We’ve become a nation of wimps just waiting around to feel offended

By David McElroy · August 6, 2012

I’m sick of people begging me to be offended at something they’ve imagined to be offensive. I’m suffering from “outrage overload” because so many people seem so eager to tell me I should be offended at an ever-growing list of things.

Here are two recent things that have me banging me head against the wall in frustration with the pathetic folks of the Fellowship of the Offended.

First, a black gymnast named Gabby Douglas won a gold medal at the Olympics and NBC’s Bob Costas had a segment about her being the first black winner of the all-around. Then the network went to a commercial break, which happened to start with a promo for a new NBC comedy called “Animal Practice,” about life at a vet clinic. The commercial imagines a monkey who lives at the clinic seeing himself (herself?) winning an Olympic medal. (See the video at the end of this article.)

The promotion had been running regularly throughout the Olympics as a tie between the show and the games. But because it happened to run after a black woman won a gold medal, well, you know the rest. The ad was clearly racist — and NBC was forced to apologize. (See this article for some of the outraged tweets about it.)

When I told someone the story Sunday night and asked for her reaction, she almost shouted her reply: “Tell these people to get a life!”

Why are people so eager to assume someone was being racist? Do they believe that someone at NBC produced that commercial weeks in advance — and ran it dozens of times ahead of time — just so some sheet-wearing racist could pull the spot out to run in the event that a black gymnast won something? Are these people honestly that stupid?

So that was the week’s chance to get many blacks and some white liberals whining about imaginary racism where none existed. Our second story is an opportunity for whites and conservatives to be offended about something done by a black athlete.

Serena Williams won a gold medal at the Olympics Sunday and she was obviously excited at the end of the match. She danced around the court in pure joy, at one point doing what some people refer to as the “crip walk.” Some people started going ballistic, saying she was “tainting” her gold medal with this little bit of joy. (Here’s an item from the Washington Post with a look at it from a more sympathetic point of view.)

Williams was raised in Compton, so this was just part of popular culture there. She wasn’t celebrating some street gang. It was just child-like exuberance. But some people, such as conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel , still want to be offended by it. She wrote:

“Yup, that’s what we need representing America, a Gold Medalist who, upon winning, glorifies hardened criminals who murder each other — and innocent Americans — for sport.”

To the morons such as those crying racism at NBC’s monkey ad and the other morons whining about Serena Williams’ little dance, I say, “Get a life.”

There are a lot of truly evil things about this world that don’t bother people in the least, yet they’re willing to be angry and offended by trivial things that aren’t offensive unless you bring your own twisted interpretation to them. The only thing that offends me is that people are so busy inventing new things to be offended about.

If this is you, well, get a life.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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