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One giant leap for peoplekind

February 16, 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

It has finally happened – political correctness has reached the tipping point with the public saying enough is enough of this ridiculous thought process, where every phrase, saying, terminology, and idiom, is somehow offensive to someone and must be changed.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave and have had no social interaction with society, by now you must have realized that most people have not been taken in by the politically correct craziness that appears to surround us.

Just listen to casual conversations around you in any public area – people do not use politically correct phrases when describing their weekend to friends and co-workers.

As usual, a small minority has demanded that the rest of us fall in line with their way of thinking. Most people ignore it but those in public life, for some reason, will fold like an open newspaper in a strong wind the first time they hear someone yell ‘that’s offensive,’ rather than take a stand and state plainly that it is not offensive at all.

When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon he made the now famous statement, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

No one screamed. No one found it offensive. No one demanded an apology.

The reason is simple. ‘Mankind’ is a word that is used to describe everyone on the planet – women, men, children – all of us a big society made up of different cultures, races, and countries.

The fact that the word has ‘man’ in it does not negate women or children in society. It’s just a word.

You can thank Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for finally tipping the political correctness meter upside down after his correction of a person at one of his town hall meetings in Edmonton.

When a woman in the audience used the word ‘mankind,’ Trudeau interrupted her saying “We like to say ‘peoplekind,’ not necessarily mankind, because it’s more inclusive.”

The audience applauded enthusiastically. Of course they did because it’s no secret these so-called town hall meetings are stacked with Liberal Trudeau supporters who would have applauded he if broke wind by accident while on stage. There’s a lot of stories of not-so-ardent fans who want to ask real questions of the P.M. being turned away from these public forums.

His attempt at extreme politically correct speech however has backfired.

The press had a field day and the story went international and not for a good reason.

It didn’t take long for the P.M. to realize, most likely because his closest advisers had to explain it to him, that his attempt to appear ‘inclusive’ has probably started a new trend where political correctness will be seen for what it truly is.

I’m sure there was some kind of meeting where Liberal spin doctors decided what to do next. They came up with the plan for the P.M. to go public and say it was a ‘joke.’

‘Take my wife… please.’ ‘A Rabbi, a Minister, and a Priest, go into bar…’ ‘Raquel Welch – those aren’t buoy’s..’ – those are jokes. They are told to get a laugh and the important thing is they actually have a punchline.

Correcting someone’s speech in a public forum isn’t a joke.

The whole modern concept of offensive speech has been based on someone being offended for others – not themselves – which makes the whole practice even more absurd.

If you truly say something to a person and it is offensive, you know it is offensive when you speak the words. Rarely do people say something off-putting purely by accident.

By today’s crazy politically correct standards that are being forced on us by a minority, Neil Armstrong’s moon landing statement would have to have been a lot shorter.

That’s one SMALL (sorry, offensive to little people) step for a MAN, (no explanation needed there), one GIANT (offensive to basketball players and people taller than 6’4”) LEAP (offensive to disabled persons who can’t leap) for MANKIND (offensive to everyone).

Somehow the phrase “Uh… I’m here,” would not have had the same historic impact during the first lunar landing.

It’s time to knock off the drum-beating and looney rhetoric about offensive words and phrases that are, after all, just words.

The average person knows when something is offensive. Let’s just try some common sense.

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