I never liked the “Baby On Board” signs people hung on their cars. What did they expect me to do? Drive more timidly? Change lanes?
I never liked the stories about nosy waiters or waitresses admonishing pregnant women about an insignificant amount of alcohol. My mom smoked and drank and I turned out. . . okay.
The jury is still out after all.
I always liked the description a reporter gave about Werner Herzog driving in America and how when he saw a traffic sign that read “Right Lane MUST Exit” he flew into a rage about these unseen forces telling him to comply and he didn’t want to do it.
As an American citizen, he chose freedom, by golly!
I am not always a fan of political correctness. It can be so delimiting. It can be so alienating if context and generations and cultural norms are not taken into consideration in order to soften the impending interaction between those who choose to live strictly by its code and those who choose simply to live their lives and want to do what’s right but don’t want to spend too much time thinking about it. Not everyone reads the appropriate journals or listens to the appropriate public channels.
I think many grievances stem from a perception that political correctness has run amok. Take the stupid brouhaha over saying, Happy Holidays, instead of Merry Christmas. That became the War On Christmas because conservative talking heads amplified it and I am sure some folks on the political correctness train doubled down in an attempt to justify it.
As far as I am concerned, using Happy Holidays is the correct response if you have no idea what someone believes but I also think that most of us use Merry Christmas mindlessly because we spent more than six decades in a society saturated with Christianity whether we liked it or not. I’d like to be cut some slack if I use Merry Christmas under the wrong circumstance. I also don’t want to be jeered at if I choose to use Happy Holidays.
The ‘War On Christmas’ gets perpetuated because I think it serves as a reminder that political correctness exists and it helps stoke the fear that the next thing you know ‘they’ - the ubiquitous, nefarious they - are coming for your guns.
The news on the right and hate radio make their living mocking all things politically correct but now that we have a president who delights in this same chicanery the stakes have changed. He is the amplifier and reanimator of behavior that had been relegated to the shadows. He is the Pied Piper of Not Politically Correct persons.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it succinctly, “He can stay, he can go. He can be impeached, or voted out in 2020. But removing @#$%@ will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalization that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified and reanimated.”
No matter what transpires over the next hundred days, we have our work cut out for us if we want to make a better America. And, I think what I am trying to say is, we all want a better America. We want a better world. But don’t be so dogmatic that you overlook the innate good in people. Don’t be so set in how you want to see the world that you don’t allow others any slack.
People want to do the right thing, let’s show them how it’s done while giving them the chance to follow our lead.
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Here’s an interview with John Cusack who, as it turns out, is incredibly progressive. The interview is on the Progressive.Org website after all. Which reminded me of his role in Roadside Prophets (I am not recommending this movie, by the way, I remember nothing about it - except - for the scene in the cafe) when he yells “Free Food for the Poor!” Read the interview. I knew I liked him for some reason other than the movies Grifters and Say Anything.
Also, AAR and wise friend, Charley McCabe, sent me an email that included this quote relating to rivers written by Jim Harrison and from his novel, The English Major. Charley says he is doing his damndest to find a balance in these trying days before the election and while he is awaiting the arrival of his first grandchild in Two Harbors, Minnesota.
“I’m sort of neutral in terms of religion but ever since I was a kid I’ve thought moving water to be the best thing God made. Back in grade school when I started trout fishing with my dad he told me that gods and spirits lived in creeks and rivers, information he got from his own father’s Chippewa buddy. I never doubted this one bit. Where else would they live?”
