From the Edge of Darkness: 6

Trash Can; Charley Freiberg photo

Politically Correct  

I got into a heated argument the other day with a friend, before another friend broke it up. My argue-partner is a long-time friend, one of several I try not to discuss politics with because I don’t want to actually know what I’m pretty sure I know about who voted for whom, though I still can’t comprehend why. Somehow today, however, breakfast conversation came with a side order of  some snarky comments about Obamacare, stories about schools and who said “Allah” without getting into trouble and who said “God” and got into trouble - and what that means about free speech; and then slid in some connected way into the “Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays” thing. You know that thing, right? That, “Don’t say ‘Happy Holidays’ to me when I celebrate Christmas because I’m going to get totally offended if you do and then carry a chip on my shoulder about it” thing.

So --- here’s the other part of that thing. I’m really tired of hearing about that thing, especially from people who are smart enough to know better but choose to be offended for some very questionable reason - maybe because they’ve heard some idiot mouthing off about a totally fictional “ war on Christmas,” maybe because they’re enjoying feeling put upon and slighted – none of which is actually true, if you think about it a moment. Listen - I’m a business person, and I send my patients greeting cards during the holiday season because it’s a traditional time of year to offer folks we see often, as well as total strangers, greetings and good wishes – the dark season, the gift-giving season, the season when we all need some cheer and good wishes as we slog through the long dark season – and I’m not going to send anything but “Happy Holiday” cards, because there are a lot of people who celebrate different holidays at that time of year, and some who celebrate more than one (New Year’s, anyone?), and I don’t think it’s any of my business to stick my nose into what particular holidays each of my patients and students is celebrating – or not celebrating – nor will I, nor should I have to, remember hundreds of basically insignificant religious or non-religious preferences  from one year to the next. 

The salesclerk in the retail store, the postal deliverer, our masters at the dump, the town road crew, our doctor and dentist, acquaintances we run into as we do errands, and everyone else we run into in the course of business is in the same situation, and  “Happy Holidays” is all-inclusive, inoffensive, and a kind, cheerful greeting. It means exactly what it says: have a happy holiday(s); it isn’t secret code for “stick this in your ear Christian dogs we spit on your winter holiday and replace it with ours.”  I mean, really.  

The proper response to being wished a happy holiday is a little rush of warm feeling at being offered good wishes and a heart-felt “Thank you, you too!” Anything other response, public or private, is just curmudgeonly, Scroogish, mean-spirited and crabby, and marks you as a bully looking for any excuse for a fight. [And, just to remind you happy holiday haters, that was a common greeting back in the dark ages when we were – or believed ourselves to be - a majority-Christian society.]

We all know that everything changes over time, countries included. Ours has changed and is changing: women are no longer stuck at home just being home-makers, men can be care-givers without putting their masculinity in question, black folks have stopped sitting in the back of the bus, minorities are more populous and there are more of them and they don’t hide away in ghettos anymore, people in your neighborhood don’t all speak only the same language or worship the same deity - if they worship any deity at all – and these are all good changes, and make our society richer and more interesting and even exciting. So what do we do to help ourselves not feel overwhelmed and crabby under such circumstances? Especially those of us who can’t seem to greet natural change with curiousity and welcome? Especially those of us who tend to feel we’re under attack by some nameless Other that’s taking over what we thought we owned and ruled and knew? What we do is try to clarify our thinking about what’s happening, so we can understand it and recognize a saner way to respond.

First look at the concept of social mores or cultural norms – which basically are the unofficial, agreed-upon set of things we believe and do in a homogenous culture or society that tend to strengthen the benefits of living in a group by regulating the social interactions within it (thank you, internet, for these definitions). These mores or norms sometimes become encoded in law, sometimes not, and they – and any laws encoding them – change as society and its culture changes. An example would be the blue laws that kept businesses closed on Sundays when I was a kid and most people agreed that keeping the Christian holy day free from commerce and commercial labor was important. Another example would be states, like Utah, that were “dry” states because the main part of the population didn’t believe in consuming alcohol; or the few years of Prohibition. These are examples of norms with laws attached that have changed or are changing as the culture changes, both from inside and outside influences.

