The new bugbear for leftist academics and gender studies majors in elite colleges… and soon to be new hotness with Democrat politicians… is the idea of “microaggressions.” The basic idea here is that everyone but Pale Patriarchal Penis People are subjected to a nonstop daily barrage of unintended racism and sexism. For instance, did you use the word “he” generically? Well you are guilty. According to the academic journal Wikipedia, microaggressions come in four forms:

• microassault: an explicit racial derogation; verbal/nonverbal; eg: name-calling, avoidant behavior, purposeful discriminatory actions.
• microinsult: communications that convey rudeness and insensitivity and demean a person’s racial heritage or identity; subtle snubs; unknown to the perpetrator; hidden insulting message to the recipient of color.
• microinvalidation: communications that exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of a person belonging to a particular group.
• microrape: Characterized by predatory non-physical prurient communications with the intent to penetrate the victim’s emotional security on the basis of heteronormative impositions

The news isn’t all bad because, it seems, that political lunacy may actually be a chronic and fatal condition:

A new study by Harvard University’s Voices of Diversity project suggests that microaggressions are so harmful that they might even shorten your life.

The idea of the study was to examine what kind of impact microaggressions, minor slights against minority groups, were having on the students at four different higher-ed institutions, and concluded that it was pretty severe.

The authors, Harvard’s DuBois Institute associate Paula J. Caplan and research assistant Jordan C. Ford, wrote that although microaggressions “might seem minor” they are “so numerous that trying to function in such a setting is ‘like lifting a ton of feathers.’”

The sad fact is the world is populated by jerks. And life is hard, but, to quote John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, ‘Life’s hard. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.’ While it is sad, in an existential type of way, that people with enough mental horsepower to read actually buy into this kind of I’m-a-unique-snowflake-and-you’re-a-big-meanie nonsense and let it limit their lives, the idea that it shortens life or causes disease should be seen for what it is: bull**** agitprop designed to foster campus speech codes. If it turns out to be true, then Charles Darwin and society wins.