Oppressed by the “Tunnel of Oppression” at Sonoma State

Oppressed by the “Tunnel of Oppression” at Sonoma State

Last week, out of curiosity, I attended an event on the campus of Sonoma State University (SSU) entitled, the “Tunnel of Oppression.”  From a quick Google search on the internet, this event appears to be one that is occurring on college campuses all across the country.  In the case of SSU, this was the first year in which the event was offered to the student community.  The event itself consisted of 13 walk through dioramas displayed in college dormitory rooms that depicted the challenges and oppression experienced by under-represented minority groups in America, consisting of the following groups of people:

• The homeless
• Immigrants
• Genocide
• Asians
• People born with abnormalities and the disabled
• Latinos
• African-Americans
• People struggling with accepting their body image
• Women treated as sexual objects
• LGBTQQI (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, queers, questioning and intersects)
• Religious minorities
• Veterans
• Individuals from the prior groups who were killed by others

Groups of about eight participants were led through all 13 displays by a student from the Multicultural Center on the SSU campus and we concluded the experience with a 20 minute debriefing session with a paid staff member from the same Multicultural Center.  The staff member informed us that we might have varied feelings and that no feeling was wrong and throughout the whole experience, we were guided by the student leaders to be respectful of one another with soft soothing voices that was clearly manipulative.  But I was there to observe and learn and to keep my mouth shut.

Our leader who led the debriefing asked each of us what one word conveyed our reaction to the experience.  The students in the group responded, “upset,” “confused,” “depressed,” “sad” and other similar terms that were entirely understandable.  My response the first time was “curious.”  Three days later when I returned, it was “manipulated.”  At the end, we were told to expect that we might experience strong emotions as long as two weeks after our experience and were provided a set of phone numbers of with whom we could process out our reactions and responses.  Furthermore, we were encouraged to think about what we had experienced and consider getting involved for “social change.”  The obvious question of “social change toward what end?” was never addressed.  We were given a button to wear on our coats reading, “I experienced the Tunnel of Oppression” as we left to publicize the event to other students on campus.

Early the following morning, I woke up feeling upset and manipulated by what I had witnessed the evening before.  It occurred to me that the genocide exhibit had completely failed to list 146 million out of the 148 million deaths in the 20^th century perpetrated on their people by the three Communist regimes of China, the Soviet Union and Viet Nam.  It occurred to me that this was no accident, perpetrated by progressive activists whose ultimate aim is to bring the world under a One World communist totalitarian government.  It also occurred to me that under the religion display, Christians were portrayed as extremists and angry bigots.  I am a genuine Christian and I am neither of those things and I find such ugly caricatures deeply offensive and disrespectful to me.  Moreover, I know them to be bald-faced lies.  The diorama depicting women as sex objects was in no way matched with one depicting white old guys like me who, for the past 30 years, have experienced oppression from angry radical feminists who have belittled, demeaned and psychologically castrated white men in America in our media and culture since the 1970s.  And I wondered, as a 57 year old WASP American middle class male who has provided for my family for the past 30+ years, where was my diorama of oppression?!?  I remembered how the LGBTQQI had signs in it mocking and vilifying Christian beliefs which I know to be intellectually defensible and justified by the facts.  The hypocrisy and obvious bias of those presentations was nothing short of deceptive, deceitful and downright evil.

The debriefing session at the end was an exercise in psychological oppression and manipulation.  The leader focused and limited the discussion to people’s feelings.  As someone who has studied the tactics of the progressive left for years, I understand what’s happening and how deceitful it really is.  But most college students lack the life experience to understand what’s being done to them.  The soft, soothing voices and appeals to be respectful sound so nice and kind, but in reality, what is being discussed is appealing to relatively unsophisticated and defenseless college students without providing an intellectual framework for understanding what’s being done to them.  It is well known by theologians, psychiatrists and psychologists that feelings are NOT a reliable barometer of truth.  Instead, reality, or the truth, is first determined by our values of right and wrong.  Those values mean nothing if we choose not to exert our will to do what is right.  Unless we exercise our wills to think coherently, we will end up using our minds incoherently and incoherent thoughts lead to incoherent actions, which lead to incoherent people.  The feelings held by incoherent people are easily manipulated by others and that is precisely what the student leaders of the Tunnel of Oppression were aiming for.

