My New Years Resolution this year is one I have made in the past alas with limited success. That is to avoid at least wherever possible to get in a duel of wits with an unarmed or inadequately armed man (or woman for that matter). But sometimes like in the Wild West some would be gunslinger ambushes you and it hard to back down . They stalk from place to place you and make it impossible to back away. On the internet we call these gunslingers trolls.
The last such challenge occurred recently when I was having what I thought was a benign discussion on Political Correctness or “PC” for short on Facebook. However just mentioning the term political correctness or PC is not very political correct and to some people they interpret as call for a Jihad against the non politically correct infidel.
My Facebook friend mentioned that if people had more manners there would be no need for all this PC stuff. After all if we all exhibited good manners who would go around calling other people nasty names and epithets? I agreed and added that the problem with PC is that that there are so many things that you can’t say by the rigid rules of PC that it’s hard to say anything meaningful.
Well apparently that was all it took to get some PC militant to open fire. Before I knew it, it seemed like I was at the OK Corral with bullets flying in my direction in the form of a tirade of insults accusing me of being in the camp of Glenn Beck and other right wing extremists. Nor was his aim merely directed at me. He saw fit to accuse the entire population of
But what is PC anyway? The urban dictionary really is kind of scathing in their definitions but PC People don’t make it easy since seem to create a constantly moving target. If only they stuck with simply condemning racial and ethnic slurs or sexist and homophobic comments there would be little serious criticism among reasonable people. But do we need to create a whole politically correct lexicon to accomplish this? This is covered already by manners. Even if a well mannered and well bred person doesn’t particular like a group of people for whatever reason they don’t call them names for the hell of it. They simply ignore then and live and let live. Only ill-mannered boors would go out of the way to insult people for no reason. And bad manners know no ethnic, gender sexual or political persuasion. You can find it anywhere. Some people are simply well bred and others are not.
PC however has morphed well beyond ethnic or racial slurs or cultural stereotypes however. The best I can discern the concept of PC it’s not PC to hurt anyone feelings ever under any circumstances. We should not do or say anything that may damage another’s self-esteem.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of PC run amuck.
Sports and most games are contests. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Imagine if every year at the World Series both the NY Yankees and LA Dodgers were declared the winners. Why bother watching a game?
But that’s what we do in many schools these days. Everyone is declared a winner even if you come in dead last. Does any one think that a child that came in last or whose team loses really feels as good as the one who came in first despite the prize of “finishing”? Of course not! When you lose you are supposed to feel bad and that hopefully will motivate you to try harder the next time. Few of us succeed at anything until we felt the hurt of failure. Because some children are never allowed to experience the hurt of failure they have been harmed in many ways by PC People. It shows in the real world of work and life.
Another example: Certain terms carry a stigma. The term “Welfare” is one. Families that can not afford to clothe or feed their children may (if they qualify) receive a stipend or dole form the state. Once it was known as welfare. But to make the people receiving it feel better about getting it they change the name every few years to something else, Public Assistance and a host of other euphuisms were created. However does it really reduce the stigma? Do the people receiving the funds feel better about getting it? Do people resenting the poor think more kindly of public assistance recipients than they do of welfare recipients? The only people who feel better are the welfare administrators and the PC people. Everyone included the recipients still call it welfare by the way.
It would be nice I suppose if we lived in a world where no one got their feelings hurt. But this world is not it. All the euphuisms imaginable will not help much when we have lost something important or if we failed to archive something we want. Sugarcoating it often makes it worse not better.
Ironically in researching this little piece I have learned that for the PC people the last thing I would want to do is take away their strict rules of behavior. Let then be as PC as they want. They obviously need it. Because if you push them just a little bit and challenge their cherished notions they react like an alcoholic who slips and takes a drink and then loses all self control. Just look at the behavior of my wit-challenged troll who lashed out not only at me but the population of the state of
If only we can find a way to keep them from imposing their absurd rigidity on everyone else who have manners and can make our own reasonable choices and decisions. Or even have a civil discussion on the subject. Civil discussions do have to be warn and fuzzy just civil.
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