A Lot Of Help From Your FriendsKathleen Stock found out when she was cancelled who her real friends were
Rod Dreher
Nov 10, 2022
I gave a talk earlier this week in London about the most important lessons that the underground church from the Soviet years has to teach us today, struggling amid the soft totalitarianism of wokeness. One of them is discovering and leaning into the importance of small groups. I heard this from Christians all over the former Soviet bloc. They gave several reasons why small groups were so valuable; one of them is that they provide meaningful support when you feel isolated and besieged. They keep you grounded in the truth, and in courage.
Kathleen Stock (pictured above) is neither a Christian (to my knowledge) nor a conservative, but her experience in the year after being driven out of the University of Sussex because she is a "gender-critical" feminist (meaning that she doesn't accept trans ideology), reinforces the dissidents' insight. Here's her piece in UnHerd about what happened. Excerpts:
Eventually things calmed down a bit and I was left with the aftermath. The near-total impersonality from former colleagues I’d worked with for years — one kindly administrator being the exception — was a shock. I couldn’t read it properly. Was it embarrassment? Guilt? Indifference? Blame? I still can’t tell.
With my family, one weekend I drove to my office to get my things — another surreal moment. Though I was led to believe it had all been sorted in advance, the doors to my building were locked. I went to find a security guard to let me in. Suspicious (perhaps he had heard there had been a bit of trouble recently), he demanded to see my ID, before grudgingly wedging the door for me and saying I had to be out in a few hours. Conscious of my notoriety on campus, we threw books, posters, and mementoes from years of academic life into boxes and fled, putting it all in storage on the way home. As I left for the final time, I was suffused with memories of arriving there as a young lecturer — just as alone as I apparently was now, and with some of the very items I had just packed up. It felt like I had performed an enormous circle in time, only to end up at exactly the same place.
It got better:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-lot-of-help-from-your-friends/
