Much of the "safe space" rhetoric has involved universities and collective housing. Even the latter still affords safe spaces--when I don't like my neighborhood, when I don't like where I work, I have my home. And within my home, I have space that I retreat into when I don't want to be around family. Always have. This has always been true. I control that space because it's mine. Part of that space's safety is precisely in who's controlling it, leading me to wonder if that's not what it's actually about--intentionally or just because that's the reward/behavior feedback loop that people find themselves in. (A dodder doesn't have to be aware that it's growing towards a food source, much less have intent; it just does.)
What's different is carving out "safe spaces" in public venues. This is an innovation. It's the creation of new safe spaces that compel others that have to navigate those spaces to conform to the dictates of others. Where those spaces are is an on-going process. Today it's one place, one venue. Tomorrow it's another.
What conformity is to be imposed also changes. Today it's one trigger that cannot be mentioned, tomorrow it's how a long-standing term is reinterpreted or newly parsed, the day after that it's something else. Often it's something that's been there straight along, but now that the "truth" about it is salient and offense is taken, conformity and compliance are required--with the implicit assumption that whatever that "something" is has always been offensive, but subliminarlly so. Whatever that something is, one group (sometimes one person) decides for the public in that space what is necessary for it to be safe and even reads that offensiveness back into time and projects it into the attitudes of people who seriously don't know what the new interpretation or reparsing is.
It's contagious among the hyper-authoritarian moralists. I was once called out by a young Millennial for insensitively using the phrase "grammar nazi." "Don't you know there are people who would be offended at using that kind of language, people who suffered at the hands of the Nazis?" I pointed out that it was a metaphor, and, in fact, I personally knew concentration a camp survivor and a woman who had multiple brothers and sisters and an extensive system of aunts and uncles, but who by 1946, when she was put in a NATO concentration camp, was, as far as she could tell to this day, the only remaining child. Because her parents had sent her to a relative, and that relative was rounded up while she was being babysat by a Gentile friend of the relative. Nobody knew that young girl was in the "wrong" town or with that family. In any event, neither the old man with the camp tattoo on his arm nor his wife, who had her family wiped out, had a problem with "grammar nazi."
And we won't even discuss what happened when I told some students, when asked what my family had done over a long weekend, that we had a picnic. The insidious "lynching" Volk etymology had reached deep into their zealot's psyche.
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