Saturday, February 20, 2016

Hurt Feelings



The educationoids are as busy as bees and daughters and sons of bees with their Political Correctness onslaught.

In a Delaware school district, some subversive genius mailed out a "Hurt Feelings" Scorecard. Your fish wrapper or local "reality TV" deprived you of it so here it is: 

 CLICK HERE FOR STORY AND CHART

But the PC powers that be -- a group whose greatest fear is that somewhere someone is happily laughing at them-- scurried to recall and neutralize the effect of the hilarious document.  That did not happen.

Meanwhile, out West in Portland Oregon the Catholic University of Portland issued an order that all 4,000 students and faculty must report " any discomfort" to the University police office. This will probably  spill over ibto the surrounding countryside, Oregon being what it is--- the way it is... and you can look for it in some institution near you sometime during 2016.


The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is taking some big hits and is as inescapable as it is incremental that soon we will no longer be free to call each other "Dumb" or "Mean" or "Stingy" or "fool" or "stupid" or even "ugly".  

Many many years ago Casey Stangl brought his Yankees to Atlanta on the way back north from the grapefruit league. I have interviewed some of the team, I wrote a story in which I blasted a box seats fan who was heckling Elstom Howard. I called  the heckler "a Jerk". My then boss, sports editor Furman Bisher convinced me that there was no such thing as “a jerk” in the sports pages of the Atlanta Constitution!


 Who knew that Bisher was the vanguard of the PeeCee patterollers ?!

I’ve done a little scanning and searching of historical files, and I will admit that political correctness and a mouthful of Octagon / Lye soap might have kept Alexander Hamilton out of his fatal duel with Alan Burr, but I notice that Pope Francis shed his cloak of PeeCee speech to trash a prominent American from the other side of the Rio Grande River, so there are some very powerful people apparently, who do not share the sensibilities of some of our educationists.

We’ve seen for a long time that people running the colleges and universities in the United States are not properly tasked: they all ought to be either  teaching, or cleaning the quadrangles of debris. It is the proper role of the students in such places to question one another in bull sessions and confront professors in classrooms...Even in colorful language born of the greatest American tradition: words like “buffoon”, “dork”, “doofus”, “Honkie”, and the one most applied to me during my wild, young adulthood:  “N-word-Lover”.

Finally it is not unhealthy to recognize some words as coarse, ugly and unrepresentative. But let’s remind ourselves that our feelings cannot be “hurt” without our participation. It is never what another says that so stings our soul and hurts our heart. It is what we tell ourselves about ourslves relative to what they say that causes pain.  I’ve tried to teach young people who come within my orbit that if I called them a  paperclip, that would NOT  make them one !!

That’s the sort of thing we should be teaching. Not the nonsense of PeeCee.