In an era of Donald Trump's latest insult to a minority or Hillary Clinton's "Pokemon Go to the Polls!" we see Political Correctness slowly waving it's red flag at this current election. It almost seems that every other sentence is followed by a 'you shouldn't say that' or 'I'm (enter race, gender, social standing) so I can say that' in today's talks about society. This just frustrates all parties involved in a conversation and usually ends in a big huff. So here's the question: Are we being too sensitive or are we really actually being rude and unjust?
To a textbook definition of being politically correct is, as Google states:
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- the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.
Now, don't get me wrong I swing mainly left, but aren't there some times where you're talking about something and someone gets insulted and says that you aren't allowed to comment on that, because "you don't understand it to it's fullest"? There are other times where you hear someone talking on something you've gone through and you get offended. Well, the caveat is that some things are completely valid such as: blatant racism, blatant appropriation, making fun of someone for their disabilities (Go Trump) or other things that we've tried to stamp out of our society since the United States' creation. My issue is, who draws the lines on where to stop and where to start and who gets to marginalize the groups that are 'allowed' to be offended?
We hear cries from the older generation of our parents and grandparents saying "You all get so offended about everything! Back in my day, we just dealt."
Okay, well let's just jump back in time say 60 years? So our grandparents would be around our age. Let's say 1956. Let's really just look at the first three months of 1956 it's really that easy. Eisenhower (R) is told he is healthy enough to run for re-election and turns around and runs and wins. Marilyn Monroe legally changes her name. Elvis Presley releases "Heartbreak Hotel" and last BUT NOT least, 96 United States Congressman (voted in their by the people) sign the 'Southern Manifesto' which protested the 1954 Supreme Court Ruling of Brown v Board of Education, which if you don't remember from your United States History Class (Thanks Ms. Procell), that was the ruling that desegregated public education.
Here we are 60 years in the past and African Americans are barely allowed to sit on the bus (Montgomery Bus Boycott), or eat at the lunch counters (Nashville Sit-Ins) or even drink from the same water fountain as a white person!
So this is a time where there was no such thing as being technically 'politically correct' and if something that were said back then were said today a physical brawl would probably ensue, but maybe there was political correctness in certain regions. After some research and a few phone calls to my grandparents (thank you, Grandma Susie and Tapa) I found out that it became more of political correctness based on the region you were from. As my grandma put it, the 'bible belt' had a lot more of the things that are seen as not politically correct back in the day and when she moved from Missouri to the Central Valley in California, she saw that it was still highly frowned upon here to say things like that. She said that to a degree there still was more of a "mind your P's and Q's" motion, especially being from a large southern family. She then said that the term "politically correct" started coming around more in the late 80's and 90's. Which then begs me to ask, "Why did it start to pop up around the birth of our generation?"
So here's my point:
Were our grandparents calling us sensitive, because they went through some of the hardest times in the last 50 years of American History with assassinations, blatant lynchings, and bombs or are we truly becoming a generation of entitled brats that need a reality check, because we've never truly seen how hard it is? Honestly, being a Starbucks Barista, I see some of the most entitled, rude, and down right mean people day to day (I'll have a Venti Extra Hot No Foam Latte Half Non-Fat Half-Whole Milk with 3 Sugar Free Vanilla, 2 Raw Sugars and 1 Equal) so I see the entitlement really take hold, but why are we acting like this? Who taught us to act like this? Maybe it's just the fact that the most horrible thing to happen to our generation was that our iPhone chargers got shorter and more expensive rather than being forcibly drafted into Vietnam?
