The chill

(And so again the Blob feels it necessary to stray from its Sportsball enclosure because the guards were asleep. You know the drill: Hall pass, library, return when the Blob begins griping about his cruddy baseball team again).

Once upon a time I had an English teacher who thought Martin Luther King Jr. got what was coming to him.

It was the morning after MLK was gunned down in Memphis, and I was a seventh grader at Village Woods Junior High, which is what we called middle school back then, children. Time has done what time does -- blurring details, thinning memory -- but what I remember is this teacher asking us if we were saddened by King's death. And when many of us said yes, he replied something to the effect that MLK was a troublemaker and this was the fate of all troublemakers.

Now, I don't know if he meant that the way it sounded. I didn't then, and don't now, know anything about this teacher's political leanings, or any racial animus he might or might not have harbored. So it's possible it was not a negative reflection on MLK at all, but just a weary acknowledgment that the world is a cruel place and especially so to people who stir things up.

However.

However, it didn't come off that way. Especially to a classroom of seventh graders -- including one (me) who uttered a snort of contempt and drew a withering teacher's stare in response.

Anyway, what brings this all back is what happened at Ball State University this week, where an administrator was fired for not being properly devastated by the cold-blooded murder of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk. This was deemed unacceptable to Indiana governor Mike Braun, attorney general Todd Rokita and their legion of online snitches, who've sworn to purge the state of teachers who either publicly "celebrate" Kirk's death or have spoken of it with any sort of nuance.

This is how Suzanne Swierc, BSU's director of health promotion and advocacy, found herself on the street this week.

She was fired for calling Kirk's death "a tragedy" on her personal Facebook page, and that she "can (and does) feel for his wife and children."

Then she went on to invoke that old devil nuance by saying his death was a reflection of what he sowed. "It does not excuse his death, AND it's a sad truth," she wrote.

Which it is. Or which it could be more than reasonably argued, at least in the world before the current Regime.

There, it's a fireable offense. There, no deviation from the Regime's party line will be tolerated, and those who violate that will be cast into outer darkness.

Sorry. I tend to get a bit overwrought when the jackboots start marching.

In any case, Ball State eighty-sixed Swierc, because Ball State is a state institution and thus compelled (or feels it's compelled) to carry water for its bosses in Indianapolis. And it was all very legal, especially in a right-to-work state like Indiana where you can fire an employee for wearing the wrong tie if you so desire. You don't have to have, you know, a reason.

You might be expected to come up with a more defensible reason than Ball State did, however.

In its official release the University said it went strictly by official guidelines, which state that a public institution can justify a dismissal by applying a two-part test to determine whether or not an employee's speech disrupts the workplace. The release went on to say the University determined Swierc's post did exactly that.

"... Our administration evaluated the impact of the significant disruption to the University's mission and operations and the effect of the post on her ability to perform her work in her leadership position," the release said, in a masterwork of handbook-speak.

And to which the Blob -- a 1977 graduate of Ball State, by the by -- says this: Oh, balls.

Also: Tell me how, precisely, Swierc's post was a "significant disruption" to her ability to (what did she do again?) promote and advocate health issues. Tell me how, again precisely, a post entirely unrelated to her job made it difficult for her to do that job. Explain yourselves -- or to put it in more educational terms: Show me your damn work.

This is the problem, see, with all this deadening of free expression by the Regime and its compliant acolytes. Unless they get dragged into a courtroom which might or might not be presided over by their fellow travelers, they never have to show their work. They never have to prove any of what they claim; they only have to claim it. They never have to explain, in this instance, what they mean by "celebrating" Charlie Kirk's heinous murder, or "justifying" it, because they're in charge and only they get to determine that.

Even if it's total eyewash. Even if no rational person could consider a specific opinion "celebrating" or "justifying."

Suzanne Swierc's specific opinion, for instance.

Once upon a time I had a history teacher who insulted his female students in the crudest way possible.

He said, once upon a time, that the reason prostitution was such a hard dollar in the city where he worked is because they got too much competition from "the amateurs" at the school where he worked.

That city was Muncie, In. And that school was Ball State University.

As far as I know, this teacher was never so much as reprimanded, though by all rights he at the very least should have been. (And might have; again, memory is tricky). Of course, social media was years in the future then. Of course, we weren't the nation of grimy snitches we've become.

And of course, the Regime wasn't running things with an iron fist, imposing its version of reality on thoroughly cowed institutions of higher learning and television networks and news organizations.

Where I live here in northeast Indiana, the mercury's supposed to top out at 86 degrees today. But you know what?

I feel a chill in the air. A most definite chill.