Are We Too Careful?

Below is the beginning of another great article by Roger W. Gardner regarding political correctness, its effects in the past, and its potential dangers in the future.  It's pretty long, but it is a truly outstanding explanation of one of my biggest pet peeves (also one of the core principles of liberalism).  Below is a teaser, but you really should go read the whole thing.

This, my friends, in case you haven't noticed, is a very careful generation. In fact, I've lived in this wonderful country of ours for a little over seven decades now, and this is without a doubt the most "careful" generation that I have ever had the misfortune to live amongst. Somehow we have managed to become the most careful people in the world, maybe the most careful people in history. We live in constant fear that we might inadvertently say something truthful that might offend someone, somewhere. We've learned to call this pervasive state of denial Political Correctness. But is it really Political Correctness, or is it something else?

I ask myself, is this present pacifistic crop of Chamberlainesque appeasers really being "careful" of other people's feelings, or merely being cowardly? Are all of our so-called PCisms truly demonstrations of our consideration for others, or are they rather an expression of our fear of others? Are we avoiding confrontation with those who threaten our lives and our culture out of kindness and tolerance, or are we just desperately trying to avoid that confrontation? Are we perhaps concerned that we might just antagonize our antagonists even more by naming them? Are we hoping to avoid the inevitable nastiness of these confrontations by hiding behind this intricately-wrought screen of euphemisms called Political Correctness?

When you think about it, isn't this really that same old weasely logic that in the 1950s induced us to call a Jew "someone of the Jewish persuasion"? As though they had somehow been persuaded to become a Jew. Isn't this just the latest manifestation of that same old hypocritical crap? Did we also talk about "someone of the Christian persuasion" in the 1950s? I don't think so.

In short, this is nothing all that new, it's that old familiar circuitous obfuscation that wouldn't allow us to call a Jew a Jew. Why? Would a Jew be offended to be called a Jew? Hardly. Every Jew I've ever known was proud to be a Jew. Could it be perhaps that we found that word so offensive that we could hardly bring ourselves to say it? Were these semantic acrobatics really evidence of our consideration for others or evidence of that intransigent American brand of anti-Semitism? Was this an example of some early form of Political Correctness in action? Or are we really talking about something else here. Something a little bit easier to understand, but something too awful to actually put it into words. Something called the truth.

Read the entire article here - it's worth your time.

There's my two cents.