Meditation for August 28th, 2016
Being Offended Versus Being Scared For You Life
Here at the news bureau for the Center for Learning Arts and Journalistic Integrity at the University of Cracked Pot Meditations we take offending people very seriously. We love to offend people. We want you squirming in your seat. We want you to view other points of view and consider where other people are coming from. We don’t want you to comfortably drown in safe comfortable ignorance.
Nothing bad will happen to you when you get offended.
In fact, not offending you is worse for modern society than offending you. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are the fundamental rights in a real free democracy. That means that people who have different points of view will also have the right to say and express themselves as well.
We have this Facebook thingy that allows people a platform to express themselves and their ideas to the world. Facebook has people that are active participants scrolling through ideas after ideas, opinions after opinions, but the problem now is that when someone sees something that offends them, they unfriend, unfollow, completely quit Facebook forever (one and a half day in real time).
Now we have the University of Chicago giving out a warning that people won’t be getting any trigger warnings or that they will be protected from anything that might be offensive and some people are very offended by this.
Being offended means you disagree with someone’s point of view. Hell, that point of view might be completely from ignorance and lack of research, but that person has come to a conclusion and is sticking to it.
In fact, I believe one or two people might have read up to this point and are getting heated about my opinion on this. There are probably a few people that didn’t even read this blog because they were scared of being offended. They have no idea what my ideas are. The people that have read this far that are turning red in the face have no idea where this blog is going, but they are already mad.
This is a great blow to American education. It’s not just the politically correct liberals who are pushing for a safe place, but religious people are trying to get their places more comfortable for them. Even the anti politically correct crowd are wanting a safe place to be as offensive as possible so they can troll emotionally charged people and giggle into their Reddits.
We learn and grow by being uncomfortable.
“Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is though the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.” – M. Scott Peck
Nothing causes a person to grow and learn better than being hurt. We become better people when we suffer loss, climb up from the bottom and when we feel isolated and alone. People that are comfortable sit in their towers knowing nothing – until their comfort is threatened.
So be offended. That is ok. People are going to hurt your feelings. Some of them won’t even know they are doing it while others are just complete assholes. You will be a stronger person because of it.
Find out from people who don’t share your opinions why they don’t share your opinions. Have a dialogue. Share ideas. Lets get active rather than offended.
If you’re one of the people that think the world is getting too soft and easily offended, this next section is for you:
There’s being offended and then there is being scared for your life. There is a huge difference between the two. The second is the reason your precious hate is being tolerated by fear anymore.
Women have had to endure men literally trying to rape them on a daily, YES I SAID DAILY, basis. Religion and traditional values point out that women are only meant for two reasons: babies and pleasing the husband (which sometimes one makes the other). THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO FUCKING RUN THIS COUNTRY THAT STILL THINKS THIS IS TRUE BASED ON MYTHOLOGY BEING TREATED AS FACT!
Men get angry at women for not sleeping with them, then gets self-righteous when the same women sleeps with someone else. Men have shot up malls because they couldn’t get laid. Men have murdered women because the women wouldn’t sleep with them.
Men follow women down dark streets saying disgusting things about body parts in a threatening matter.
Women are bitches, cunts, sluts, whores, hoes, tricks…
A book (many books) could be written on how men treat women on a daily basis. A FUCKING DAILY BASIS!
Rape is real. Women get raped. Yes, men get raped too, but more often than not a woman is getting raped. There is no spectrum when it comes to rape – date rape to murder rape – rape is rape and it is happening all the time. Rape isn’t funny. You’d have to be a comedic genius to come up with a funny rape joke…
…yeah, that is a guy telling a rape joke and it is mostly men laughing, try and tell a rape joke where a rape survivor laughs…
Rape jokes is not offensive it is reminding someone that they could be raped any day now. Rape jokes make rape seem a little less dramatic and takes the power out of it. Does rape really need the power taken out of it?
I would rather be murdered then raped, and I have been raped before.
I don’t have to live in constant fear of being raped. While I have spent my entire life recovering from being raped, I don’t worry it’s going to happen again. Even though it had happened once in my life, I don’t have to constantly look over my shoulder and wondering if this or that person is going to rape me. Women have to fear that EVERYDAY!
These are our mothers, daughters, sisters, nieces, friends and even our significant others. They may never get raped, and I hope they don’t, but they have to live in constant fear of it.
