Monday, June 20, 2005

PC is the latest trend.

Unfortunately it's completely un-PC.

The patient in room 7613 would like their medecine.
If you clearly know the gender of the patient, why would you just not use the correct pronoun so you can keep the singular identifier consistent with your pronoun?
Or there's
If your child needs to use their locker during classtime, know it's going to affect their citizenship grade.
It's like the teacher shortcut to a generic letter. UNfortunately, it's not "politically correct" to just select one or the other singular pronoun. And heaven forbid you have to write "his or her." That takes sooo much extra time! I've got an idea! Let's just send home a letter that's poorly written!

And there's the whole "we don't refer to black people as black people. It's not "politically correct." Well, what should we refer to them as? African American? Hmm, last time I checked, Africa isn't the only place where people have dark skin. And so what are white people then? Do we need to call them all Polish American? Because clearly Polish people are white. And therefore all white people must be Polish. SERIOUSLY, people, this is a problem. So when a black person is filling out a college application and it says to check the box for ethnic/racial makeup statistics and the options are "white," "African American," "Native American," "Asian," and "other" how accurate are the statistical makeup charts if the population is 5% Albanian, 35% Hatian-American, 5% African American, 5% Hispanic, 10% Asian, and 40% White and the school session begins and there's the same amount of black people as there are white? Oh, that 35% that you didn't know about are just "other" We only count African Americans in our statistics.

It's a problem that we try to avoid offending people by putting them into categories that sound a little more "professional" and sacrificing diversity and heritage at the same time. And with the "his/her" gender things, we're sacrificing our dignity as educated people. We learned how to make our subjects and pronouns agree in middle school, friends. Let's not sacrifice it just to save face (and keystrokes).

I guess I seem a little bitter, but I have a really hard time growing up sometimes being told that the Upper-Middle-Class White man is the enemy and is trying to take over the country. I will not be at fault for being white, and I will not be held accountable for people who might not be wealthy and just happen to be not white. That's not my fault. The best I can be is who God made me, and I will NEVER be told that it's not good enough. I'm sick of movie stars and other charity causes telling me what I need to do and who I need to give my money to. I'm sick of hearing speeches and reading articles about how the United States is a bully of a country and our President is a moron. I love my country, and I am blessed to be here. I love and support President Bush, even if he does or says something that I think maybe wasn't what I would do. What is the big deal with being politically correct, if it's not even living up to its name?
Politics and correctness sortof don't always go hand in hand. Politics is politics, unfortunately often correctness aside.

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