Politically Correct

I'm on a list serve group for insulator collectors, you know, those little glass things found on telephone poles. I suppose you have to be a little different to see beauty in those little blobs of glass, but there are a couple of guys who log on quite often who sometimes get on my nerves. So, being too chicken to call them on the crap they spread, I'll blog instead. Lately they have been complaining about the use of politically correct phrases and lamenting about the loss of simple business names. i.e. Quest substituted for American Telephone and Telegraph. The most vocal of the two is, I think, either a policeman or a corrections officer and he doesn't see what's wrong with relating an ethnic joke in our discussion group. I wonder if he would find a joke about a donut eating pig beating up on a 12 year old blind girl as funny as the ethnic joke he told. My experience has been that things are funny until it's your ox being gored. As far as the political correctness goes, he seems to think that all Hispanics are illegal aliens, and are therefore violators of the laws of our country. I would like to tell him about a friend of mine, who when asked what label he preferred, Hispanic or Mexican American, he replied, "I prefer American, my family has been in the US for 6 generations." Which, I might add, is about 3 more generations more than my family and probably more than our Germanic named blowhard.

As for the unsimple meaningless names used today I suspect our blowhard goes to Home Depot or Lowes when he needs a big ticket item and only goes to the small local hardware store when he needs a washer or a bolt. There are no "Mom and Pop" stores any more because they can't compete with Wal-Mart or even Albertson's or Stop-N-Shop. And it's our fault, we have been seduced by low prices even though it may mean lower quality as well. Instead of owing our soul to the company store, we'll owe it to the Republic of China.