"Nobody's right, if everybody's wrong." A line from a Buffalo Springfield song ("For What It's Worth"). As true now as it was then, maybe even more so. Why? Because a pernicious infection that began so long ago has borne its fruit.
What fruit, you may ask? How about: over-political correctness, either-or thinking, an either-you're-with-us-or-against-us attitude, advocating love-it-or-leave-it, and many, many more. There's so much fruit we don't know whether to make marmalade or some kind of alcoholic beverage. The former might be better for us, but most of us favor the latter.
My point is that this isn't a new phenomenon, it's only taken on a more aggressive and bitter dimension. There was a time we could talk. There was a time we could debate and discuss. There was a time when justified and substantiated views meant something. Those times are gone.
What's so amazing, if you ask me, is that those times are considered to be "the good old days", when everything was anything but good: enforced and dictated conformity, institutionalized racial discrimination, submission to authority, and a-place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place thinking carried the day. Yes, for the greatest part we were "told" how to think and feel, yet in those (not-so-) "good old days", there was still a modicum of dissent possible; discussion was still possible, debate was still possible. It was simply accepted that the person with the best argument(s) won. And then it all changed.
Out of that repressive, conformity-seeking "cultural" attitude, out of that forensically-based, argumentatively challenging norm, we created a winner-takes-all, right-or-wrong, in-or-out view of the world. Buffalo Springfield saw it happening. We're living the consequences of the thought.
The most negative form of all of this is, of course, "political correctness". What's good or bad, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable is dictated from the surface of things. Words, concepts, notions, ideas cannot be explored because some people find some words "offensive". I'm here to tell you that words are nothing more than words. Yes, there are those who are offended when they hear the word "fuck" and there are those who are elated when they hear the word "Jesus", but how do we know where and when and to whom and for what reasons some people are uplifted and others discouraged by such words. Again: they are but words.
Humpty Dumpty taught us that words mean whatever we think they mean. But the words haven't changed, only the "we's". And now, every "we" feels that it deserves equal time and equal treatment and equal consideration, and I believe that that is absolutely correct. What I don't believe is that equal anything means equal acceptance. It only means "you may say". How others deal with it is a whole different issue.
Don't get me wrong: anyone who denigrates or demeans or dismisses what another says simply because s/he "doesn't like it" is as ignorant as s/he who gets upset because someone from another perceptual framework doesn't understand the term as the in-group understands it. It's time for us to get over the words and get down to what we are really talking about. And, to do that, we have to be able to accept, acknowledge, differ, discuss, and debate what we are saying.
Oh, I don't long for "the days", but I do wish for possibility to talk about it. Why is that so hard?
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