TRAGEDY VS TERROR

I’m about up-to-here with “terrorism” being called “tragedy,” as well as other forms of political correctness” (PC) I won’t venture into here.

What’s tragedy? Some examples: an accidental plane crash that snuffs the life from 300 people, a hurricane that eliminates a town, an earthquake that buries people alive, loss of a child from disease. In other words accidents, and Acts of God, In a tragedy, there’s no premeditation, no political, social, or religious motivation involved.

What’s terrorism? Some examples: Timothy McVey blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City, the bombing of an abortion clinic, 9/11, and yes, the Muslim Major who apparently wounded 30, and killed fourteen innocent people at Ft. Hood on November 5, 2009. The media reports 13 dead. But it was really 14 innocents - because the unborn baby of a pregnant woman was killed along with his mother. In terrorism, someone made a plan (premeditation), a human being or beings executed the plan, and there was political, social, religious motivation, or some combination thereof.

Fact is, the distinction between tragedy and terrorism isn’t news. Educated people know the difference. So why does most media, and too many upper echelon politicians, persist in calling the terrorist attack at Ft. Hood what it isn’t? It’s weak-kneed political correctness (PC) aimed at a political agenda run amuck (this sentence is not politically correct). To fix something, we must admit what the something is.

Some political correctness is harmless, annoying as it may be. I really don’t care that stewardesses have been replaced by flight attendants, or that waiters and waitresses have morphed into “servers.” But I do care when political correctness hampers government, the FBI, and others from protecting our troops at Ft. Hood from a terrorist because he called himself a Muslim? What if terrorist been Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or Mormon? Would authorities have investigated and taken proper action then? You know the answer. No need to elucidate.

A cursory trip through the Internet using the term “political correctness” is interesting. Apparently some PC started during World War I, when our government marketed “sauerkraut” as “Liberty Cabbage” to avoid Americans not buying the stuff because it had a German name.

More insidiously, there are several articles that trace PC to the Marxist-Leninist vocabulary in which “correct” means the correct “party line.” A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is quoted as tracing the ancestry of PC to the China’s Mao Tse-tung’s “Little Red Book.” To me, PC is in line with George Orwell’s Book “1984” and the term “Newspeak.” In a manner of speaking, the PC in play at Ft. Hood requires us to expunge reality for what some national politicians want to be true, whether it is true or not.