BETSY NEWMARK ON ALIENATION, THEN AND NOW:

I was starting to teach the unit on the 1950s to my AP U.S. History class and going over various words that had been used to describe the decade such as “conformity,” “complacency,” “anxiety,” and “alienation.” and making sure that the students knew what the words mean. (You’d be surprised at how students’ vocabularies have shrunk in the years since I started teaching 25 years ago as students have so many other options for entertainment other than reading, but that’s a subject for another day.) As they discussed the word “alienation” as feeling detached and isolated from a group to which one belongs, I was thinking of how that describes how I feel more and more. I just can’t relate to college students who are so upset by certain words or pieces of literature that they need a trigger warning before they can read it. I don’t understand how every little thing that someone might say or do is now called a “microaggression”necessitating all sorts of training seminars. I never did relate to all the people who cheered on Barack Obama as some sort of messianic figure to come save the country. Maybe my sense of alienation began as Bill Clinton was defended by feminists who decreed that he was entitled to one free grope or affair with an intern since he was pro-choice. I love history and read it and teach it. Increasingly, I felt that the country was a place I just didn’t recognize or relate to. Briefly, after 9/11, I could feel connected to the country and sensed that bond among us.

But more and more, that feeling dissipated.

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