Tag Archive for: PC

Political Correctness: Offended vs Inspired

Several decades ago, on a radio program in Chicago, I interviewed a man who described a growing phenomenon that would have a profound impact on American business. I didn’t believe this new trend would ever occur. He called it “political correctness.” I had never heard the term PC. As the years passed his predictions about changing conditions and business pressures have proven to be accurate.

As a result of PC, developing clear policies is essential for the effective operation of any business, and the specific wording requires care and caution in order to be “correct” and avoid unintended consequences. But recently that caution seems to have resulted in a trend wherein the opinions and beliefs of some people overpower those of others.

Sometimes that might be only one person, but without consistent policies, a single individual can negate what countless others have valued for many years.

The pressing question is. “What makes that person’s belief or position take precedence over those of others with differing perspectives?” Can we accept the notion that one point of view is more important and more powerful than an alternative point of view?

groucho-marx

For a larger view click on the image.

In the old television program, “You Bet Your Life,” Groucho Marx said, “Say the magic word, and a duck will come down and give you fifty dollars.” In today’s world the “magic word” seems to be “offended.”

It doesn’t produce a fifty-dollar bill, but it’s changing the names of holidays, removing decorations or symbols from work areas, censoring the names of mascots, and prohibiting wearing certain clothing or accessories in the workplace.

We’ve seen the workplace and classrooms become devoid of the touches and the symbols that define the people inhabiting them.

Not long ago it was possible to learn about a person just by entering his or her workspace – be it a small cubicle or a large private office. The pictures, plaques, trophies, and other items on display provided insight into family status, religious affiliation, and military service. Today those clues have largely disappeared because someone found them “offensive.” People working in the locations were expected to remove the items because of the sensitivities of others.

Many schools and businesses have come to the point where displaying certain personal items or wearing certain clothes or accessories are grounds for discipline.

We risk becoming homogenized rather than “diverse”– evolving into a one-size-fits-all society where a small group of individuals determines acceptable behavior for all. The grandson of an acquaintance of mine was removed from his classroom because he was wearing (proudly) the division patch his grandfather had worn in combat during World War II because a teacher’s-aide was offended by the military symbol.

By coincidence, on the same day his father was told to remove an American flag pin from his suit jacket prior to joining a meeting at his office because it might offend another participant.

How did displaying an American flag become offensive? As a side note, when I tried to purchase a few small American flags for an event, a clerk at the store told me, “We don’t stock those things any more.” Those things!

In businesses and schools, we now have Winter and Spring breaks. Professional athletic teams are being pressured to accept names that won’t offend anyone.

If such a trend continues, we might see the passing of occupational names like Vikings, Packers, and Cowboys before too long.

And if other rights activists enter the forum, we might evev see the end of the Bears, Broncos, Dolphins, Bengals, Jaguars, Cardinals, Panthers, and Lions to name just a few.

It’s probably safe to point out that almost everything and anything can offend somebody. So here’s something to consider when developing policies and monitoring behaviors.

When you hear anyone say, “I’m offended by _____” try this. Revise that sentence by saying, “I’m inspired by ______.”

You won’t be starting an argument; you’ll be stating an equally valid opinion.

Then reflect on the reaction you get, and ask yourself, “Did I just make a difference?”

Are We Witnessing America’s Death by Political Correctness?

Please read the below article by Colonel Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. concerning the history of the progressive political correct propaganda programs first developed by the Communist Party and promoted by progressives in the U.S. since the early 1950s.  Over the past six years the progressive movement has been implemented by the Obama administration by integrating progressive and politically correct policy in all Government Bureaus with the help of 45 czars appointed by Obama who were never confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

The progressive and political correctness indoctrination has been force fed to the captive U.S. Armed Forces negatively affecting combat effectiveness, unit cohesiveness, and moral.  While this has been on going, the left of center liberal media establishment has been promulgating progressive political correctness in their reporting, in order to indoctrinate the American people.  At the same time, the Obama appointees at the Department of Education have promoted Obama’s progressiveness and political correctness in the new anti-American Common Core teaching curriculum for secondary and college educational courses, in keeping with the progressive indoctrination of unsuspecting students by leftists college professors that has been going on since the early 1960’s.

Unsuspecting students at all levels of education are being indoctrinated with this new progressive political correct Common Core agenda approved by the Obama administration which has eliminated civics courses, information about the Founding Fathers, study of the Bill of Rights, analysis on the US Constitution, positive history about how the US abolished slavery, the impressive history about how the US Armed Forces freed millions of people in foreign lands from oppressive dictators and returned the land to the people in those countries, how the free enterprise created the most effective economic engine in the history of mankind, and cover up the Socialism has never worked in any country where it has been tried.

