POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: The Scourge of Our Times

Here is a insightful submission by Gerry Jampol, a very good friend of mine, who is a fine wordsmith and former systems technician for the San Francisco Chronicle for many years.

 Anyone with a pulse is familiar with the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press….” 

 However, the authors of the Bill of Rights, proponents of the freedom of speech provision, apparently didn’t foresee a time when citizens themselves would abridge freedom of speech. For more than three decades the country has been terrorized by a self-important coterie of citizens who have mocked freedom of speech through what is called political correctness, or P.C.

  P.C. has become the refuge for the ignorant and oversensitive. It’s a political weapon that seeks to ostracize and judge people who have redefined words and terms. Those who don’t use P.C. terminology are readily accused of being racist, sexist, insensitive, homophobic.

  The P.C. lobby’s holier-than-thou attitude and air of moral superiority doesn’t impress me at all and is just a cover for their Leftist-liberal-women’s lib agenda in which they seek to bludgeon everyone who disagrees with them.

  The nonsensical term “Afro-American” has largely replaced “Black.”  P.C. wordsmiths have concocted all sorts of circumlocutions. The ''mentally retarded'' are now mentally challenged. If you’re ''crippled'' in an accident, you are now physically challenged, but, heaven forbid, not a cripple. A U.K. council has banned the term ''brainstorming'' and replaced it with ''thought showers'' , as the councillors thought the term may offend epileptics! Also a ''man hole'' is now called a ''utility hole.''
  In San Francisco, a loudmouthed group of wheelchair-bound people used their P.C. bull to stop the opening of a restaurant because they were too good to go through the kitchen to use the service elevator to take them to the second floor. They demanded that the restaurateur build a very expensive elevator just for their own selfish use. The restaurant owner lost about $800,000 thanks to the P.C. pigs. In politically correct San Francisco, there was little doubt that the city wouldn’t grant the owner a certificate to open his eatery.

 

P.C. is dangerous. Thousands of employees have lost their jobs because of P.C. During a private conversation some troublemaking lout overheard one of two men using a non-P.C. term. An intimidated employer, fearful of a lawsuit for having a “hostile work environment,” fired the “offending” employee. During Stalin’s reign, Russians were too scared of the secret police and informers to talk with one another in public, so they whispered even the most innocuous remarks. Are we, too, being reduced to whispering our opinions lest some politically correct moron should hear us?

  In England several years ago, the authorities forced a homeowner to remove ceramic pigs she had in her front window because Muslim passers-by were “offended” by the pigs. The authorities were supposedly trying to be sensitive, that is, politically correct. The homeowner’s rights did not matter. Muslims are pulling this crap all over Europe.

  Educators are among the worst PC oppressors. A school district banned a children’s book because it contained a story about peanuts. The district felt that the book was offensive to children who have peanut allergy. The poor Christmas tree is now referred to as a ''holiday tree''.

  In 2006 and 2008 a Dutch newspaper published and other newspapers reprinted satirical cartoons that depicted Mohammed. Muslims object to seeing their prophet depicted. So, they rioted throughout the world for nearly a week. Freedom of speech and press are alien to Muslims, who are undoubtedly the most dangerous and capricious people in the world. According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, 32 armed conflicts were under way in 2000; more than two thirds involved Muslims.

  Even worse, when CNN reported the story, it told its audience that it wouldn’t show any of the

cartoons for fear of “offending” Muslims. This was a story that demanded an accompanying illustration so viewers could see what the fuss was all about. However, politically correct CNN deprived its viewers of making a judgment for themselves, but I'm glad to show them to you on the right. CNN offends plenty of people every day, but Muslims are now a special group.

  On one of FB’s World War II groups, the high-handed administrator declared that the word “Jap” was racist and threatened to throw out anyone who used it. In the context of the war “Jap” was a common term. In dozens of documentaries, veterans who discuss the war rarely hesitate to use “Jap.” Those vets fought a vicious enemy and they are entitled to use the word. Perhaps the administrator would like to rewrite all books about the Pacific war and delete Jap. That would be a very Stalinist thing to do. The Soviet dictator was always ordering books rewritten to conform to his whims.

  Nearly a decade ago, a municipal official in Washington, D.C., was addressing his staff about the department budget. In his speech, he used the perfectly legitimate word “niggardly,” which means stingy. However, it isn’t on the P.C. list of acceptable words. Well, ignorant and oversensitive staff members called the official a racist and demanded his firing, which the equally ignorant mayor of Washington did. When the dust settled – and someone opened a dictionary -- the fired official was rehired but in a different job. When a reporter mentioned to one of the ignoramuses that the word was of Swedish origin, she replied, “we don’t know where they [the Swedes] got that word from.”The Third Reich mentality of the P.C. crowd could lead the deletion of thousands of words from the English language. 

Political correctness has scared off the news media from covering important issues. Black-on-white bigotry and hatred is one subject that needs to be tackled, but don’t expect the news media to cover it in any depth, if at all. The lack of allegiance to the United States by many second-generation Latinos is another issue on the list of untouchable subjects. There are thousands of gay men who seek out sex partners to deliberately infect them with HIV. It’s a national scandal, but you won’t be hearing much about it.
 

In 2012, when George Mitchell shot and killed black Trayvon Martin, even before the facts of the case were known, five female members of the House black caucus delivered the vilest, most hateful anti-white speeches I recall ever hearing. If white people weren’t shackled by political correctness, they should have denounced the five women and their speeches. Alas, white Americans were too P.C. to be outraged.

  In the 11th Century, Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was forced to make a trek through a blizzard to plead to Pope Gregory VII to revoke his excommunication. When Henry reached the pope’s residence at Canossa, he humiliated himself for three days on his knees outside the castle gates. Today’s version of the “Walk to Canossa” is the pilgrimage to Jesse Jackson. When white people seek absolution for offending blacks, they make the trek to Jackson to seek his forgiveness. This politically correct act has given Jackson far more power than he deserves. Until wimpy white people cut out this nonsense, Jackson will continue his guilt game.

The Way I See It.......political correctness movement has gone way too far. While the original intent of PC may have been good (to encourage tact and sensitivity to other's feelings around issues of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, and physical abilities), the effect has been to make everyone avoid these topics altogether, thereby hindering our ability to freely and openly discuss diversity issues. Political correctness has become a bigger problem than the problem it was intended to address!

My friend is right and joins the millions of us who are fed up to the back-teeth with the PC Thought Police spearheaded mainly by leftist academic elites that are slowly trying to bring Marxist-Socialism into the fabric of the United States starting with the polluting of university students in their charge as well as infiltrating the Democratic Party and the major media outlets with their ''Great Leader'' Barack Obama as their poster boy.

To put it more meaningfully; Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

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