I’m offended: Ban everything

by Rowan Besthe,

We are witnessing an unprecedented level of politically correct tyranny. Not long ago, words were on the chopping block. State Departments of Education, broadcast corporations, and elitists prescribing their brand of enlightenment to the fragile masses in order to protect them from scary words like “girl” and “bossy.” That was child’s play relative to this latest surge of banning more than speech in “free speech.”

Today’s new order of liberty stealing political correctness is attacking symbolism. Citing the tragedy in South Carolina, Governor Haley called for the removal of the Confederate flag flying over the State House. Amazon.com and EBay piled on by banning sales of any merchandise containing the flag, followed by other merchants.

Words have plain meaning, more often than not, in the context applied to political correctness – black and white, like the print. Consider those ban requested words like girl and bossy. Both have plain meaning, one being a biologic trait and the other a personality trait. Neither of which should generate a level of offense requiring a ban. More importantly, words are the product of the host speaker or writer and in essence give evidence to the biases of that person, indicting the offender alone.

Symbolism may have many meanings to many people, based on experience, locale, or history. Symbolism of the Confederate Flag has these varied representations. A symbol of the South as adopted by the seceding states. A symbol of slave owners. A contemporary symbol of racism. Note that the symbol in any of these forms is an indictment of an entire group of people, regardless of accuracy or offense. For instance, one may have lived in the south but not agreed with the secession. Or, one may have lived in the Confederate States but was not a slave owner. Or, one could be a conservative white Christian who actually is not a racist. In this case, the symbol stigmatizes more than just an offender.

A more ominous example is the recent general association of whiteness with terror. Whiteness being Professor Zandria Robinson’s symbol of white skin color or white-like behavior. She concludes that being or acting white (whiteness) is associated with terror. Racist at its roots, that implicates all whites in an unapologetic stereotype, which ignores any progress made by the collaboration of blacks and whites alike. This indicates that there are racist elements among all races and racism is not exclusively a white trait.

If politically correct tyranny can inject its brand of hate to any symbol in feigned offense, how long will it be before other symbols are racist umbrellas? Banning symbols of historic relevance has the effect of erasing that part of history which dooms us to a repeat performance – I’m getting an eerie Nazi Germany vibe here. On the other hand, if we do want to travel down this road, maybe we should just cut to the chase and ban all whites since they clearly are the problem as Gavin McInnes sarcastically suggests.

That’s where I stand. If I haven’t offended you, then I haven’t tried hard enough.

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