[As a side note, homogenous means that everything in the group is the same – when we’re talking about societies or cultures this is almost never actually accurate, but when there’s a large majority that shares most characteristics, it’s common to believe we live in a homogenous society because we can forget about or overlook the folks who are different, or maybe we simply assume that they’ve become like us or want to do so. The opposite is diversity in which the society and its cultural norms embody many different versions of the same human types, ethnicities, religions, clothing styles, foods, and so on. Let us not forget that we all – all of us who are living in the United States – were at some point in our lineage history the diversity that interrupted the homogenous version of the society/culture that preceded us.]

Another concept is that which can be called good manners, politeness, etiquette, courtesy manners: all slightly different concepts that are closely related, and all about which the details evolve as society changes, but that have as their purpose consideration for others – putting the interests or comfort of others before oneself by displaying self-control and good intentions, to the end of being seen as trustworthy in social interactions – and receiving the same consideration from others. It’s what we do and say, and how we do it and say it, so that everyone in a situation can feel safe, comfortable, accepted and acceptable, part of the unit, able and welcome to contribute.

And then there’s political correctness: a relatively new concept, which has the goal of avoiding speech or behavior that a particular group of people (as opposed to a specific individual)  might find unkind or offensive or even having the intention of excluding or insulting or discriminating against that group, which is usually a group defined by sex or race. This is really just courtesy manners with a tinge of politics attached to make adherence to these norms more compelling. Political correctness often applies to a group of people in a public or political setting often interacting with some official or semi-official person or institution, while courtesy manners is one on one always. Political correctness, like social mores, can easily develop laws addressing the same issues. Examples are things like unequal pay given to women or minorities for equal work; or the institution of more severe legal penalties for hate crimes against members of certain groups. What we think of today as issues looked at through the lens of political correctness will often develop into matters of social mores or cultural norms as time passes and the circumstances from which they arise become more normalized across the culture, and like social mores or cultural norms, will often disappear or evolve into something else as the society’s thinking about the topics develops and matures. Most the things we ascribe to “political correctness” are, in fact, like teenagers – society hasn’t discussed them or thought about them for long enough for them to be mature and well-considered, which is why they can be so annoying.

Finally, there is politics, which is not any of the above three, though it might go tripping lightly or blundering heavily through all three, creating confusion and distraction and quite a lot of trouble as it goes. Politics, and the discussion of it, might include something like whether the country or state should take responsibility for ensuring its citizens all have basic requirements of food, housing medical care, and education; and if so, what is the best way to do so; but does not include, say, rejection of insurance plans because they’re simply a way of gambling (an Amish social more), or the vilification of citizens who are too impoverished to buy their own insurance (an affront against courtesy manners), or the ejection of “whores, homosexuals and non-Christians” from an otherwise all-inclusive plan because we don’t like their way of living (political correctness).

Social mores, courtesy manners, and political correctness often overlap. Social mores and political correctness can equally easily be in conflict with each other, as social mores can change more slowly than the culture actually does. We get into trouble, as a society, in a large part when we cling to social mores that haven’t evolved fast enough to be truly representative of the changes that have happened in our culture – when we try to insist that people adjust to the static cultural norms and refuse to accept that the norms must and do evolve to embrace all members of an evolving culture. And we piss everyone off, including ourselves, when we insist that our discomfort with the speed or direction of cultural change – whether we stand on the old cultural norms version side or the evolving political correctness side – is either just an excess or a deficiency of everyone else’s willingness to attend to or insist on political correctness. Which is, after all, a way of saying that our norms are the right norms, and everyone else’s are aberrant.

