How Does This Shoe Feel?

This author is considering what it's like when the shoe is on the other foot--only because the shoe is now on the other foot:

Until recently, George Ciccariello-Maher was an anonymous political science professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. However, of late a white-hot mob has threatened him -- and his child -- so gravely that he is now teaching via a video feed. This week he announced he's resigning out of concern for his family's safety: "My situation has become unsustainable," he explained on his Facebook account.

Surely Ciccariello-Maher said something racist or, to use the dominant term of art, white supremacist? No -- the people issuing a fountain of death threats against him all year have been from the right.

A year ago, Ciccariello-Maher tweeted a wry joke -- "All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide" -- in the vein of the self-critical "That's so white" meme now popular among Blue Americans. He said the tweet was a "satirical jab at a certain paranoid racist fantasy and that white genocide does not exist."

A few months later, he tweeted that it made him want to vomit watching someone give up their first-class airline seat to a soldier. In October, he tweeted that "Trumpism" and the "narrative of white victimization" were to blame for the lethal mass shooting in Las Vegas.

In other words, the professor's critics now feel "injured," by someone they thus deem unfit for human society.

Their forcing someone into hiding for just writing some stuff is unforgivable. But it should make us think about when the shoe is on the other foot.

As is often said on Instapundit, the Left isn't going to like having to play by the new rules they themselves have created.  The author realizes this:

However, there is no conception of justice or truth that makes it somehow pardonable "collateral damage" when the left behaves this way -- which it does too frequently. The behaviors are mirror-image parallels...

I suspect that many horrified by the Drexel professor's situation will stick to a basic idea that the left is right and the right is wrong, and thus tarring and feathering the right-winger is progress while tarring and feathering the left-winger is injustice.

Yet just as many will -- one hopes -- understand that this view is too short-sighted, privileging the gut over the brain.

We'll see if anyone on the left heeds the author's words.  I will not be holding my breath.