An Opinion - Shpak Speaks

Not So Controversial or Kitsch...

But Still Messing With My World

By Shpak

Staff Writer

hink about how hard it is for people to form their thoughts into words and to express themselves -- and then try creating an instution which tells them what they can and can't say in public. In effect, this person, who finds it difficult to commnicate, has yet another obstacle in their self-expression.
I believe in the ideas which form the concept of the use of politically correct terminology. These ideas hoped to eradicate those elements in speech which further degraded minorities and the disenfranchised. This is to say that you wouldn't want to constantly refer to a mentally retarded child as a "retard" or even as "disabled" because the connotation is derogatory and does nothing to better their progress at overcoming their difficulties. On the same note, the terminology for such individuals has become so sophisticated that they are now "physically and mentally challenged individuals." Once we master this new piece of terminology, we then find that this applies to every aspect of society. Those who do not develop such a vocabulary are usually deemed "ignorant" and "un-P.C." We have gone beyond simple terminology -- P.C. is the way you dress, the car you drive, the amount of "like"s in your sentence structure, right on down to whether or not you smoke cigarettes. So I guess I'm not really addressing something new in the 90s society, but this absurd notion "P.C." and "not-P.C." is driving me nuts. This now fully actualized idea of a cosmic, transcendent, and indisputably correct jargon that characterizes every aspect of daily speech and thought seems reminds me of the years of Reagan's moral majority. Granted, they were right-wing "biddie" conservatives who wished to impose their Christian ethics on all of us. They attempted, in their time, to form our views and speech patterns around what they obliged us to think "if we were descent human beings". But essentially, we are witnessing the same trend from the "slightly further left, liberal elements" who wish to curb our expression of the everyday. The source may not even be that clear cut; we really don't know if the left, the right, or that amorphus middle is devising this instrument of fascist programming. Further, if the P.C. movement did in fact start on the left how could the term "liberal" be attached to it? I believed "liberal" to mean those enlightened and accepting. How could the P.C. phenomena promote or create an individual's enlightenment if it is an act of censorship and restriction? Just as each person has their own thought patterns and ideas, specific to their character, they have their own way of expressing themselves verbally. So how can someone tell me how to speak when in reality, even if I was speaking in "their" words, I may not even understand why I'm using "their" words?
I understand that this war on terminology is aimed at those racist, wife beating, littering, non-recycling individuals, who drink and drive, who suck down fast food and throw the wrapper out the car window, but I'm not one of those people. So why do I feel like if I call someone a "chick" or a "black person" that I'll be ostracized? It's just my rap -- that's all. I'm not trying to hurt anyone.
Think about it -- if you are engaged in a conversation about the environment, and you don't have your PIRG or Greenpeace membership cards or a memorized list of statistics on the rate of species extinction in the southwestern hemisphere, then you're just a loser. You don't care about the earth.
Take it further -- you're living in a rather tough neighborhood. Most of your neighbors are on welfare and tend to play music that shakes your ceiling and cabinets with bass. You have tried to ask them to turn it down. They start screaming at you in Spanish. Worse, you speak spanish and understand what their saying to your face. The next day your car is scratched to hell and your lawn is full of trash. You say to a friend, "My neighbors have no fucking consideration of my right to some quiet. They sit on their asses all day and collect welfare while I'm just trying to do my work." Out of anger you add that your Spanish is better than theirs. Then it is revealed that these people are second generation immigrants from Puerto Rico. You are a racist, didn't you know? The comment you make about the first generation Puerto Ricans being hard workers and those of the second and third generations as those who tend to collect welfare makes you a criminal. But you have watched it everyday, and you understand what does and doesn't go down on your block, yet you're wrong for putting it in your own words and for exposing the reality there.
Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate the shouting of "Nigger" or "Hymie" throughout the streets. I submit that the very demand that everything one says should be P.C. creates deception and paranoia. You as a listener can hear someone speak and never know if the words represent their actual views or if the words were scripted for a person who is just trying to please the P.C. Conventional wisdom.
Furthermore, I feel like everything we say should be scripted. Sometimes I find myself in a room with someone of a different race and I feel like I am being watched, that everything I say may be construed as racist. I'm constantly searching out the right terminology. I end up floundering. I myself have never noticed color, but it seems I have been conditioned or socialized now to always deal with it as an issue.
I feel like the creation of a specific way to express oneself in everyday speech is stifling and tends to make people feel like bashing the whole movement. I am not bashing, back-lashing or even asking anyone to agree. What I am saying is that maybe things are a bit out of hand. Many great ideas have rotted in the past and have been revised and re-instituted, oh let's say, within context.
Beyond what some people would argue, I maintain, "This is an infringement on my constitutional right to free speech" or, " This is all part of a grand conspiracy of the Right to undermine the liberal push towards a better and more accepting United States!" or worse., "This P.C. shit is trying to make us look like fools because we're not college educated!" There is a fundamental problem with letting P.C.-ness become the only way to live. Forgive me for mentioning Nazi Germany and Orwell's 1984, and maybe even Huxely's A Brave New World. but institutionalized P.C. is too similar to mind control for me. Once your words are controlled and scripted, your thoughts are next and then what's left?
Forgive me, but I just spent fifteen months abroad in Europe, the Middle East and the like, and I didn't deal with such formalities of language control. People said what they meant and then if you or anyone else felt that their phraseology or ideas were a bit funked, then you called them on it. It seemed a tad more, I don't know, mature -- or maybe effective. I didn't know that this topic had been fully harangued. I am only reacting to the oppression I'm now feeling. My question is if the ridiculous nature of the "politically correct lifestyle" has been exposed, then what is being done to change it? Who is now running the program? Where did it feed into society and why is everybody checking up on the terminology of everybody else?
I'm asking for a re-evaluation of the reasons for the war on terminology. What were the ideas behind it at the onset and are they the same ideas which embody "Politically Correct" today? Are we headed in the world of doublespeak? Shouldn't we be dealing with people's actions? Do their words mean as much as their actions? I'll leave it out there for ya to decide.