You don’t intend to rape someone? It’s just a joke? “Stop policing what I say you gestapo liberal!”
There is a huge difference between being a republican and pissing off democrats with your aversion to taxes and being someone who tells rape jokes. One is possibly offensive and the other is making someone fear for their life.
Gays and trans people are BEING KILLED EVERYDAY JUST FOR BEING WHO THEY ARE! You might love the word faggot or calling someone a cocksucker, but that just states that what some people are are less than others.
There is a mythological system that states very clearly that gays are an abomination and should be put to death. They won’t go to heaven. SOME OF THESE PEOPLE ARE RUNNING OUR COUNTRY! They actually think that there should be laws discriminating certain people in the name of “protecting our values.”
When people that are voted to run our country are fighting to keep certain people as second class citizens, then other people get to hold on to their beliefs that they are targets for violence.
Telling jokes about how feminine being gay is really doesn’t do anyone justice. Gays for not being like “normal” men, women for being less than men so therefore these gays are just like them, and men for creating a standard that all men must adhere to in order to not be called names just because we cry at Disney films or love show tunes.
Making reference that someone who is straight likes to have gay sex is not offensive, it is a reminder that the wrong person knowing that someone is gay could mean violence or death.
Being all confused about gender is no reason to hate. A person who is stating that they don’t fall under the human constructed gender narrative is being brave and putting themselves in danger. Our society already has a gender fetish where two genders must fit in two neat stereotype boxes. People are killed for looking one way and dressing like another way. PEOPLE ARE GETTING KILLED RIGHT NOW IN THIS HERE FREE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!
The point is that there is a huge difference between being an offensive jerk and being a arbiter of hate and fear. You are actually being as scared and offended by gays, women and trans folks as the politically correct folks you think that are trying to take your “precious” little words away. You are keeping the hate and therefore the murder and violence towards certain folks that live at our societal fringes as outcasts because of TV and bibles.
Does “All Black Lives Matter” offend you? Good. It looks like your treasured free country that you get to act like however you want and you won’t get any consequences while a black guy can’t even act like Carlton Banks without risking a fatal shot by police.
“All Lives Matter” is just saying that you feel like all people are born equal – and I mean social economically and not ‘legally’ – and that police just like to shoot everyone the same. No, the unfortunate news is that your white ass, even if born poor as fuck, still have more opportunities then a black person in this country.
“More white people are shot by police than blacks” That is a shocking sentence if it weren’t for the fact that math is in favor of that. There are 211 million white ass honkeys living in these here United States, while only 35 million blacks live here. There are 6.2 white people for every black person. That is math that more white people are shot by cops than blacks, but when you do the math on the possibility of being shot as a black man, it is 2.5 more times that you will than if you are white.
“What about black on black crime?” Well, if blacks are killing each other then it’s fine to let the system stay the same, right? No. The system in place is a slow process of progression being slowed to a minimum by religious, rich and scared white people to keep blacks at a certain level of privilege. People are literally still mad that slavery is illegal. People are using “science” to prove that black people are less than. We let white people off for rape because it might bum them out to do time and keep blacks in prisons for years for marijuana.
Racism isn’t cute, nor did Dave Chapelle make it okay to start making racist jokes again. This isn’t being offensive, it is purely based on fear of blacks.
A lot of people that are happy about the University of Chicago’s choice to ignore trigger warnings and creating a safe academic place for people to learn must be sick and tired of college campuses across our nation not allowing certain people to speak because of students possibly being offended must know that sometimes there are legitimate reasons that a person shouldn’t speak.
At the University of Virginia a man named Charles Murray was going to speak, but the students got together and advocated that he not speak. Is Charles Murray offensive? Yes, but he also uses pseudoscience to prove that some races are in fact inferior to others. The activists were appalled that a University would have a man using no real science to back his claim that whites are better than blacks to “educate” anyone.
If you want to know what is offensive and what is worse, think, is this just dumb and won’t really hurt anyone, or is this going to strengthen centuries long ideas and practices that literally kills people for being themselves?
If you’re a bigot piece of shit white guy, then that question will be so hard to answer. I hope calling you a bigot piece of shit white guy offends you and you write me an angry email or comment.
I won’t ok the comments because I don’t want anyone being offended.