas would be competing with them next season. They were incredulous. Surely, they thought, adults in the room would meet to address this insanity and put the kibosh on it. That’s not the way that it shook out. Thomas, a biological male, did, in fact, compete as a member of the UPenn women’s team during the 2021-22 season (due to COVID, NCAA athletes were granted an extra year of eligibility).

Although this lack of support came as a shock to the young women on the UPenn women’s swim team and, more generally, to women competitors across the sport, it came as no shock to anyone who, like me, has ever been a part of higher ed. You see, I’ve been in those meetings. Almost everyone involved in the athletic department and administration at UPenn, I can assure you, found it absurd that a biological male was about to compete on a women's team. The problem was that this was not in spite of Title IX but because of it. As a result, most of those involved were afraid to confront a powerful DEI mafia backed by the Biden administration.

Many people earn six-figure salaries at places like UPenn, in the NCAA, and in other athletic governing bodies specifically to protect the interests of young female athletes. They did nothing to defend women in athletics because they enjoy the administrative gravy train in higher education and understand how it works. One thing that every college administrator knows is which side the bread is buttered on.

In the recent pre-47 era, all it took was one Internet mob, followed by feds in hot pursuit, to put a hitch in your professional giddy-up-especially in the Ivy League. This cast a pall on the entire concept of standing on principle. So this same scenario of spineless capitulation played out in track and field, cycling, volleyball, and other sports. Title IX, something that was set up specifically to protect women, was used to punish them instead.

Plainly said, the majority of academics, administrators, and staff who were supposed to protect women’s sports at UPenn and in the Ivy League were cowards. When it came down to either standing up for young women or perpetuating their sorry existence, they chose what was behind door #2. Profiles in Courage it was not.

I will, right here and right now, do something that every UPenn, Ivy League, and NCAA administrator failed so utterly to do when they had the chance: inject an iota of reason into an otherwise completely batshit crazy situation. Gunning for the DEI mafia in higher ed or government circles circa 2021 was a modern version of tilting at windmills. Nothing might have prevented the events involving UPenn women’s swimming, considering who was in charge of the government at that time. That being the case, why throw your career away over nothing? That, at least, is an honest argument.

But that’s not what the argument happened to be. A lot of people involved in this convinced themselves that they were on the right side of things. They became true believers and acted with conviction, threatening to punish anyone on the UPenn women’s team who objected. They did this not because they knew that it was the right thing to do, but because it was the only way they could let themselves off the hook for being well-compensated, useless douche canoes.

Although this particular incident came to a head just a few years ago, the roots go back a way. It would have been much easier to stop this deranged nonsense decades ago if everyone who understood that the tenets of DEI were, at the very least, uncollegial and in violation of academic freedom, and at worst, an assault on learning, merit, rigor, excellence, productivity, and nearly every other reason professionals work in higher education, had spoken up. But that rarely happened. Academics tend to be, shall we say, non-confrontational, except when the power dynamic is tilted in their favor. When it comes to higher ed, you don’t even have to threaten to kick ass or make someone an offer they can’t refuse to get your way. All it takes is a subtle hint that their next internal grant or tenure and promotion package might face some scrutiny. It’s nothing like twisting arms in the outlands beyond the edge of campus.

That’s where we are right now. I’m still trying to figure out how it all went to hell so fast.

Eight decades ago, young people were engaged in a life-and-death struggle against great evil. In the dark, early days of the Pacific campaign during WWII, young men flew B-25 bombers off aircraft carriers on a likely one-way mission to merely poke the Japanese in the eye. Twenty-year-olds flew dozens of bomber missions over Europe with low rates of success stacked against very high odds against survival. Thousands and thousands of kids stormed the beaches at Normandy, advancing in the face of murderous fire from German defenses. A lot of them never made it home from Europe (the few who are still around must be even more perplexed than me about the new age).

Those young people, my generation’s parents, may not have had a college education and professional bona fides, but they knew which bathroom to use and figured out a way to save the entire world from tyranny despite lacking safe spaces and equity. When those young people returned home, they put the horrors of war behind them and began to build the most prosperous nation in human history, despite the handicap of lacking any knowledge of intersectionality. Somehow, they made do.

Thanks to the GI Bill, colleges and universities entered a new, vastly more expansive and profitable era. And for a while, it all seemed like it was going to work out for everyone’s benefit. In the years following WWII, we built aircraft using slide rules and ruthlessly competent engineering that flew into the periphery of space at almost seven times the speed of sound. Less than 66 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, we landed men on the moon. We revolutionized health care and nutrition and extended life expectancies by decades. We invented computers and the Internet, revolutionizing the manner in which humans gather information and communicate. We sent spacecraft to every planet in the solar system and some out into the galaxy beyond. Everything seemed possible.

I was born into and grew up in an era of miracles wrought by hard work, dedication, and dearly earned competence. So it’s a bitter pill to swallow when I look around now and see that our greatest challenge isn’t going to the moon and back with slide rules and vacuum tubes; it’s trying to figure out who gets to use the girls’ bathroom at an Ivy League swim meet. We no longer build aircraft that can fly at 100,000 feet and Mach 3+ because the solar grid lacks sufficient power to replace the AG-330 Start Cart needed to spool up a J58 engine. Also, a snail darter might get harmed by the sonic boom.

We are, these days, a nation in the thrall of lazy, dishonest, spineless, clueless, incompetent, yet endlessly entitled and arrogant academics, bureaucrats, politicians, media figures, and other “experts” who can’t seem to find their way from their heads to their asses with their hands when something important, like, say, COVID or the 25th Amendment, is in play. But it doesn't slow them down in the slightest when they decide, despite millions of years of evolution (and a plethora of other ancillary evidence to the contrary), that men can transform into women, that merit is a manifestation of oppression, that opposing ideas are vulgar, and that disagreement is tantamount to prejudice. How the hell do you expect these nimrods to figure out that men don’t belong in women’s sports?

That’s where we are right now. When you can’t do hard things anymore, sophistry rules. I just don’t know how long that’s sustainable.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com