Recently I wrote to you, dear reader, about the importance of manners. Today I turn your attention to the underbelly of the matter to reveal the detriment that occurs when a society is so over-polite that it loses touch with itself. Courtesy is a virtue; tiptoeing is a waste of energy at best. As an institution, as a generation, as a nation we engage in macrocosmic tiptoeing every single day. Sometimes it's political correctness, but all too often it looks more like an epidemic of social rhetoric.
PC-ism today is not just a matter of respect for a liberal sensibility; it has turned into an index for how aware, or active, or tolerant a person is, and is thus being abused. Moreover, such abuse -- or overuse, if you will -- has created a backfire that either many don't notice, or most won't acknowledge. A cyclical paradox results: being oversensitive to our differences desensitizes us to PC ideas and language, thus we feel the need to be even more sensitive in order to regain social control. And on it goes.
Today (fill in the blank)-American qualifiers are becoming more and more pervasive in the national vernacular. This country is predicated on a history of uniting many nationalities into one, but it seems that being diverse is not enough; we also have to remind ourselves constantly of just how different we all are.
I am an American, a generally apathetic, apolitical one, but an American nonetheless. And I don't feel that being an American negates my heritage in any way. Being one nationality and having another ancestry are not mutually exclusive. It betrays faulty logic to think that calling oneself an American means denying one's history or beliefs.
The longer we embrace the perceived need for fill-in-the-blank qualification, the further we get from the reason we started in the first place. Where does one draw the line? If I wanted to call myself, say, a Vertically-Challenged-American no one would buy it. There's a boundary somewhere at which the compulsion to identify goes from PC to absurd. Who's to finally say when we've reached it?
Equality is the ultimate goal, or so it seems. But labeling, even with the intention of being respectful, segregates. It reinforces walls between us, and draws borders around us. The more specific we get with our labeling -- self-labeling, to boot -- the smaller those bounded areas become. At this rate we are on a trajectory toward a nation divided more than ever, in the name of equality. We may be supporting one another's differences, but we are doing so from increasingly exclusive factions.
Two of these factions transcend race and ethnicity (and, in reality, can't get a whole lot more exclusive than they already are). I refer here to the ongoing battle of the sexes. The feminist movement has proven itself a vital source of social change over the decades, but its applications today too often foster a climate of women against men, and in doing so undermine its fundamental principles.
Again it comes back to oversensitivity. Nowadays it seems like women have evolved social radar for systematic detection of things that might be somehow offensive to their gender. I could have sworn that one of the stereotypes we were tying to erase was that women are too sensitive. I don't think that a hair trigger response to meaningless minutia is particularly constructive in this vein.
Take for example, the he/she debate in literature. Writing clear, solid prose is hard enough as it is without worrying about the implications of pronoun undertone. I am a woman, and certainly of the belief that the two sexes are equal, but I find it a pandering annoyance to have to write things like, " He/She has a right to defend him/herself against the accusations of his/her peers." And the hideous " s/he" amalgamation is not an acceptable solution.
If a writer has any hope to successfully, convincingly and compellingly convey a message to his readers, he must be able to focus on that message without fearing the repercussions of something so benign and insignificant as the political correctness of his pronouns. (I'm sure I needn't clarify that not all writers are men. Or do I?)
Meanwhile, in the realm of the corporeal, women are continuing the struggle to rend asunder the oppressive gender roles traditionally upheld in this country. Women can do anything men can do -- and don't you forget it. Sometimes even the slightest regression to customary conventions, like a man pulling out a woman's chair, or carrying her luggage, can induce of wave of feminist retaliation. They say that chivalry is dead. What they don't tell you is that we killed it.
If a man helps a woman with a heavy parcel he is not saying that women are weak. If a man offers to pay for dinner he is not flaunting that women make 74 cents to the male dollar. If a man looks desirously at a woman it does not mean he sees all women as potential notches in his proverbial bedpost. There is a good chance that these men are acting with neutral if not positive intentions. And say the worst case scenario is true, ladies, and all he wants is sex (God forbid): just because some anonymous bag of hormones thinks you're a piece of meat doesn't mean you are. The more we indulge in insecure whining, the more insecure and whiny we look.
And maybe that's the root of it all. Maybe we, as a country, are simply not confident that we are diverse, or accepting, or equal enough. From white supremacy to the glass ceiling, Americans are plagued by a history of national intolerance, hatred and cruelty. Perhaps it is a deep-seated collective fear of becoming a nation like we once were that forces us to perform PC acrobatics in a tireless effort not to offend. Well, the innocent don't run. Either we're covering up for something, or we need to drop the act and stop striving for some imaginary utopia.
All these backbends, these side-steps, and whistle-blows are acting in opposition to the intentions that motivate them. The establishment of a fair and equal society is a noble goal, but being PC for the sake of being PC will never get us there.
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