"In" or "Out"?!!

I've been out of the collegiate world for 26 years. Full fledged American adulthood is pretty easy compared to, say, an Indonesian fishing wife washing her family's laundry in a dirty bay. I've had my own cars, well paying jobs, babies in a hospital with clean, sterile surgical equipment, homes with solid plumbing and roof materials keeping the elements away from my bed. Vacations, new clothes, good food. My parents are still living, married, healthy. My sister is my closest friend and well.... You know the story. Many of you have lived it, also. Life has been pretty comfortable for me.


After college, I moved to Washington, DC, started working at the Department of Defense and settled in to a new housemate situation. I did what many young people did, I subscribed to The Washingtonian magazine, seeking restaurant ideas, theater suggestions, tips on living in a huge city with a very high crime rate. I can still picture the first time I saw the words "Politically Correct" and "Politically Incorrect" in that magazine. The editors had made a list of items that were supposedly acceptable, silly things like Pepsi, turkey and avocado sandwiches, and Honda automobiles. Similarly, the unacceptable items were Coca-Cola, ham sandwiches, and Yugos. (Google that one if you don't know what it is!) I thought, what the heck does Pepsi have to do with politics? Who gets to decide which items make the list? Who says that ham sandwiches are "Politically Incorrect" (my dad loves them by the way) and why should I care?


I dismissed the whole notice of making lists like that as incredibly silly and a waste of time. I was a strong person, I didn't care who thought what about my tastes. A few days after dismissing the lists, I was having dinner with my boyfriend and another couple. We were talking about work, cars, the usual stuff when the husband said, "Oh, you like Coca-Cola? That's not politically correct!!." And looked at me with a very serious face. I thought he was joking. So I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Didn't you read the list in The Washingtonian? I always want to be politically correct." Right there, that attitude occurred to me as silly, strange and extremely sheepish! I still thought he was joking. As the evening wore on, I began to see that he was a person who needed someone else to tell him what to do. He was going to follow trends, and just go along to get along, not caring what he wanted, somewhat, just as long as he was Politically Correct.


He was a prime example of the new way of thinking that blazed its way through the United States of America in the 1990's. Unfortunately, many, many others also were ready to accept this notion of following the crowd.  Now we have universities, city councils, state leaders, and national leaders all very concerned with doing the "Politically Correct" thing. I'm choosing to do what I like, within moral boundaries, regardless of whether it is "correct" or "incorrect" with a crowd.