Politically Incorrect or Purposely Blunt?
Al Ritter
Our culture still battles about the term “politically correct,” as if it’s a political football only held by the moral high ground group. What do we really know about the term politically correct? It has been traced back as far as the 1790’s, but it was brought into the main stream by Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
This basic conception of language differences between those people concerned with offending others and those people not afraid to offend took root in the culture discussions of the
1980’s and 1990’s and has been brought to the forefront by the progressive liberals.
Within a few years, this previously obscure term featured regularly in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against curriculum expansion and progressive teaching methods in US high schools and universities. It was the argument by the universities that the reason for lower test scores by any particular group was caused by continued use of politically incorrect terms that lowered self-esteem.
It was argued by the other side that the revisionist terms were leveled by a group that thought only on an emotional sense rather than using rational discourse. Thus the term and usage of the word politically correct took its place in the American political scene.
With the history of PC now out of the way let’s discuss the way it is used in today’s language. If it is true that the progressive liberals intend to speak from the idea of emotion rather than logical discourse, then logic is taken out of the equation in making rational decisions. Why has the political right allowed the left to only allow discussion on major issues to be done in emotional terms? Could it be that the right hasn’t been educated to the origins of the term political correctness?
Let’s look at a few ways to describe the attack on 9/11….if we said that “we were attacked on 9/11 by males,” we would have made a logical statement based on fact. If we claimed that “we were attacked by middle eastern men,” we would have made a statement based on logic, but now borderline politically incorrect. If we claimed that “we were attacked by Muslims,” we have made a statement based on fact, but HIGHLY offensive to the PC police.
When the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA compiles data they look towards “items in common.” Every sentence above shows those items in common between the attackers on 9/11, and HAS been logged in the history of the event by the respective governmental groups. The process is called “profiling,” and there are separate departments in each of these investigative branches paid to do just that, and yet terms such as we have outlined so far cannot be spoken outside of those departments because of PC.
Somehow the “PC police” of the left wing have their own groups of protectionism that are off limits. Some of these oppressed people are women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and the newest group, Muslims. Even though a suicide bomber has never been a catholic, a Jew, or a Methodist, to cast Muslims as being the most likely to be a suicide bomber is politically incorrect, unless you place the magical words “radical extremist” before the word Muslim.
Why do we let political correctness jeopardize our physical safety? Israel has the most effective program to fight terrorism in the world; after all, they have been doing it for years longer than anyone else. They deal in facts; political correctness has no place in factual information, only in political discussion. Should politics figure into the safety of our citizens?
We are bound to failure if factual information is ignored in a process that formulates policy. Too often politics finds its way into every facet of life…………..politics should be the path to freedom, but lately it’s the politics that is removing freedom.