So, what’s the fix? Courtesy manners is the fix. When we employ courtesy manners, we don’t call someone else names they find offensive, we don’t get offended when someone can’t figure out our complicated gender or sexual orientation or ethnic background or religious preferences and guesses wrong, and we don’t attach unkind, mean, or nasty characteristics or intentions to someone we don’t know well enough to know them to be true. Instead, we try to tap into compassion, we try to make others comfortable, we try to find ways to be inclusive and kind. And we do this even when we’re having a political discussion.

This applies to hundreds of discussions, hundreds of situations. Is it ok to call Donald Trump a liar and a racist? Yes, because those things are demonstrably true and certainly politically important. Is it ok to call all Republicans liars and racists? No, not unless you can prove it. Is it ok for the girly-girl who dresses in frilly dresses but whose gender identification isn’t female to be nasty to someone who calls her “her?” Not unless we all suddenly become mind readers. Is it ok to be offended when someone wishes you “Happy Holidays” in December instead of “Merry Christmas?” Of course not. The person who offers that greeting shouldn’t be expected to guess whether you’re a Christian, Jew, Hindu, Moslem, Wiccan, etc, etc; “Happy Holidays” can cover any holiday that takes place at that time of year, religious or secular, including the New Year and the winter solstice. Stop being tetchy and respond instead to the kind wish, for gawd’s sake.

Some final observations:

We all need to get over ourselves, already.

Don’t muddy the waters of political discussion with our biases towards or against current social mores and issues of political correctness. When we do, we’re no longer talking politics, we’re obsessing about our personal discomfort with what’s unfamiliar to us, and trying to impose our comfort, that becomes rigidness, on others.

Employ courtesy manners at all times.

Keep religious topics a discussion amongst same-religion people (or ecumenical cross-religion conferences). God, Christ, Allah, Jehovah, and all the other names that indicate a deity – to each person, their comprehension of god is clearly the correct one and everyone else’s is flawed.  Clearly either everyone’s correct which means there needn’t be any argument, or everyone’s wrong which means there needn’t be any argument, or only one person is right and there’s really no way to tell who it is, so embrace your personal truth and hope for the best, but leave the rest of us out of it, and we’ll have the courtesy to do the same for you.

Rule of thumb: the more alarming/maddening/horrible a story that’s used to demonstrate the injustices waging between Me + Mine and Them + Theirs, the more likely it is to be false – either totally made up, or missing so much information or details that we can’t be sure it happened, or if it did, we can’t be sure why it happened. Stories designed to inflame fervent emotional reactions are almost always missing some important information needed to understand what really happened. So the story about the kid who said “Allah” at school and didn’t get into trouble, and the one who responded, “I believe in God, not Allah” and got in trouble, is almost certainly missing important detail. The detail might be that the school administration misapprehended and/or misapplied the rules/laws about keeping religion out of public schools; the detail might be in not knowing what was the situation in which the utterances were made, the physical expression of each kid during the conversation, and the tone of voice of each. What’s certain is that one can’t come to a reasonable, general understanding about the state of the country or of politics or of education from this story, but you can get yourself all cranked up if you’re looking for a reason to be cranked up. 

People tell stories to illustrate certain points of view, and we need to really think about them, before getting wound up. I remember a story that made the rounds during Obama’s 2^nd run for office – the story asserted that Obama, personally, refused some military person permission to give a speech to some laudable-sounding group about his military experience. How dare Obama stop a hero from speaking to a patriotic group!

The missing part of the story was that there was - probably still is - a military rule that no active military personnel can give speeches about their military experience to any group without specific permission from their commanding officer. Obama, of course, had nothing to do with either the making of the rule or the giving or refusing of this soldier’s permission. If I remember correctly, the solider in question either didn’t make a request in time, or never made one at all. So, no real story there, but, wow, were people wound up about it! 

One more time: We all need to get over ourselves.

And, yes, I'm feeling wicked crabby. It's 90 frickin' degrees out and my tomatoes need planting out. That's a good excuse to be tetchy.

For the blog, June 12, 2017. I am one Witness.