In today’s day and age, it seems that certain groups, specifically those associated with the political right, are quick to demonize individuals and organizations for being “PC,” or politically correct. It seems that within the last couple of years or so, there has been a movement in the U.S. to bash those deemed as being PC, to say that being politically correct is ruining this country and turning everybody into, as Sarah Palin would put it, “weak-wristed liberals.” It seems like you cannot go through a comment section on YouTube or Facebook without seeing someone complain about “dirty, PC liberals” or some inane nonsense about how liberals are going to ruin this country with their evil, progressive thinking.

I think the idea that being politically correct is going to ruin this country and turn all of us into thin-skinned, word-fearing sissies is absurd. If someone is thinking that taking somebody else’s gender identity into consideration or asking one what pronoun they prefer is going to set this country back x-number years, then they are sadly mistaken. Societies thrive and progress. Without forward thinking individuals or collectives, there wouldn’t be any progress. We would not be making any headway in our journey toward a better, more advanced country.

We can all remember being a little kid, our mothers telling us to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The message is a message of kindness and respect, two qualities that are not currently being shared by the political right and their associates. They are too caught up in their own conservative mindsets. Their political agenda has created blinders, developing a narrow worldview rooted in ethnocentrism. The world around them is changing and the only thing they know is the raising they received from their parents, the same raising they received from their parents, and so on and so forth. They have been told their entire lives that the way they are living is the true and right way to live. They’ve grown up believing that the U.S. cannot evolve culturally or as a society because they fear it will lead to anarchy and the collapse of our republic. One has to realize that there are countless perspectives. There is no right way to go about approaching life; there isn’t one way either. Every person, each society and the countless cultures that inhabit this big, beautiful, blue ball have formed their own opinions and their own ideas of how the world operates. No one is wrong; no one is right. There are only a multitude of different vantage points looking down to one location, seeing it differently.