(Originally written Monday, March 27, 2006)
It has begun.
At first I thought it was just Bill O'Reilly talking more smack, trying to force his views on the rest of America by claiming that he's Joe Decent Citizen. But then I read Stars&Stripes yesterday, (motto: Yesterday's News Tomorrow) and I read about WPs going crazy out in Minnesota.
It seems that the Easter Bunny display that was in the St. Paul city hall was removed by some dude because he didn't want to offend non-Christians. He also said that there were no actual complaints. I guess he was just being proactive, anticipating some shit that wasn't going to occur.
Hmmmmm, that's pretty odd, I thought to myself. Why would a guy remove a public display, (which was not purchased with government money) due to imaginary complaints, unless he had an ulterior motive? Maybe the tourists aren't flocking to St. Paul like they used to back in the good old days. Maybe this guy is simply enacting his own plan for world domination and one of the first steps is to do something nonsensical in an oft-overlooked mid-western city. Maybe he wants St. Paul, Minn. to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most anal and uptight place in America. I dunno his motivation, but there's got to me more to it than simple knee-jerk political correctness.
I tried to not get into the whole Christmas/Holiday Tree thing that happened back during December. It seemed to me to be an overblown situation hyped up by people trying to "defend" their religious freedoms, ("It's a damn Christmas Tree! Why must you people attack the one conifer that I hold dear to me and means so much to my people? Don't you know Jesus often slept in evergreens because he didn't want to be eaten by bears at night? Evergreens and fir trees feature huge in Christian lore!" is the type of thing you'd hear these outraged Christians say.)
Prior to this guy out in St. Paul, I wondered if there really were people out there who were so scared of offending people that they'd just wuss everything into some kind of bland, beige version of reality. I figured people like that just existed in movies to act as foils to the liberated main characters. Guess I was wrong. Now my question is: Who are these people who are so easily offended by everything they see?
How can somebody live in the world today and still be so cut off from everything that they wait until now to be offended. Did somebody just wake up one morning and think to themselves, "Gee, how can I annoy regular people today?" Or perhaps they were like, "These secular and commercialized displays of religious holidays are getting too popular. It's time to take them down a notch or two." Are there time-traveling puritans wandering around looking at Christmas Trees and Easter Bunnies and saying "Heavens me! This just won't do at all! I must rectify this blasphemous situation at once and save the soul of that gentleman in the giant bunny suit from eternal damnation!"
I think the answer is none of the above. The only people getting offended are the ones who are railing against the PC upheaval. What they should do is just chill out and let this whole thing die down. The situation is too silly to go on, it'll collapse on itself as soon as somebody realizes that the months are named after Pagan gods, and tries to change them to shit like: Thirdmonth, and Reallyhotmonth, or something.
What I don't understand is this: Since political correctness was created to fix that which offended people, isn't it, by its very existence self-defeating? I mean, too much political correctness is just as offensive as too little. So why did somebody come up with it in the first place? Political correctness is like anarchy, it can't survive because it works at cross purposes to what it is supposed to achieve. And why is it that nobody is taking into account how people are being offended by all the wacky PC junk that's going on? Does being offended by political correctness not count because it's supposed to be there to serve and benefit us all? And what about Scarecrow's brain?!
I try not to get involved with type of stuff. My usual reaction is chill in the cut, chuckling discretely to myself. As an atheist I tend to not get into the religious conversations with people, I'm always afraid that I'll ask questions they don't have answers for and I'll accidentally turn them into atheists too.
And if I did that, who'd buy me Christmas and Easter presents?
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