OT:Sorta: Insensitivity Training

["Brian Loe" <knobdy () gmail com>]

It does address some security issues and there are some funny bits, so its close

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http://www.crisismagazine.com/june2007/shea.htm

Insensitivity Training: Facing the Crybaby Culture By Mark P. Shea

Every couple of days it seems somebody falls apart due to
"insensitivity." The problem has been buzzing around in our headlines
for years. We all remember back in January 1999 when a group of
Professionally Aggrieved Grievance Professionals came unglued after
David Howard, a white aide to Anthony Williams, the black mayor of
Washington, D.C., used the word "niggardly" in reference to a budget.
It mattered not one iota that the word has absolutely no etymological
relationship with "nigger." (It's of Scandinavian origin and means
"miserly" or "stingy.") Letters were written; protests were mounted.
Howard himself bowed and scraped in abject remorse like a Stalinist
show-trial witness confessing to crimes against the regime. Ten days
later, Howard was sacked in a rite of sacrificial appeasement to
outraged sensitivity gods. Only his own membership in an Approved
Victim Group saved him: It turned out that, as a homosexual, Howard
was himself backed up by an entire community of Professionally
Aggrieved Grievance Professionals with their own deeply rooted
sensitivities that likewise demanded appeasement. The mayor therefore
offered Howard a chance to return to his position. Howard refused but
accepted another position with the mayor instead.

Such tales are not isolated in our culture. One can go on and on, if
for no other reason than the sheer amusement of the thing. A couple of
years ago, for instance, Southwest Airlines was hit with a lawsuit for
racial harassment. Their crime? They do not assign seats. You simply
pick a seat, and the plane takes off. So, in the final prep for
take-off, one of the flight attendants came on the intercom and said,
"Eenie meenie minie mo, pick a seat, we gotta go." Two
African-American passengers naturally could not endure this horrific
assault on their exquisite sensitivities. Lawsuit city.

Speaking of cities, Los Angeles issued a request to all manufacturers
of computers to cease referring to "master" and "slave" units on their
equipment after a hurt soul filed a complaint. Numerous computer
manufacturers slavishly complied.

Fortunately, the hypersensitivity industry has also pinpointed the
deep wells of pain opened by the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta
Braves.
Particularly offensive is the heart-breaking use of the "tomahawk chop"
by Braves fans. In other sensitivity news, Notre Dame recently had to
fend off charges from Irish Americans doubled over in anguish by the
torment they feel at the label "Fighting Irish" and the Notre Dame
mascot (a leprechaun with his dukes up). The Notre Dame Observer
(March 23, 2006) had to answer these charges by reaffirming offended
Irish people in their okayness and assuring them that the plucky
little leprechaun is "a celebration of the resiliency and strength of
the Irish people," symbolizing how "the Irish have suffered through
numerous hardships in their history—occupation by a foreign power,
religious discrimination, famine and overt racism here in the United
States have all been faced by the Irish people, and yet they
persevered to become one of the most influential peoples in history."
(Let me say that, as a member of America's suffering Irish-American
community, I thank Notre Dame for drying my tears of outrage. On
behalf of the groaning legions of agonized Irish in America, I forgive
you, Notre
Dame.)

Not everyone is similarly inclined to mercy, however. Sometimes the
tinder-dry sense of outrage caused by our culture's gross
insensitivity to practically everything threatens to erupt in a
conflagration of hurt feelings. For instance, a couple of years ago a
proposed picnic to honor baseball Hall-of-Famer Jackie Robinson led
some 40 students at the University of Albany, State University of New
York, to protest that the word "picnic" originally referred to the
lynching of blacks. It turned out the protestors were what the
dominant Europhallocentric Hegemony calls "wrong," since "picnic"
actually comes from a 17th-century French word for "social gathering
in which each person brings a different food." But the sensitivity
professionals at SUNY did not let stultifying categories of "right,"
"wrong," "ignorant," or "informed" get in the way of their festival of
emotional incontinence.
The strained feelings of offended black students were in such a pitch
that the university instead put out a memo asking all student leaders
to refrain from any use of the word "picnic." Explained the Campus
Affirmative Action office, "Whether the claims are true or not, the
point is the word offended." Therefore, in publicity for the event,
the word "picnic" was changed to "outing."

