(With apologies to Jonathan Swift.)
I’ve often said I do my best thinking in the shower. (Sorry for that visual, those of who who know me in the real world.) Something occurred to me to day, and I think I may be onto something with it.
Political Correctness has out of control. Don’t believe me? Here’s just a couple of headlines from the last few days:
I’ll spare you a long list; I know of you have blood pressure problems.
The question is “How do we fight political correctness?” I say fight fire with fire. For my example, I’m going to use the names of sports teams.
For the last several years, we’ve seen an increasing number of teams taking fire for the names of their mascots, and many of them changing their mascots to something more acceptable to the PC crowd. Many teams with names referencing anything Indian, er, Native American, have changed their names, and the Washington Redskins pretty much fight a yearly battle to stay the Redskins. Other mascots who happened to have firearm handy have been disarmed, and God help you if you’re team was “The Rebels”.
Now here’s how I see this working. We have a mythical high school football team here, the Silver Valley Indians. Ack, can’t have that, since it’s disparaging to the Native Americans who once lived in harmony with nature in this area before the E-e-e-vil White Europeans arrived and took their land from them. Let’s instead honor the area’s historic connection with silver mining, and call them the miners.
Oh, not so fast here. This area was settled by the Scots-Irish, and by dingy they labored in those mines, working 18 hours days and dying in mine accidents so that some rich so-and-so could get richer. You’re not going to denigrate (opps, can’t use that word) belittle the contribution of my ancestors just because they had the misfortune to be poor!
OK, we’ll call then the Silver Valley Deer. After all, we have a lot of deer around here, and since deer are fast and agile runners, what better mascot for a football team. Right?
No you won’t! I will not stand for anyone taking advantage of helpless animals, even to the point of stealing their name to apply it to a barbaric sport like football. Deer are gentle and pastoral creatures, who would be just fine if we would all stop hunting them and driving our cars in places where they still run free, free like the wind!
Alright, let’s just call them the Silver Valley Alphas, after the first letter in the Greek alphabet. I don’t think so, sparky. Calling the the Alphas is simply a not-so-subtle putdown of the teams that are further down the Greek alphabet, and it will harm their self esteem in ways we can’t yet comprehend Besides, who says we should use the Greek alphabet anyway? What about the Zulu alphabet, or the Mayan, or the Easter Islanders so that we can honor their contributions to alphabets world-wide?
Getting my drift? Once you start being politically correct, there’s no end to it. The more you try to stay PC, the harder it becomes, until your belief system wraps you up and smothers you in indecision, lest you offend someone, somewhere.
Let’s use their own belief system, and choke them to death on it. Every time someone tries to go all PC on you, one-up them. Tie them up with their own BS and beat them senseless with it.
And of course, since we’ll be hypocrites in doing so, we get to be the ultimate in non-PC while doing it. Bonus Points!