Now progressives in the Obama administration appointed to the Center for Disease Control are doing nothing to keep American citizens safe from the Ebola epidemic, and are delaying the required precautionary steps necessary to prevent the spread of the Ebola infectious disease from spreading throughout the Republic, because it would not be politically correct.  Obama administration officials have been insinuating that it would be racist to restrict the entry of travelers with passports from countries in West Africa where the Ebola epidemics are rampant.  However, in order to protect their citizens from an Ebola epidemic, the intelligent leaders of African and European countries are restricting flights from West Africa from entering their countries.  The primary function of the leader of any country is to protect the lives of their citizens.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Officials are not properly screening arriving international passengers insuring where they have traveled, asking the passenger if they have a fever, screening passengers to see if they are sick, and are not thermo-scanning passenger’s temperatures.  Yet, US Immigration and Custom Officials are quarantining dogs and cats entering the US, and demanding to examine the medical records of those animals.  Even though the citizens of West African countries have been exposed to a serious Ebola epidemic—and despite repeated calls for restricting flights from West Africa to the United States as African and European countries have restricted those flights from arriving in their countries, the Obama administration refuses to restrict flights from West Africa from entering the US – after all it would be racist and politically incorrect.

rgb on political correctnessA postscript:

When the Obama administration asked Israel to send members of its Armed Forces to provide medical assistance to Ebola infected countries in West Africa, their Defense Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, said  “The hell I’ll expose my troops to Ebola.”  It kind of makes you feel warm inside to know that Obama is exposing 3,000 U.S. military personnel to Liberia where the infectious disease is rampant. No other member of the 192 United Nations is exposing their sons and daughters to that killer disease.

However, Obama won’t deploy one member of the U.S. Armed Forces to seal the wide open southern border, in order to prevent drug smugglers, human smugglers, Islamic terrorists, 200,000 illegal youth from central America, and Ebola infected illegal immigrants from entering the United States.

Dinesh D’Souza wrote:

“Obama is the architect of American decline, and progressivism is the ideology of American suicide. Decline is a choice, but so is liberty. Let us resolve as Americans to make liberty our choice.”

Sellin

Colonel Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. , U.S. Army (Ret.)

National suicide by political correctness

by LAWRENCE SELLIN, PH.D. October 1, 2014

Barack Obama said “ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing if innocents.”

That definition includes: al- Qa’ida, Abu Sayyaf, Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Hamas, Hizballah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e Tayyiba, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Asbat al-Ansar, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, Jemaah Islamiya, Ansar al-Islam, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, al-Shabaab, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, Boko Haram, al-Nusrah Front, Ansar al-Shari’a in Benghazi, Ansar al-Shari’a in Darnah, Ansar al-Shari’a in Tunisia – Well, you get the idea.

As noted recently by Diana West, Americans continue to be perplexed as to how the Obama Administration and the media keep repeating the politically correct propaganda that Islam has nothing to do with jihad. Such widespread, politics- and mass-media-driven brainwashing is not new.

Just as today’s politicians, journalists and academics seek to separate Islam from its radical impact; brutal conquest, forced conversion, sex slavery and beheadings. Past opinion-makers worked equally hard to separate communism from its own brand inhuman impact; brutal conquest, forced collectivization, concentration camps and mass murder.

Few Americans realize that political correctness, a policy implicitly promoted by Democrats and established as the de facto totalitarian legal system on American universities, was designed by communists in the 1930s to undermine western civilization and democracy while disguising the nature of the threat.

After the successful 1917 communist revolution in Russia, it was widely believed that a proletarian revolt would sweep across Europe and, ultimately, North America. It did not. The only two attempts at a workers’ government in Munich and Budapest lasted only months.

As a result the Communist International began to investigate other ways to create the state of societal hopelessness and alienation necessary as a prerequisite for socialist revolution.

The single, most important organizational component of this conspiracy was a Communist think tank called the Institute for Social Research, popularly known as the Frankfurt School. The task of the Frankfurt School was first, to undermine the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western civilization that emphasized the uniqueness and sacredness of the individual and, second, to determine new cultural forms which would increase the disaffection of the population.

Political Correctness is cultural Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Just as in classical economic Marxism, certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good, such as feminist women, blacks, ethnic minorities and those who define themselves according to sexual orientation. These groups are deemed to be “victims,” and therefore unquestionably good. Similarly, white males and, by extension Western civilization, are determined to be automatically evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

Perhaps the most important, if least-known, of the Frankfurt School’s successes was the shaping of the electronic media of radio and television into the powerful instruments of social control which they represent today.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, American universities now represent the largest concentration of Marxist dogma and political correctness in the world. This is not the academy of a republic, but Hitler’s Gestapo and Stalin’s NKVD rooting out deviationists in the guise of racial, ethnic, gender and cultural sensitivity.

The policies of the Obama Administration reflect what David Horowitz described as an unholy alliance between leftists and radical Islam. They have been brought together by the traits they share – their hatred of Western civilization and their belief that the United States is the embodiment of evil on earth. While Islamic radicals seek to purge the world of heresies and of the infidels who practice them, leftist radicals seek to purge society’s collective “soul” of the vices allegedly spawned by capitalism — those being racism, sexism, imperialism, and greed.

Given the existential threat posed by such ideologies, political correctness can no longer be considered merely a peculiarity of cowardly politicians, a biased media or tenured radicals, but a dangerous subversive element of an anti-American and anti-Western strategy.

But frankly, Mr. Obama, I don’t care if ISIL is “Islamic” or not. Wanting us all dead is a sufficient reason to take the war directly and aggressively to them.

ABOUT LAWRENCE SELLIN, PH.D.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of “Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution “. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.

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