The Tunnel of Oppression begs the question: “who is doing the oppressing?” and “what is the root cause of all oppression?”    The exhibits leave the viewer to infer the oppressor, with many defaulting to the usual stereotypes and alleged villains for the different groups of people.  But blacks sold other blacks to white slave traders and whites in America and Great Britain fought for decades to eventually end the slave trade and slavery throughout their respective countries and the British Empire.  Economic and political oppression in Mexico and Central America sends so many illegal immigrants across our borders in pursuit of the economic opportunities and the political freedoms and generous public benefits available to them in the United States.  The term oppression is a loaded word, implying a victim and a victimizer.  Political and community organizing is designed to foment and incite conflict and class warfare between opposing economic, political and social groups that Karl Marx, the father of Communism, first wrote about  in his Communist Manifesto over 100 years ago.

Regrettably, posing or answering these questions is contrary to the goals of the progressive left, which does not want the students to think critically, only to respond emotionally and fail to use their minds.  In light of the fact that most students attend college to develop their critical thinking skills, this should strike all of us as deeply ironic and contrary to the entire aim and intent of a liberal arts education.  Presenting biased displays that omit critical and significant information that students deserve to have to make informed choices is manipulative, devious, deceptive, and wrong.  In a word it is sheer evil.  As such, any responsible university official has, in my opinion, a fiduciary responsibility to the school’s students and their parents, to shut down such activities on campus unless there is a balanced presentation from historically informed traditional constitutional conservatives and libertarians to present both sides of the cultural and political debate in America.

Anything else is sheer Marxist indoctrination designed to incite class warfare and harms American society.  However, let us not be deceived, America’s institutions of higher learning have been taken over by progressive Marxist professors and administrators whose vision for the world includes using students as “useful idiots,”  a term first coined by V.I. Lenin, to further their cause of generating social unrest, which is designed to lead to violence, which will encourage the populace to welcome the state restoring peace and order by force and in the process, negating all the liberties and freedoms Americans have come to take for granted that are embodied in the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution.  Once that happens, the world becomes a very dark place indeed.

Our university and college students have a right to know that end game of the agenda of the progressive left is to create a New World Order ruled by the world banking and political elites behind the scenes under a form of totalitarian communism.  They deserve to know that Communism has proven itself in the 20^th century to be a remarkable machine of mass murder, responsible for killing 148 million of its citizens in peacetime, out of the 174 million people (or 85% of the total) who were murdered by genocide and democide in the 20^th century.  They also deserve to know that Communism as an economic system has utterly failed to produce anywhere near close to the same number of goods and services produced by workers living in a free enterprise capitalist system, as evidenced by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989.  Political power, centralized in the hands of the state, under the control of the few, has always resulted in dictatorship and murderous tyranny throughout history.  Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.  America is in the process of learning these same lessons of history the hard way.

University and college students also have a right and need to know that oppression has been with mankind ever since Cain killed his brother Abel after the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  When mankind pursues its selfish nature and instincts, it never pursues the good, the kind and the noble.  Left to our own devices, we all pursue sex, money and power to please ourselves, often at the expense of our fellow man.  History shows us this over and over again.  The cause of all oppression is man’s selfish nature which leads to sin, which harms us and each other.  The progressive left just believes that the cure to mankind’s ills is to entrust all power in the hands of those who are the most prideful and selfish and all will be well.  Anyone who buys into such a belief system is a fool, insane or simply evil.  There is no other logical explanation.  The solution to oppression is not to oppress those who are in authority, but to turn to God for His wisdom, power, grace, mercy, forgiveness and love and obey his commandments.  Anything short of this is doomed to fail.

For those wishing to educate themselves further on the agenda of the progressive left in America and around the world, I encourage readers to get and view the documentary DVD, Agenda, which does an excellent job of chronicling the open and public agenda put forth by the American Communist Party for the past 70 years, designed to undermine American culture, morality and the traditional family from within.  Until more Americans wake up to the sinister agenda that is being perpetrated on our country, and become educated and equipped to oppose this menace of evil, America will closely resemble Nazi Germany of the 1930s in very short order.  Don’t take my word for it.  View the Agenda documentary that can be ordered on Amazon or at www.agendadocumentary.com.  Then you decide if what I’m revealing and warning about here is real or not and share your comments and reactions here.

“Evil men prosper, when good men do nothing.” – Edmund Burke