Begging for Puppies

Something has been bugging me. Not like the anger that I feel when I have to go to the gym – that’s more of a percolating rage at the ridiculousness of the process of running and ellipticalling until time ceases to exist. That kind of rage can be bottled for an alternative source of energy. (Even if you don’t believe we are killing the planet, it would be great to have such a renewable source, right?) But this is different, I mean bugging me, as in, that twinge you get in your stomach when you think something is wrong but you can’t articulate it. (Or you can articulate lots of things that are wrong but you feel like there is one more that hasn't been addressed.) So I thought I would investigate what it is here - because that seems to be what these things are for. I have been hearing, for a few years, people angry and ranting at being forced to be “politically correct”. And when people rage against something, I tend to want to figure out why. They complain about how the government is trying to take their freedom of speech. But that is not “politically correct”; that is censorship and should be fiercely stood against.
        
      It is really important not to confuse the two concepts. They are similar, I will give you that, but different – and different enough that confusion of the two would be as bad as the years I wasted singing the wrong words in second verse of Adele's song Someone Like You. I thought the line was - We were born and raised in a summer haze bound by a piece of pie of our glory days. The line really is – bound by the surprise of our glory days. Not such a huge mistake, but one that implies that their glory days consisted of being tied up with pie. Pie is delicious but glory days tied up with pie insinuates that there were no glory days but some sort of horrible trauma related to pie – which would then make it not delicious. So I was belting something, quite opposite to the spirit of the song, at the top of my lungs in my car. Unfortunately, I feel like this belting about political correctness is a similar mistake but more insidious.

 So let’s define them. (Boring I know, but if we don’t know what we are talking about, we could be singing songs that celebrate horrible pie eating experiences and never really understand why.) Censorship is the government regulating what people can read, watch, learn or say. Politically Correct is a belief that offensive language should be eliminated. So one is an oppressive government deciding what should and should not be read and watched and the other is a culture of people deciding how they should conduct themselves. The key difference is: controlling “the dispersion of facts” verses belief.

So I am trying to get my head around this. What is making people so mad? No one is saying that free speech should be taken away. But words have power. It is what I love about them. Martin Luther King used word after beautiful word to change the world. And yet just before him Hitler used words to convince an entire nation that they should annihilate a specific group of people. He labeled them as less than human – as vermin. This made it possible for the killing and torture of millions of men, women and children. Have we really come so far that we don’t remember this?

The amazing thing is, we have the choice to say anything we want; our government made sure of it and so they should, but what we do with that freedom has consequences – culture defining consequences. I keep hearing people say, “I can’t worry about everything I say just because I might offend them! It is their problem if they get offended.” As Louie CK says, "That's like saying, 'yeah, I shot this guy in the face and then I guess he got himself murdered.'"

Why are we even bothering to teach our children to be nice if they can just grow up to say anything (or type anything) they like without thinking about other people. Just because you have the right to say anything you want doesn’t mean you should say it. I have a right to say to the guy who comes into the gym constantly pulling one leg of his shorts up over his hip (it’s like he hates one leg of his shorts being equal with the hem of his other leg. I’m not sure why he doesn’t just cut off one leg) and coughing at even intervals, without covering his mouth, while he runs, that he annoys me more than the constant high-pitched ring of a smoke alarm. But I keep my mouth shut because he is not murdering anyone. Is he disturbing me? Yes. Is he a narcissist that thinks the gym is there for his own personal use and none of the rest of us lab rats matter? Possibly. But he is not murdering anyone.

Now let’s say murder was involved. Let’s say that a completely different man who hiked one leg of their shorts up, so he looks like he's wearing half a speedo, and coughed at even intervals was murdering people in Texas. I can’t just start yelling at the guy in my gym that his short-hiking-cough-prone-bronchi makes him a murderer. I could consider his personal psychosis and rationally think if there is a link between coughing and short-leg-raising to susceptibility to murderous thoughts but I would have to dismiss it. Whatever happened to the advice, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”? At least as a first filter sentence to run through your head before speaking or typing. What could people possibly be scared of? It can’t be censorship because that is something else entirely.

So back to: “Hey that’s my opinion and I’m allowed to have any opinion I want. And why should I have to worry if I offend someone.”  Well, let’s say I was having a particularly annoying day at the gym and I decide that this guy with the shorts is actually beneath me – he is stupid.  So I go home and my daughter does something silly, like spill milk all over the counter. And I say, “Ha! You are such a shorts-hiker”. She is not offended and, in fact, because of my tone, we both laugh as we clean it up. (Let’s assume she knows this person and has also been annoyed at the shorts-hiking.) And let’s say I used the term every time she screwed up. Then the shorts-hiker becomes less than us – something to be better than. Now she is at college and the shorts-hiking thing has become quite popular and young men everywhere are grabbing their shorts and hiking them over their hip. It's all the rage.  Now she see’s all of them as stupid and less than she is, because they are associated with failure. It would be a short step for her to treat them as less than her – less than human even. If one of them pissed her off she might not have any issues with ripping those hiked shorts right off their bodies. (This is a hypothetical; my daughter is very kind - even to shorts-hikers.)
Words have power and, when something has power, caution should be exercised when using it. It is why we don’t let the five year old drive; and also why we say to the five year old, “think about what it would feel like if someone called you a shorts-hiker/cougher”. We need to stop worrying about whether being politically correct is violating our rights and start asking if the things we are typing online and saying out of our mouths have been carefully thought out and given the respect that powerful things deserve. By-the-way my daughter just learned how to light a match last night. We teach our children not to play with fire, because they tend to freak out and drop a still burning match on the carpet (which is what happened and why children need adult supervision when lighting fires).

Maybe we should all start thinking of our words as flames. They can be contained in a fire place that welcomes friends into a cozy environment  of respectful discussion – or they can spew out of our mouths under the guise of righteous rage: it burns the house down and you are left homeless and your guests are naked or standing in the street in shredded smoldering clothing.

Now I know that all of our world issues can’t be fixed with a slumber party but what if we all stopped putting little I’m-smarter-than-you-comments and meme’s on Facebook and started having real conversations – it might take a long time and, yes, in the mean time, someone crazy might set off a nuclear war head; but at least then we can all die knowing that before someone destroyed the world we had all started being nice to each other. I mean we tried the other way. We gave it a real go. We yelled at each other; we threatened everyone else from the safety of our social media fortresses that allowed us to use hate and then sign off to go watch TV, with our conscience clear, because what we said was true. How about we try it the other way for a while? I’m just sayin’, can we continue to discuss the REALLY important issues while still watching how we speak about each other. And when we are not discussing the real issue can there be a place you can go and just watch puppies until we are at peace again. Because there are a huge amount of real issues and if you don’t take a break a couple of times a day your head might explode or you will get tired and stop discussing and arguing about these really important issues. Because sometimes there are so many issues that you feel too overwhelmed and are not sure which issue to fight against. (I read a great blog about staying focused on certain issues so you don't get numb and eventually apathetic because it is all so overwhelming, but I can't remember who wrote it, sorry - especially to the author!) So can we go back to putting videos of puppies on Facebook – PLEASE! Because let’s face it - where will real change come from? From a meme? Or from people doing the hard work of figuring out who we want to be as a human race - in between decreasing cortisol levels by studying puppies?

So I will help kick things off. Here are a couple videos of us trying to get Percy to cross the footbridge. He was very scared…

After trying to get him to cross back over the bridge - he ran off with another family. It took quite a bit of encouragement to get him to live with us again.