Are YOU politically correct?!

Nowadays in this country, in fact, everyday in this country, and in countries all over the world, people are expected to refrain from speaking out their real thoughts and views by the social demand for ‘political correctness’. God forbid you criticize the war; our soldiers are dying out there! How can you say that all their blood and sweat is in vain? God forbid you criticize the president?? Talk about gay people? Women? Men? In fact just shut up. You’ll probably be much safer from attacks of accidental offendees.

Politics, as is, is a game of lies and deception. Players in that game constantly put down each other with constant word play and abuse and always try to come out on top. It is a game obsessed with the superficial aspects of life and tends to cater purely to people’s emotions rather than to actual rational thought and purpose.

Political correctness is no different. As a matter of fact, isn’t being politically correct practicing politics for the masses? Everyday people go about on their tip toes doing anything and everything possible to avoid offending others, and the potential offendees, my God; you should see the way they react! A black man can call another black man by the N word but anybody else tries it and you’ll be hanging by your nipples on some tree somewhere. That doesn’t make calling him that right but it provokes some thought. At least when it comes to me.

Just like the real politicians, people go about everyday saying, doing and promising things they do not mean. Certain people can’t stand people from other religions, different sexual orientations, different skin color, caste etc. so they try very hard to show that they’ve got nothing against them and in fact, are perfectly happy to embrace them into their lives and times.

But watch it if your daughter wants to get married to a Singhalese or your son turns out to be bisexual. Whoa now, that kind of shit is OK for other people but not for me and my kind.

Well, I suppose we have to be grateful that we seemed to have moved on from the brutal open racism and other types of violent expression that we used to show towards different people. But have we moved on from openly showing and acting upon our irrational hateful sentiments to hiding it and coating it with smiles and when we are alone among our ‘own kind’, we trash them and smash them and vent out all our pent up frustration on them. So we breed hatred and ongoing fear and mistrust for human beings who are not so different to us after all.

Differences exist right? I don’t think we can make apple jam about that. And some of those differences we do not agree with, this will be the case with any person. If you are religious then there will be people practicing things in society that your religion requires you to denounce, and if you are not religious, then you will secretly be quite suspicious of the lifestyles of the religious.

So what’s better, being open and quite plainly avoiding the ‘different’ as you perceive them and not making any secrets as to how you feel about them? or putting on your smiles and you wiles and being perfectly friendly and helpful on the outside while your flesh crawls with disgust and and hate on the inside?

There are people who are extremely tolerant of others and that is great to see. But are we honestly tolerant of any and everybody we meet and their practices? And aren’t we a slave to general public sentiment when we actually make that decision as to whether we should tolerate them or not? We might say that we draw the line depending on what we believe is good and evil. But do good and evil really exist in a firm manner when looked at through a given moral or religious perspective? You might be a liberal and there will be certain things you consider good and bad that will clash with a strongly conservative person who will have their own ideas of good and bad. So are we meant to live in constant state of agreeing to disagree with each other?