However, the use of the word "outing" offended—wait for it—the gay
community, so the event formerly known as a picnic was ultimately
publicized with no noun to describe it.

 Meanwhile, in the sphere of gender and sex, terrible battles are
being fought by another gathering of the extremely sensitive. From the
feminist musicologist who recently announced that Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony was an expression of rape, to the courageous Euro-feminists
who suffer "because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be
triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women,"
great strides are being made. A feminist group at Stockholm University
recently sought to ban all urinals from campus, following their
removal from a Swedish elementary school. Likewise, the word "history"
was banned a while back at Stockport College in Manchester, England,
because it contains the sharply wounding syllable "his." And few can
but admire the Oscar-winning performance of Dr. Nancy Hopkins of MIT
who told the Boston Globe that she had to leave the room or else she
would have "either blacked out or thrown up" after then-president of
Harvard, Larry Summers, suggested that there might be differences
between men and women in aptitude to the hard sciences. Summers paid
for this mild observation with his professional life, of course.

Every once in a while, there are collisions between various aggrieved
peoples, which make the suffering they must endure all the more
terrible. For instance, a few years ago Native Americans in Washington
State (members of one of the highest-ranking Approved Victim Groups)
decided they wanted to revive the ancient sacred mystical ancestral
tradition of going out in a power boat with echo locators and lots of
high-tech gear to kill a whale.

This presented the sensitive people in western Washington with an
apparently insoluble conundrum: If the local media complained about
the murder of our cetacean brethren suckling at the breast of Gaia,
they would be imposing their Dead White European Male Cultural
Hegemony on the bleeding wounds of suffering Native Americans! The
depths of pain that could well up in the Native American community
made strong editorial writers and TV pundits blanch with terror. But
if the Manufacturers of Culture in Seattle media didn't complain, they
would be letting Free Willy die at the hands of evil predatory Homo
sapiens who have been raping Gaia for eons. The high-pitched cry of
pain from the Green Community would be audible to our mammalian animal
companions for miles. We would once again have failed to act while our
Mother Earth was taken one step closer to extinction by the defiling
disease that is humanity!

At last, after much deliberation in closed-door sessions, the
hierarchy of values was clarified by the arbiters of correct
sensitivity: Native Americans trump Euro-Americans, but whales trump
all humans.
Accordingly, media reports were filled with cries of anguish from the
Green Community on behalf of outraged whales, but there was a
moratorium on reports about Native Americans outraged over
chardonnay-sipping Euro-American TV pundits telling Native Americans
how to run their lives. Instead, Euro-American critics of Native
American environmental destruction would only be reviled for their
cultural imperialism and insensitivity when they were white sports
fishermen complaining that Indian gill netters were indiscriminately
denuding the rivers of all fish. For as everyone knows, people who
hunt and fish for sport are a form of life lower than Neanderthals,
murdering Mother Earth for the sheer pleasure of killing. No one cares
what they think. Problem solved.

Of course, religion is also a rich field for the terminally sensitive.
On a Beliefnet blog, for instance, a reader recently complained about
the horrors of insensitivity that he must endure as a non-Christian in
a religious American culture:

Sure, I can tell people I'm not interested. But what if I sit in my
cubicle and have to read Bible verses all day long because they are
posted on my co-workers [sic] cubicle? Or if every email I get at work
is encouraging me to accept Jesus? Or if people come up to me on the
street because I "look Jewish (or Hindi or Muslim)" and [tell me] I
should accept Jesus?

Indeed, we have all known the nightmare of having to look at a Bible
verse on a coworker's desk. And who among us can walk to the store or
cinema without being battered by a torrent of clamorous evangelists
body-blocking us on the sidewalks, e-mailing our Blackberries and
text-messaging us with threats of hell? One can scarcely think for the
din of Christianist agitprop in which we swim, morning, noon, and
night, 24/7. We can only admire this man for his ability to keep his
sanity despite the non-stop assault on his extremely sensitive nature.

