Ready for a challenge?

So, have you decided? You were issued a challenge last Friday. Will you take it?

Benjamin Bingman-Tennant wrote a letter to the editor last Friday, asking – no, suggesting is a better word – that “everyone at SMU … try to think before you act, and reflect on if what you are doing is discriminating or offensive toward a group.”

Now that you know what the challenge is, are you ready to take it on? Before you decide, let me give you some advice: Don’t bother.

Almost anything you can possibly say, do, think or believe is going to be discriminatory or offending to someone in some group, somewhere. Using reduction ad absurdum (or if that’s too haughty, stretching out an argument to a logical extreme to show just how unbelievably silly it is) – to think about whether or not something is offensive or discriminatory means that you would, for example, have to analyze every sentence you speak before you speak it, edit and re-edit everything you write, hope that a gaze isn’t taken as a leer, and so on.

We all would become so paralyzed with fear at offending someone, we would be afraid to do almost anything. And in case you might be curious, I’m not about to live that way, and I hope you aren’t either. So what would I suggest instead? I’ll get back to that.

Right now, though, I’m going to be quite honest. I am, like Benjamin, tired of all the Americana that has been going on the past thirteen months. I’m sick of all the people sticking flags in their windows and on their cars who wouldn’t even have thought about doing any of that on Sept. 10, 2001 once, let alone twice. I can’t stand all the pomp and circumstance that goes on every time the Star-Spangled Banner is played. Same with the newfound, Johnny-come-lately respect for the police and the firefighters. When all that goes on, it makes all the people who feel it necessary to tell us to “Never Forget” unbelievably redundant, if not downright annoying.

The sentiment over the attacks in New York and Washington, to me, in the way only Americans can do it, has become incredibly hackneyed. So, no, it’s not just Benjamin or the international students who are fed up. There are quite a few Americans – proud Americans – who though they might not admit it, feel the same way.

However, I (and many others) realize something. On that fateful day last year, the American people felt vulnerable, and they needed something to hold on to. The one thing they had was the fact that they are Americans and live in the freest country on Earth, despite the best efforts of their government. And they grabbed on to it. They might be squeezing the living hell out of it, but it’s a comfort.

So, I’ve pretty much resigned to being bombarded with the “myriad American flags and the jingoistic mantras” until the people who need them get tired of them. (And God knows I hope it’s soon.)

But, you know, that’s not all that I’m fed up with. I’m sick of people who hide behind religion, science or, in this case, cultural sensitivity, standing on their pretentious soapboxes to tell the benighted masses how to live, who then turn around and show the same shortsightedness they claim everyone else has – yet have the audacity to claim their ignorance to be “enlightenment” worth listening to.

Instead of thinking about the possibility of offending someone every time you do something, let me make a suggestion. Whenever someone says something, does something or acts in a way that you don’t like, take a moment to think whether or not there might be a shred of reason behind whatever that other person did. If it still concerns you, ask questions, but be patient. (Remember, you will also do something that someone else might wonder about, and you’ll be questioned as well.)

If we learn to do that, humanity will be a lot closer to harmony than stopping to reflect every time we might potentially offend someone – or taking umbrage to someone’s actions every time possible.