So this past week, Barack Obama was quoted as saying that his definition of "political correctness" and that of Donald Trump, the president-elect, are probably different.
He gave a bunch of examples, and I don't think you could walk away from his words assembling those examples into a coherent definition of what he believed in as being proper behavior. For example, he said that it should be possible to feel that affirmative action was not the best way to achieve racial opportunity in such things as college applications and workplace hiring, without being labeled "racist."
That was a pretty reasonable statement.
Of course, then he got into the whole "who might be offended" thing, and that's where he slid into the morass that political correctness is and has always been. Because the problem, of course, is that "offense" is a spectrum. I do not want to think about whether something I say may offend Paraguayans or Lutherans by exclusion. At the same time, I would not want to feel it's OK if I were to make a comment ridiculing, say, Catholics, without being acutely aware that a Catholic in earshot would be offended.
By "spectrum", I mean that we truly shouldn't care if we joke about Kazakhstanis or albinos in a passing way, knowing that no one present will be offended. So when should we be careful? When does it get absurd to go looking for offended people before we utter a sentence?
I think that was the point of Trump's whole campaign-long tirade against PC behavior -- that if it is allowed to go on unchecked, eventually you will be able to say nothing for fear of offending. And the corollaries are equally bad -- that people will go looking to be offended, to put themselves into an offendable group so they can play the victim for profit as could be done in this hypothetical case; that we will dumb down our communications; that we will actually become unwilling to do things like ...
Say "Merry Christmas."
It is certainly not a rare thing these days and this season, to hear people far more likely to say "Merry Christmas" in what is a normal Christmas scenario, than the bland, inoffensive "Happy Holidays." More than once I've heard people actually say that they "feel it's OK to say 'Merry Christmas' now."
And it seemed utterly bizarre when a Kohl's store commercial just appeared on TV as I was writing this, with reindeer and Santa Claus, and the message was "Happy Holidays", as if reindeer and the jolly bearded guy were somehow not explicitly Christmas-specific characters.
I was recently in contact with an acquaintance in another part of the country, looking for a recording of a barbershop version of a Christmas song he had arranged. Now this fellow, whom I've known for 25 years but only met a few times, and never known well (hence "acquaintance") is extraordinarily successful at our art form, having been both a member of a world championship quartet, and having directed a world championship chorus (not the one that I was in).
In the course of his reply, he casually used the phrase about it being "OK to say 'Merry Christmas' now", and that startled me. For one, our organization actually has a founding principle that we do not let politics or religion intrude upon our dealings. My best friends for decades are in the Society, and many of them have political leanings I'm totally unaware of. So even hinting at something that could be thought to be political is unusual.
What struck me more is that because ours is essentially an arts organization, it is quite unexpected for a member to have such a feeling about Christmas and PC, let alone to hint at it in a passing sentence to someone who is not a close friend. After all, that would seem to be a conservative leaning in an arts environment.
I was certainly not afraid to reply back with a comparable passing statement, if only to take the bait and let him know I agreed with the notion. Multiply that interaction by a few million, and perhaps we get to take off the PC blinders, and say "Merry Christmas" to our Christian, or presumed-Christian friends, and say "Happy Hanukkah" to our Jewish or presumed-Jewish friends. (Apparently the invented "Kwanzaa", whose guiding principles are rather explicitly communistic, by the way, no longer seems to exist in the public forum).
I think that celebrating what our friends celebrate brings us together, a lot better than having others play victim does, to make a better USA.
Merry Christmas, my friends.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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