This is not to say it doesn't cut both ways. Christians are also
capable of receiving non-existent insults as blows to the solar
plexus.
In 2005, for instance, the Bush White House sent out cards to
thousands of people wishing them a happy "holiday season." O the
humanity!
Reaction from the pained in the Christian community was swift and
terrible, because, of course, if a president of a secular
nation—acting in his office as president—doesn't single out Christians
for greetings during the holiday season, that can only mean that he
has joined the war on Christmas. It can't possibly mean that he is
president of all Americans and being respectful to all Americans. In
short, it can't mean that he meant well. No, he was, with malice
aforethought, delivering a slap to the face of every Christian in the
Republic. The only response any true follower of the Prince of Peace
should have to this crushing blow to our crucified feelings is a howl
of outrage!

But American Christians and Jews—heck, even American unbelievers—are
still pikers in matters of thin-skinned religious sensitivity. When it
comes to sheer childish inability to cope with a world not to their
liking, nobody does it like Muslims. As the Cartoon Riots
demonstrated, millions of Muslims combine a wondrous inability to face
the slightest criticism with a completely un-ironic blindness to their
own brutal tendency to bully.

Oversensitive Christians and Jews have light years to go before they
can achieve the feats that the Muslim world excels in on an almost
daily basis. The death toll from wandering mobs of enraged Christians
after the release of the Church-bashing Da Vinci Code currently stands
at a very disappointing zero. The Passion of the Christ was likewise a
miserable failure, both in its inability to whip Christian mobs into a
frenzy of Jew-hating pogroms and its inability to engender a murderous
underclass of embittered Jews burning down theaters or pinning Jewish
tracts to the dead body of Mel Gibson with a knife. Likewise, the
riots that did not break out and the charred cities and dead bodies
that did not trail in the wake of Iran's recent display of
Holocaust-mocking cartoons stand as a testament to the inability of
those darn perfidious Jews to freak out every time somebody looks at
them with less-than-respectful eyes.

Not that Islam's pioneering chutzpah in offensitivity hasn't yielded
real benefits for Muslims. For instance, a couple of years ago, Burger
King cringed with lickspittle apologies and withdrew an ice cream
confection from its menu after the lid of the dessert offended a
British Muslim. The man claimed the design resembled the Arabic
inscription for Allah, and branded it sacrilegious, threatening a
jihad. The Muslim Council of Great Britain, instead of telling the man
to "get a life," patted Burger King on the head for acting in
obedience to the threat. Meanwhile, in America, the New York Times
(which would not run the Danish cartoons "out of respect for Muslim
sensitivity") runs images of Piss Christ and lectures Christians on
art appreciation.

Likewise, the British press tried recently to ban images of pigs, lest
Muslims be offended; while some British schools also removed or
restricted such "anti-Muslim" children's books as The Three Little
Pigs, Charlotte's Web, Babe: The Sheep-pig, Cars and Trucks and Things
That Go, Olivia Saves the Circus, and Animal Farm. This, while Arab
television was running a series based on the Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion. And, of course, there were recent paroxysms of
outraged sensitivity over the presence of the cross on the British
flag: a cruel reminder of the sufferings of Muslims during the
Crusades (which the Muslims both started and won).

Here in the United States, this peculiar willingness to scrape before
the sensitivities of the Professionally Aggrieved has created a rich
mulch of bureaucrats, pundits, and various members of the Chattering
Classes who have shown themselves singularly well-disposed to lick the
hand of violent Muslim thugs in spaniel-like obsequies even as they
piddle on the floor in outrage over the imminent imposition of
theocracy at the hands of some bogeyman compact of damp-handed
bishops, Evangelical soccer moms, gun-toting members of the Hallelujah
Bible Church of NASCAR, and a couple of Republican Jews. Andrew
Sullivan has made a second career of seeing in "Christianists"
precisely the same danger to the Republic as that posed by Osama bin
Laden. Some Evangelical politician sends a letter to his fellow
believers asking for prayers for his campaign? That is exactly the
same thing as bin Laden's conviction that God is on his side in his
murderous war on every American man, woman, and child.

