Monday, March 27, 2017

Politically correct to the level of silly

Sierra Vista Herald ^ | Elizabeth Cowan 

We stumbled across a snarky quotation by an unknown genius that sums up the sensitive, the weird and the technologically coddled among us.
“Have you ever listened to someone for a while and wondered… ‘who ties your shoelaces for you?’”

That was a valid question for a bygone time. But today, the answer may explain a lot about the direction of the intellectually challenged among us. Most people wear slip-on shoes, be they loafers, flip-flops, sandals, or women’s footwear. The exception may be athletes who still wear lace-up athletic shoes. Are they compelled to take a retro class in shoelace-tying in high school or college?

A few of the major achievements of childhood were learning to tie your shoes, how to tell time and potty training. The folks who create products we should not live without, created velcro shoes. Voila! No more frustrated fumbling with pesky shoelaces, which explains the need for remedial shoe tieing classes.
Walk down any alley or the hallways of older apartment buildings, and you will discover that some folks never mastered potty training 101. Just like the birds of the air and the animals in the forest, when nature calls, they leave their dribbles and droppings anywhere.
Telling time has almost gone the way of the Dodo as well. Children no longer learn to look at a clock with numbers to know what time it is. Now we have digital everything, including clocks. In fact, most Millenials and those who lean toward convenience (also known as laziness) do not own or wear watches. The reasoning is everyone has cellular phones, and nearly everything has a built-in digital clock. If you doubt this, just look around and count the number of digital clocks on everything, including the ovens and stoves.
Mind you, there is nothing wrong with progress and gadgets, but just in case the world is zapped by an Electromagnetic Pulse or two, it would be nice if some folks still remembered the basics. The question is, if the EMP hits, can you cook a meal without a microwave? Even without such a catastrophic event, without a microwave folks would have to live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Aside from catastrophic events, the world, or at least a large portion of the planet’s population, has reached the point of stagnation. One major cause is the politically correct edicts of old biddies or old farts in politics and other self-appointed or elected dictatorships, who look around one day and ask, “How can I cause the most mischief?”
Thanks to them and folks like them, we exist rather than live. Folks are afraid to do or say anything because someone is sure to be offended or have their itty bitty feelings hurt. Writers have discovered this PC plague has infected a formerly useful grammar software. The company promises to eliminate grammatical errors, such as spelling, punctuation, style and even offers plagiarism detection.
What they fail to divulge is that they, too, have been infected by the PC plague.
If a writer says certain medications can cause birth defects in babies, the red circle of death appears on your computer screen with a warning. “birth defects (possible disability-biased language. Use congenital disabilities).
The problem is, if you look up the meaning of congenital, hereditary and genetic pops up. Either word means a certain characteristic or a disease passed from the genes of a parent to a child. Since the parent does not have the disability caused by the medication, does this make the pill the mother of the child?
According to the medical definition of congenital, it means a condition that is present at birth, whether or not it is inherited. We are indulging in a bit of nitpicking, but if you pay for a service one expects it to be error and politics free, for the most part.
Makes you wonder about the folks who promulgate “facts.” So we again ask. Who did teach the programming folks and other buttinskis how to tie their shoelaces?

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