Friday, June 25, 2010

Are You Politically Correct?

Are you politically correct?

May I ask why?

My family raised me to believe, not to say but to believe that human beings should be valued for their character, for their behavior, rather than for the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, their nationality or their physical prowess or lack thereof. They did not tell me I shouldn't say "nigger" or "fag" because other people might get mad; they didn't have to tell me not to say those things, because I was not raised to think those things to begin with.

The concept of PC has set back actual thinking and actual feeling by a million years or so. My way of speaking sometimes elicits scoffing references to PC from persons who, without PC, would probably say the words from whose utterance they now refrain, not because those words offend them but because they've been told (why can't they figure this out for themselves?) that they offend others, make others mad, brand the utterer as politically incorrect, and therefore something of an outcast outside of certain circumscriptions (the KKK springs immediately to mind). I write "s/he" because "he" doesn't cover 51 percent of the population, and for no other reason. I don't have to force myself, grudgingly, to grant homosexuals freedoms enjoyed already by heterosexuals; those freedoms are not mine to grant or withhold, and it would be cheeky of me to pretend they were. Folks who feel compelled to tell others they're going to hell for not being true to themselves really ought to combine meds and therapy in an attempt to control their own compulsions (instead of trying to control other people). Those people may wish to be PC until sensitivity to the beingness of other humans comes more naturally to them. The rest of us presumably know better.

I hope I do not presume in vain.