This peculiar conviction that, "If you've seen one Abrahamic religion,
you've seen 'em all," also apparently governs much of our policy in
transportation safety. Alloyed with our peculiar fear and shame over
the possibility of giving offense, it has yielded the wondrous policy
of acting as though absolutely everybody is at equal risk of being a
terrorist, just as, 20 years ago, grievance activists in the
homosexual community persuaded everyone we were all at equal risk for
AIDS.

This logic, however, turned out to be flawed since, in actual fact,
the AIDS virus is not a mugger or serial killer, striking victims
completely at random. Indeed, it turns out that AIDS follows perfectly
predictable and knowable transmission vectors having to do with
certain behaviors. If you are a human being who does not choose to
swap bodily fluids indiscriminately, your chances of getting AIDS are
essentially zero. If you do engage in that kind of behavior, you are
at extremely high risk for AIDS.

In much the same way, it turns out that not everybody is at equal risk
for being an Islamic terrorist. Studies are well on the way to showing
a strong correlation between Muslim terrorists and a condition known
as "being Muslim." Though the data are still being analyzed, it's
probably not rash to say that every Islamic terrorist is a Muslim,
though of course not all or even most Muslims are terrorists. But
given that the Muslim community does seem to be the locus of the
problem of Muslim terrorism, it would seem prudent for security
officials to focus their efforts there and not spend a great deal of
time scrutinizing nuns, six-year-old farm boys, and Lutheran Bridge
Club members for their ties to al-Qaeda or similar Islamic
organizations.

Naturally, this suggestion is met with sharp cries of pain from
sensitive Muslims who protest the bitter injustice of seeing the
Muslim community as the source of every act of Islamic terror in the
world.
Surely the Amish, Model Railroading, or Origami communities can share
some of the blame for these monsters. Must the focus be entirely on
the Muslim community, merely because 100 percent of all Muslim
terrorists hail from it? If this is not a shattering tragedy of
profiling, then what is?

Personally, I don't know how the Feds are going to resolve the
problems of searching high and low in order to avoid looking where the
problem is. But in the interest of everybody being a lot less
miserable, I think it would be good if we all studied a few tips on
how to become more insensitive.

1. Ask yourself, "Am I an idiot?" There are three basic kinds of
idiots: intellectual, emotional, and moral. An intellectual idiot is
too stupid to know or find out what a word means. An emotional idiot
is too stupid to care what a word means if it stands between him and a
good temper tantrum. A moral idiot may be intellectually and
emotionally sound, yet still be willing to sacrifice the happiness of
others simply to file a lawsuit on behalf of intellectual or emotional
idiots who don't know what, say, "picnic" or "niggardly" mean. If you
are any of these kinds of idiot, proceed immediately to step two.

2. Consider the possibility that you just need to get a life. Signs of
this need include spending all day in a sweat of irritation because
religious people exist, hallucinations that you are being raped by
classical music, constant convulsive outrage over words like "history"
and "master/slave" or "outing," and a gasping sense of oppression at
the thought of urinals. Wigging out over leprechauns and tomahawk
chops is another "get a life" indicator. Still other signs include
loss of sleep and anger-management issues over presidential greeting
cards, cartoons, ice cream lids, and books with pigs in them. If these
symptoms persist, proceed to step three.

3. Grow up. Failure to grow up could result in becoming a human
toothache and constituting a transmission vector for ulcers,
psychological and physiological ailments, and a whole host of complex
societal disorders including an overburdened diaper-laundering
industry.

4. Finally, find something useful to do with your time, such as
learning to laugh, particularly at yourself. You'll be happier. So
will the rest of us.

Mark P. Shea is the senior editor for www.CatholicExchange.com.

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