I just don’t get it. See, I admit it before anyone can challenge me with an emotional argument then throw up their hands in disgust and exclaim that I “just don’t get it.” That isn’t a good rationale for a position, but it is certainly common enough as a final frustration purge to end a debate. Not getting it is the implication that you simply aren’t wise enough, mature enough, sophisticated enough or compassionate enough to understand something so basic.
I realized two days ago that I just didn’t get it when it all came together in my warped little mind. It was the feature story on the front page of the Denver Post. (http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E53%257E2752189,00.html?search=filter) In a world at war with terrorist attacks, oil shortages, civil wars, genocides and who-knows-what-all about to befall society, the front page story is about a twelve-year-old girl who is taunted at school by other 12-year olds. This isn’t news! It’s the way immature 12-year olds have acted since the dawn of history. But, we are a more sensitive society aren’t we? Well, to be perfectly honest, no we aren’t. We are a guilt-ridden society. We are a politically correct society. We are an intolerant society. We are a boorish society. We are a society in which we seek perfection of the imperfectable while at the same time trying to be inoffensive while offending.
I grew up a long time ago in Chicago. Ethnic slurring was a basis of the urban vocabulary. About the time we learned to distinguish between boys and girls we also learned to distinguish between Polish, Italian, German, Irish and Greeks. We didn’t have the benefit of hyphenated Americanism in those days. We called each other by offensive slurs and we told jokes that stereotyped all nationalities and ethnicities in turn. And, we tempered it all with the childhood rhyme about “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” You know what? It’s still true!
I do get the part about offensive language. I know that some words have been elevated to a special stature in their alleged ability to permanently harm the delicate psyche of a person. I can a watch Chris Rock today as I watched Richard Prior twenty-five years ago use the common, offensive term for an African-American with impunity. I can stroll through Black neighborhoods anywhere in America and hear young folks address each other with the word. They seem to survive it quite well. They revel in the usage. But, let a twelve-year-old taunt another in school and it seems that laws must be invoked, investigations must be conducted and inevitably heads must roll. Does this seem a bit contradictory? That’s the part I don’t get.
We shield ourselves from these words through cutesy, pre-pubescent phrasing in which everyone know what we are saying but we don’t say it because Momma will wash our mouth out with soap for using such language. If a twelve-year-old says, “she used the N-word” it seems like a reasonable circumvention. If a 45-year-old journalist writes, “a student taunted the victim with the N-word” it seems a bit juvenile at best. Did this start with Johnny Cochran and the racist allegations against Mark Fuhrman or were we doing it earlier?
It doesn’t end there. In the last year, I’ve heard the President of the University of Colorado suggest that “the C-word was once a term of endearment” for a woman. Really? I don’t ever recall nuzzling up to a member of the opposite sex and whispering little C-words in her ear. Why can’t adults deal with language, which is comprised quite basically of only words which have no power to break bones like sticks and stones, in a forthright and adult manner? Whom are we protecting and from what?
And, of course, we also have the ever-popular basis of all modern pre-adult conversation, the ubiquitous “F-word.” If the typical high-school or college student were denied use of the F-word, that ready replacement for nouns, verbs, adjectives, exclamations and exhalations, they would be reduced to grunting for food. The F-word is a good word with a place in the hierarchy of offensiveness that has been forever deteriorated by its excessive use. Now, if we really want to get attention and be rude, crude and lewd we have nowhere dependable to go.
So, I admit, I just don’t get it. I don’t get why we’ve lost the ability to hold name-calling to its proper low level of offense. I don’t get why we have to administer punishment to the Board of Education because a couple of kids in a school of 700 seem to have brought their parental crudity to school in their back-pack. And, I don’t get what we are accomplishing with the circumlocutions of A, B, C, N and F-words when everyone knows what we mean in the first place. Will we soon have to filter the N-word from polite conversation by hiding it out as the “14th letter-word”?
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