by Angela S. Young

Created on: July 20, 2007

Don't offend me! Since when did the bill of rights include the right not to be offended? The right of free speech, in fact, guarantees that you will be offended at times. We don't want to have to see anything that offends us or causes us to think contrary to what we believe. This is political correctness gone wrong.

Political correctness started out as a way to be polite to others, but as more and more things fell under the umbrella of 'political correctness' it has gone horribly wrong. We are no longer worried about being polite; we are worried about never offending anyone for any reason. Besides being stupid and totally against free speech, it isn't even possible. No matter how hard you try, sooner or later you will offend someone: it's inevitable.

Not only is it inevitable, it is needful. In order to keep from offending someone, you must subvert your own feelings, speech, beliefs and values to those of another. The U.S. was founded on freedom from being subjected to other's beliefs about us. Instead of standing up for what we believe, in courage, we say that's OK' and many other banal, trite excuses for being a wimp.

Should we deliberately go around hurting others? No, politeness is still a good thing, but totally subverting yourself and your needs to the needs of another not to be offended' is a form of death: your death as a free-thinking, free-speaking person, and the death of society as we know it.

So what can we do? First we can understand political correctness for what it is: the stealth of free speech and free thought. Politically correct could be defined as afraid to voice dissenting opinions. The United States would not exist as it is if our founders did not understand the need for dissenting opinions. The U.S. has more and more people in it who want everyone to think like they do. They use political correctness as a tool to control people who would dissent from their own views.

Then, we need to stand up for free speech. If we don't stand for it by seeing through the agenda of political correctness and fighting against it, we won't have it for very long. Our freedom of speech and even our will to fight will die a horrible death in the name of conformity. We will become zombies, walking around doing the bidding of whoever will stand up for what they believe even while they don't allow the same for you. Conformity is not bad, but taken to the extreme it leaves us with a cookie cutter world instead of the incredibly diverse world we have come to know and love.

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