Don't Go PC!
At this point, we’ve all seen it somewhere—a beloved story completely ruined by the clumsy, misguided whitewash we call political correctness. Sometimes this results in a weak tale utterly lacking pathos and meaning, other times, a historical event dissected into an outright lie. Many of us bemoan this, citing our culture’s apparent inability to produce anything original and powerful, but how often do we think about the role we play in this whole thing?
Our own desires to hide from the truth often encourage this willingness to rewrite characters and paint over history to make it seem more innocuous or palatable by modern standards. With the weakening of our own perspectives and lack of emotional maturity, we participate in the desecration.
Whether you consider yourself a connoisseur or a creator of content or both (like me), I would challenge you to think about what actually happens when we choose political correctness over truth, especially when dealing with some of the actual historical events that shape our understanding of humanity and culture.
Ultimately, political correctness ends up devaluing and undermining what real individuals and groups of people were up against and the struggles they had to go through in order to achieve or overcome what they did. If you strip away everything that is considered offensive about their adversaries and time period, you minimize the battles they had to fight, thus undermining their growth arcs. This practice breaks the backbone of storytelling itself and robs the current generation of the personal value they can mine from these stories, one of which is sorely lacking in our day—emotional intelligence.
Our current generations have been led into a horrible cycle where we are basically taught to put a bunch of distasteful things in a box (with no regard for who labeled them that way) and lie in wait, watching for someone to mess up along those lines, after which we socially crucify and cancel them. That’s the mildest version of what can happen, with actual violence becoming more and more common.
Those of us who remember saner times might wonder how it got to this point. It’s actually pretty simple, however horrific. When you consistently give people a plethora of reasons to be angry but no actual understanding of the root issues or how we are meant to work together on a solution, you end up feeding a cycle of rage, frustration, and helplessness that eventually leads only one place—self-hatred.
You can only use an exacting, impossible standard of measurement on others for so long before you realize that you will also never measure up. Now you are even more desperate for change along the narrative lines you’ve been taught because you have to guard the idea of yourself being a good person and atone for the associative sins you’ve committed by adopting some new “enlightened” identity. The people who have been duped like this live continually balanced on a precarious edge of self-destruction.
No wonder so many of them feel that they must resort to threats and crimes; the ensuing headlines make the perpetrators feel like they’ve accomplished something by getting attention and “suffering” for a cause (albeit a cause they usually can’t fully define).
Beyond the incongruency of who’s actually competent to decide what’s right and wrong based on questionable or missing moral standards, this mindset is also missing an actual solution to the world’s problems, something that cannot be discovered or achieved without voluntary adherence to a transcendent moral code.
It’s very arrogant to assume that we have somehow achieved the perfect balance that our backward ancestors were so lacking. Every person in every era of the human race is a mixed bag of arrogance, inconsistencies, prejudice, and misconceptions, and it is actually by acknowledging this that we are able to learn and grow.
If we rewrite everything and paint over history because we can’t stand to look at uncomfortable things, we unlearn how to even recognize right and wrong and lose our ability to improve anything. Why?
Because improvement starts with a moral compass that fuels awareness and is followed by the individual pledging to change what he/she can…starting with what’s in the mirror.
This is something valuable we can gain from stories (historical or fictional): the ability to see ourselves in a character, for better or worse, to step into someone else’s shoes and learn things without having to go through their experiences. This is one reason why we must guard the purity of stories.
We gain emotional intelligence as we unpack characters, taking their backgrounds and misconceptions and situational irony into account as we work backwards to understand what shaped the perspectives they lived by. We get to see similarities and differences with ourselves, rather than foolishly slapping a generic, meaningless label on people who say or do things that make us cringe. “Racist” or “bigot” ceases to mean anything when you apply it to anyone who says something you’ve trained yourself to be annoyed by. But when you seek to understand what is being said and what makes it right or wrong—this is how you learn how something applies to you and shapes your future behavior.
Especially when you see it through God’s eyes.
Our own human perspectives and efforts to self-govern can only take us so far, especially if they’re not rooted in the love of God and the morality He has put in each human made in His image. But when you actually arm yourself with a biblical perspective and then allow yourself to look at all of history and humanity for what it is, you step into a world of unmatched wonder and persistent hope.
You get to marvel at the odds people beat with God’s help, the miracles He did for and through them, the amazing things they accomplished that changed the world forever. And as you honor their sacrifice and legacy, you also get to be encouraged that God is on the move.
He’s been at work from the beginning, all along. In the best of times and worst of times, good things have been happening, and the enemy has never had the final word. You get to look at what has happened and believe you can learn courage in your own life. And it’s this perspective that enables you to produce real, raw stories that look pain full in the face and declare that there’s still hope!
God created everyone in His image to know Him through His Son Jesus Christ, but it’s only through the Holy Spirit and submission to His Lordship that we can grow up into Him. Look at the mess we make when we stray from Him. Look at His patience to pursue us and give us the ability to change! Look at how He continues to use us!
When you see life through God’s perspective, you have the ability to love. Yourself and others.
This is what we were made for. This is what the world strains after and cannot grasp—at least until they start by reaching for the One True God through Jesus Christ. His is the Great Story that we are all a part of. And when we embrace Him and our part in Him, all other stories come alive.
Take your place in the Story of the ages, with Christ. Then, read and write boldly, eyes wide open. There’s no other way.
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