Plain talk

By Lisa Fabrizio

Today's world can be quite a confusing place. It was only short decades ago that everyone woke up in the morning and knew exactly who and what they were. If you were lucky enough to wake up in the U.S.A., you stood a pretty good chance of being better off then you were the day before. You also knew right from wrong, and what it meant to be a good citizen. You knew what you admired in your leaders and what to expect when you voted for them.

You knew all these things because people spoke often of them in plain language, unafraid of any subject, because they were confident that their right to speak freely was protected by the U.S. Constitution. And you darn well knew what was in that noble document, as your parents and teachers drilled its contents into you and impressed upon you the tremendous sacrifices of those who fought to establish and protect it.

And among those rights was that of worshiping your God in public, mindful of the right of others to worship theirs, but not fearful that the practice of your religion would make you the target of hateful and unjust accusations of those who believe in nothing. And even though the Constitution forbids the adoption of a state religion, the Judeo-Christian ethos with its Ten Commandments served as a blueprint for our laws and a backbone for our national morality.

Today, the Constitution is often looked upon the same way as Christian worship; mostly an outdated concept that at best requires lip service in order to gain the support of those who still revere it. Kind of like the boorish uncle you have to put up with until he kicks the bucket and leaves you all of his cash.

The thing is, that those who disdain the Ten Commandments and the Constitution as archaic instruments of coercion, are themselves constantly trying to shape our national behavior, but in a manner which is most inconsistent with our constitutional republic. The method of choice instead is political correctness; a truly disgusting and disingenuous term, as the political viewpoints deemed 'correct' are exclusively left wing.

Much has been made of the way in which political correctness has put the nation in danger as demonstrated by the Fort Hood shootings, and this is most certainly true. But the real danger is not limited to physical peril, the greatest casualty is truth, for the goal of the politically correct is to speak in a way so as to avoid being offensive; an impossibility in the real world.

Take racism for instance. We are constantly lectured that, no matter what we do in this nation, we will be forever stained as a racist country; and that white Americans must be perpetually held responsible for the actions of those who lived centuries before most of our relatives even came to these shores. To debate the illogic and injustice of this premise is deemed wholly politically incorrect and therefore inadmissible in public circles. Yet, it would be interesting to ask leftists to name a country they revere for their past history in reference to slavery and maybe also genocide.

Yet, this one-sided debate continues unabated, as in this charming piece by the UK Guardian's Tom Tomasky brazenly titled, "Hate Obama? You may not be a racist. But you will be white." Oozing with racism as its title implies, it is crammed with condescendingly PC statements like, "I do think it's fair to say that, at this point in US history, most individuals aren't racist, at least in any blatant way. Most white people, especially from middle age down, may have a black friend or two, or at least co-workers with whom they get along fine."

The fact is, Barack Obama could never have been elected without a great number of votes from white Americans who were willing to elect him despite his utter lack of experience. Let's face it, Obama's foremost qualification was that he'd bring something different to the presidency; he is black. What else can explain the losses of John Kerry and Al Gore, who served up the same liberal bologna but on extremely white bread? That they at least had more extensive executive and legislative experience than Obama only further illustrates the point.

If we really want to talk honestly about racial voting, we'd be asking how few blacks voted for John McCain and why that was. Of course the answer we'd get would be that Obama's agenda is more in line with the interests of blacks. Try that statement the other way around and you'll be called a racist faster than a speeding bullet. Political correctness is nothing if not a great separator which lays the blame for the plight of a few on the many, whether justifiable or not.

But it is Mr. Tomasky's final word on racism — an almost perfect distillation of what our president has been touting all over the globe — that really lays out in detail the difference between PC-ers and the rest of the country: "Americans resist overstatement because we want to reassure ourselves we're a good country at heart. But history has more often proved on this topic that we're not. We'd do well not to forget that."

Well, I would recommend that Mr. Tomasky and the rest of his ilk open a few history books written before the advent of PC to see just how wrong he is. The fact is, that millions of Americans have given their lives to abolish slavery and tyranny, both here and around the world, and liberated millions more of all races and creeds.

But these arguments fall silently on the deaf ears of those who have manipulated our national discourse to include only what they want to hear and have heard. Political correctness prevents the use of that which is really needed to heal whatever racial divides remain in this country: pure, unadulterated truth.

© Lisa Fabrizio