LEFT BRAIN / RIGHT BRAIN

Political correctness is not the weilded baton of the Thought Police as some people have pointed out. Political Correctness, or P.C. as it's known, is a term used to describe speech or actions designed solely to minimize the possibility of offending any listeners. In order not to offend or hurt the feelings of others, many terms and phrases are toned down in impact or softened by using less brutal, less cutting words.

P.C. has recently gained popularity during the last decade, primarily on college campuses, the workplace, and any other place where large groups of people congregate on a regular basis. After the horrible crash of the Seventies and the greedy struggles for money and power in the Eighties, the Nineties became a kind of cooling off period for the end of the century. As people became less involved in the mad rush of the "get it all and now" mentality, people became more in tune with their emotions and feelings. As people felt more, they became more empathic and sensitive to the feelings of others. Terms such as "retarded" or "blind" - hard words in the vernacular sense - were considered to be cruse and harsh. Replacing these with such terms as "challenged" or "differently abled or sighted" became less stigmatizing to the one suffering with the condition, and less hard to speak about in the terms of the speaker. And in other places where gender equality became an issue in the workplace, or work vocabularies changed. With more women (or womyn in some cases) becoming more successful and climbing higher in the workplace, "chairman" became "chairwoman" or "chairperson" while "workman" became simply "worker".

Even in terms of racial relations, P.C. came to the fore. "Black", the socially acceptable term for Americans of African descent became the term "people of color" while most people from the Eastern side of the Pacific rim became known as "people of the east". Even in the culture of whites, the term redneck was replaced by "people of the land".

Political Correctness, while at times a chore to maintain, is not the language of the Thought Police. Countless sensibilities have been spared and many relationships have been kept unbroken by the cushioning effect of the gentler tone of P.C. And aren't we all just a bit more at peace for it?

If I hear one more P.C. term, I'm gonna puke! Let me just say that I'm not against anybody or hate anybody more than they ought to be hated, but I refuse to use a term simply to spare someone's feelings. Nobody can get hurt from words, unless those words are ready-aim-fire, but that's different. Nobody's heart stopped beating simply from being called Black, crippled, retarded or bitch.

It's not a "personhole" cover, it's a "MANHOLE" cover! The guy is not differently sighted (like he has some inner eye that lets him peer like an eagle into the hearts of others), he's blind! He's not a "dentally challenged, differently employed person of the boulevard who is alcoholically aware", he's a bum panhandling for change, and if'n he don't get outta my face I'm gonna shove him in front of a bus!

The P.C. people, while their evil little hearts might be in the right place, are not trying to save some helpless persons feeling from being hurt. They are trying to change speech, for they know that if you can control speech, you can control thoughts. In 1948, George Orwell published the book 1984 in which the government controlled speech by writing up dictionaries of Newspeak, and they prosecuted people for having deviant thoughts. Despite the book's dark overtones and frightening message, it was doubleplus excellent and well writ to Big Brother's highfair standards. It also shows what happens when speech and thought is controlled by someone else. People who are unable to express themselves or think as individuals become trapped within their own minds and are forced to rebel to maintain the sanity they hold dear. And those that control the speech and thoughts will hurt those that do not think like they do.

P.C., though designed to make the world a better place, has become a tool by which those who wish to push their agenda stifle words and thoughts in order to make others think like them. And the more that think like them, the bigger their power base.

Well, not me, man! I speak as I want, when I want. When I start calling my neighbors "Spanish speaking people of the Carribbean" and start dating a person of differing gender or, Goddess help me, a womyn, I'm gonna take my shotgun and blow my head off.

But knowing my luck, I'll survive as a differently mobile, handicapable, person of self-minimized crania.