This is a very interesting discussion to me. I, too, married into the WASP environment and struggle to navigate the passive-aggressive attitudes. I thought it was a family thing. No clue it was a social class thing. Hmmmm...
I'm not sure that it is-- at least not
exclusively so. I think it's a local and cultural one. Because I definitely live in a different culture than I grew up in, and yet the communication styles that I'm surrounded by are largely similar (and fairly broad in terms of individual norms/styles).
The problem identified in the article, in fact, could equally be characterized as people who have been raised to be socially incompetent at communication styles outside of THEIR narrow range (which has never been stretched to be more inclusive, either).
College, however, is supposed to do that 'stretching' for a student whether they enjoy it or not. Think "Green Eggs and Ham."
Students have always been empowered to treat it like a cultural buffet, or they can approach it like Goldilocks and staunchly refuse to participate in aspects that they are not comfortable with, or find strange. The article is pointing out that now, a fair number of Goldilocks-like students are
complaining that there is sushi or other "weird" food there to be had-- that it
bothers them.
Personally, I think it's that they object to feeling MARGINALIZED by their extant worldview or cultural beliefs. They ALL want to be "normative." I think that a generation of children has grown to adulthood with the notion that any observation of a thought, practice, or belief being unshared by others constitutes BULLYING.
In response, all of our culture has gone kind of insane trying to PREDICT what Goldilocks wants and does NOT want. Our modern Goldilocks, in fact, would be suing the bear family for her pain and suffering given how awful her breaking and entering and the subsequent vandalism was for her. How DARE they keep all that stuff in their home, after all-- they should have anticipated that some people would be highly sensitive to food temperature, at least.
I also have to wonder at the class observation. It is possible that when you've never worried about your
basic needs-- for safety, food, shelter, etc.-- that you wind up in a place where verbal interactions might loom larger in relative importance. I don't deny that for some individuals the word "hate" might well seem
threatening but coming FROM a lot of people, it just isn't so, anymore than the term "fastidious" or "obsessive" is exactly a
menacing one. They are
all just WORDS and IDEAS. One need only examine the use of verbiage and its relative variance in local dialect to see how attempting to categorize emotional value in language is a losing exercise-- there IS no agreement on the emotional value even of the term "cold" for example. To a resident of San Antonio or Delhi, this term doesn't mean the same thing as it does to someone who lives in Barrow or Edinburgh. Highly subjective.
That's just my suspicion. Obviously, suffering from PTSD is probably
more common in the group that has come from lower SES, as such events are more commonplace there during one's childhood-- but it doesn't seem to translate into greater
sensitivity/vulnerability in the context that the article is discussing. At least not in studies that I've seen on PTSD, it doesn't.
I also have to agree with the article's implication that trying to purge the world of PTSD triggers is a foolish and fruitless endeavor, given how the human brain retains and processes trauma. The sensory information that is
most likely to trigger PTSD is often not speech in the first place. It's things like smells or environmental sounds/sights.
Of course, even if one COULD purge the world of, say--
the scent of lysol (just as one example)-- would it really be doing the PTSD-afflicted individual any favors long-term? Not really.
