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It is not politically correct to smoke, to let your cat have kittens, or to read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. We all know that now.All through the ages, there have been things which part of the populace frowned upon the rest of the populace if they did. There was an old lady in the novel Gone With The Wind who told Scarlett, "my dear, it just isn't done." I don't recall what Scarlett was doing (that time) that "wasn't done", but it doesn't matter.
The point is, there have always been people who considered their own reasoning so correct and unimpeachable that they believed they had a right to dictate to other people those things which shouldn't be done. Those "correct" groups didn't choose to do those things themselves; therefore, nobody else had the right to choose to do them, either. Being p.c. (politically correct) is not new; it's as old as history.
The elitists among us today who arrogantly determine what is and is not p.c. are coming up with new activities, behaviors, and yes, thoughts and beliefs, at a very fast clip, which they intend to disallow the rest of us from doing or thinking. Gone With The Wind and Tom Sawyer are still fiction, but the thought police are not.
Whatever offends these elitists should offend you, too, and shouldn't be done, read, believed or thought. Cigarettes, kittens and Tom Sawyer offend them, therefore ..... you get the idea. But that's only the beginning. What you choose to eat offends them now, and very soon you will be treated just as rudely, reprehensibly and, dare I say, hatefully for eating Krispy Kreme donuts in public as you are now for smoking in public. I was saying years ago that this would be next, and no, I'm not psychic. It wasn't that hard to see.
The TV news cameras will soon focus on your hand holding a donut and your mouth taking a bite of it, to emphasize how disgusting you and your behavior are, in every weekly hysteria piece occasioned by new weekly attempts by somebody, somewhere, to ban you from every place on earth. Including your own home. (Yes, it's being attempted.) In the audio with the film, someone will solemnly intimate that every one of those revolting donut eaters will be dead of stomach cancer by next month (and people will email the news station to say "Who cares? Donut eaters are revolting.") and so will everyone around them, from secondhand fat fumes (and people will rush to city council meetings to say "You should be protecting us from that!"). You haven't heard of secondhand fat fumes yet? Be patient. They'll think of it.
Of course the narrators never get around to verifying whether any of that happened, i.e. finding one death certificate in the entire history of the world through today that lists the cause of death as secondhand smoke. They never will with secondhand fat fumes, either, investigative reporters having long ago been replaced by "journalists" (defined as people who keep a journal) and propaganda ministers. But I digress.
Many other things offend these elitists now, besides what you eat, smoke or read. These things include what vehicle you choose to drive (particularly - horrors! - if you insist on feeding internal combustion engines what those engines run on), what you choose to heat your house with in winter (especially - horrors! - if you're burning wood as your ancestors did for thousands of years), how much water your bathroom requires (toilets with one inch of water and shower heads limited to a steady trickle being optimum), and what lightbulbs you choose to see by (Edison's wonderful invention that served us well for generations becoming illegal, in favor of expensive spiral bulbs that give less light and require a haz-mat team if you break one).
Hundreds of laws and regulations are newly in place for these offenses of yours, and they have barely gotten started on determining what books you can read (as originally written, without the "offenses" blotted out), what vitamins you're allowed to take (and which incompetent government agency will be regulating that), and whether you can grow vegetables in your back yard or milk your cow and share it with a neighbor without being arrested. The law was passed for that one late last year, called the Feeding Little Children Act or something to that effect. Look it up. It's time for you to get informed about all of this.
It is also offensive to these elitists - otherwise known as liberals, a misnomer if there ever was one, to call sin sin, to call Christmas Christmas or to call God God in public places - soon to be defined as including your own home. That precedent has been set, as I mentioned above.
The train has started and it's running downhill out of control. It's just as un-p.c. to eat as it is to smoke, to let women have babies as it is to let cats have them, and to be as unoffended by faith as by Tom Sawyer. Our very thoughts are already literally on trial. I always thought that what you do is your business and what I do is mine, whether any of it "just isn't done" or not. I was wrong.
Let me just make a point or three. Cats have been having kittens for thousands of years and they have never taken over the planet or killed us by the millions because there were so many of us. Indians have been smoking peace pipes for hundreds of years that we know of and they never killed themselves or anybody else with their smoke. (The habit of scalping people in the past being a different matter.) And Mark Twain may have written a politically incorrect piece or two in his time, being the sarcastic wit and critic of government that he was, but Tom Sawyer wasn't one of them. Until as judged now in this oh-so-enlightened age.
In this age, it is perfectly acceptable to murder babies and kittens by the millions, but not to smoke a cigarette or eat a donut. We are no more enlightened in any matter that "just isn't done" than we were in the days of the fictional Scarlett. In fact, we are less so.
Thanks for reading.