PC

8-2-06

ginmar has a rant up about PC.

I don’t fit her parameters of what she perceives an anti-PC person to be. Because, I am anti-PC, and I don’t think I am a bad person for it.

I am a considerate person. I will not willingly harm another person, and never will I maliciously harm someone.

PC is not about being considerate of others, though. It’s about being condescending. When one person uses euphemistic language to speak about another person, or their condition, then they’ve just shown they are not willing to look directly at the issue or the person. They prefer to smother it all in labels, as if using pretty words will clean things up and make them go away.

I am an immigrant to the US. I am also an Indian, a Kiowa Apache more specifically, and a German. I am a woman. I’m old. I’m fat. I am not insulted when I am called a half-breed, or a feminazi, or an anti-feminist (funny, how I can be both in the same breath), or old, or fat. I am insulted when I am called “volumetrically challenged”, “pleasingly plump”, “senior”, “of the female persuasion”, or other such PC terms.

And, yanno, I’m not 100% Indian, so calling me “Native American” or whatever is the currently in vogue PC term is incorrect anyway.

You see, when PC becomes so convoluted that no one knows what words are currently the “right” ones to use when addressing another person, or talking about them, PC becomes a stumbling block to communication and to community and mingling. All those labels keep people separated, and Other.

Giving lofty titles to jobs doesn’t change the nature of the job, nor does it bestow any extra dignity on the person doing the job. A secretary is still a secretary, regardless of gender or for whom one is doing secretarial work. A garbage collector is not an engineer, and calling them one isn’t going to change the fact that they haul garbage from one place to another.

As for the citizens of the United States – they are all Americans, regardless of country of origin. Separating them out by labeling them “Irish-Americans” or “German-Americans” or “Greco-Americans” or “African-Americans” (what, no “Nairobi-Americans” or “Egyptian-Americans”?) or “French-Americans” is divisive and ssets them into a lesser status. They aren’t Americans, they’re (fill in the blank)-Americans, not quite full Americans.

Poor people are poor, not “economically challenged”. A lot more contributes to their poverty than mere lack of money. By labelling them as “economically challenged”, they are then dismissed as being too stupid to understand how to handle their money, and not, you know, because they are nickel and dimed to death, with disproportionate taxes and fees. The PC label allows people to disregard their very real plight.

That’s why I hate being PC. I want to look closely at the people, the problems, and the issues, not clothe them in frilly terms like the Victorians once dressed table legs to hide the mere mention or thought that there might be naughty “legs” under those drapey tablecloths.