Never thought of myself as "Politically Correct." Polite? Maybe ... but Political Correctness seemed to carry a different meaning ... though as I sit here and toy with finding a definition of Political Correctness, I don't find any obvious place to begin.
I was asked some years back to talk about diversity and multiculturalism to a school district .... maybe 500 people gathered together, fulfilling, I suppose, some district policy that Teachers and Staff would be exposed annually to a certain number of trainings or hours of training. The person planning it had invited me and, oddly enough, had been asked to leave their Diversity Committee for espousing a view that I was to espouse that day. Her view wasn't, apparently, consistent with the way the Committee saw Diversity and Multiculturalism. She was, by the way, the only Black Person working for the School District, as far as I knew.
The view she had represented was, I suppose, one she had developed while being my student in a post-professional training program. Simply put: I was against multi-culturalism as it was practiced. By that, I mean that the presumption that if you know some statistical identifiers about an individual
-- say .. Place of Birth, Pigmentation of Skin, Religion of Birth, Gender -- you know a great deal about them. I gave myself as an example: I was born in Brooklyn, NY; I was pale in the Winter and quite dark in the Summer; my parents were both Jewish; and I was a long-time Heterosexual Male. I explained -- first to a break-out group and then to the whole audience -- that I had a colleague whom I had found out was Jewish. I had asked her what it meant to her to be Jewish and she explained that it meant that neither she nor her husband mowed the lawn or changed their own flat tires. I responded that I did both and changed toilets and electrical thiggamajigs, too.
In any case, I argued, that day before the School District, that knowing still those few things about me couldn't begin to explain how growing up was in a home where other languages were spoken, where Sabbath was celebrated as it was, perhaps, in Colonial America, the Outer Hebrides and certain pockets of religious zealots about the World, and where hundreds of religious rituals dominated the changing of the Seasons. The little bits of information couldn't begin to explain what it was like to grow up under the influence of an ex-Soldier Boy from WW2, his Father-in-Law, a religious leader with a sizable following, and a Mom who was born in Hungary and was still mourning all her aunts and cousins who died under the programs of the Reich.
I went on to explain that the notion of politically correct language was difficult for me, as well. In the News, a Black School Principal had just been fired in a neighboring school district for using the so-articulated N-Word in a training about Racially Sensitive Speech. I had no problems -- I suggested rightly or wrongly -- with words. If some blonde talking head (Coulter) wants to call my people of origin "Fucking Jews," WTF do I care? I don't think well of her, anyhow, and her use of the expression Fucking Jew or Sale Juif? Really? What do I care? I'm actually far more troubled by what I perceive as her coldness and lack -- again, in my perception -- of her kindness.
Kindness! That was it and that brings me back to folk who use the Truth as an excuse for being unkind. Maybe I prefer the expression "Verbal Sensitivity" to "Political Correctness." I remember attending Christmas Parties and people coming over to me (well, three people) on different occasions and saying:
This is a Christian Country.
I don't have to wish you Happy Channukah or Holidays.
This is a Christian Country.
Merry Christmas.
I guess I coulda answered:
And a Merry F'n Christmas to you, too.
But it seemed pointless.
Lookee, here ... I'm a Last Quarter Guy ... Carrying 20 too-many-pounds ... Not enough grass growing on my head ... a CPU that just don't process as fast as it once did ... one eye that don't work so well, either ... ... I'm interested in -- even if maybe it's too late -- what Otis Reading suggested: "Try a Little Tenderness." Maybe it is too late to correct for all the hurts I've inflicted on others and others have inflicted on me in the First Three Quarters. Who knows? No one is anywhere near perfect. Certainly, not I.
But ... how do we live with the rampant unkindnesses that we hear in the cavalier and dismissive speech of one of our Presidential candidates:
Trivializing the experience of a POW ...
Singling out one group of immigrants as having a larger number of dangerous felons ...
Making fun of how people look ....
Playing the "Hormone Card" with Women ....
Allowing others to demonize Muslims
as if they weren't Sons and Daughters of Mothers like the rest of us ...
Making fun of opponent's behaviors ...
... and maybe most difficult for me ...
Assuming people will accept his "Believe Me's" ... the last refuge of Teen-agers in trouble with their parents and scoundrels.
It was Bush I who used to speak of Kinder and Gentler Times. The Older I get? the more I wish for those times and the less do I believe that they will come. In the very end of Malachi, the depressed prophet described "The End of Days" when the hearts of the parents and children will be returned to each other and warns that if that doesn't occur, the peoples of the Earth are in Deep Shit! It's frankly embarrassing as an American to imagine that my country could be run by such people who pay no attention to how the Other feels about what is being said.
It's good to be invisible ... not one of the Coulter/Trump targets. Just a Citizen.
