Fix The Culture - Here’s A Start

A lot has been written deploring the state of civility in our political discourse, an especially hot topic in the wake of President Trump’s address to Congress recently. If it’s true that politics is downstream of culture, it’s no wonder that our politics have devolved to the regrettable state they are in now.

Amidst all the commentary is a question that keeps coming up. How do we fix the disrespectful culture that the politicians believe they need to use as a weapon to further their ambitions? Especially when the Commander-in-Chief is himself one of the chief offenders?

I certainly don’t have the answers to this, since the coarsening of the culture has taken place over many decades and won’t be resolved overnight. But allow me to suggest a start. Get The Simpsons show canceled. Please don’t laugh. Although The Simpsons wasn’t the first show to blow up the celebration of the family as loving and supportive of one another, it’s had by far the most staying power, still on the air after debuting in 1989. That’s at least two generations’ worth of anti-parent programming right there. Since I was raising my kids during the early days of The Simpsons along with other “kids are smarter than their parents” shows such as Married, With Children and Rosanne, it seemed like being a parent was akin to walking around in a minefield. And exemplified by seeing those ubiquitous “Don’t have a cow, man!” T-shirts that summed up little Bart’s attitude toward his bumbling father. I know some will say that compared to today’s new sitcoms, The Simpsons seems rather tame. But getting them off the air could send a signal that the pioneers of raunchy humor have had their day, and it’s time to move on.

I know what you’re thinking. If you were so against these programs, why did you allow your kids to watch them? Well, as those who parented kids during this and ongoing times could attest, preventing that is easier said than done. And if both parents aren’t 100% committed to addressing the issue firmly with their kids, then the kids will find a way to the forbidden fruit, especially the more the parents rant against it (which I did more than my share of).

Let’s move on to something just as bad, in my opinion, as a Bart Simpson snide putdown. Perhaps one of the more pervasively used terms that indicates disrespect for another, even if it’s not intended, is the woefully misused and overused term “dude.” When I hear my granddaughters calling each other “dude,” that’s cringeworthy. Since the original meaning was to describe an inexperienced cowboy, there is a built-in condescension involved in using this term, whether the users realize it or not. Yet it’s universally the go-to in conversations when calling someone something other than their name. Although this may seem a trite thing to focus on, remember how the left uses language to create and sustain its narratives all the time. For instance, whenever we’ve heard the Dems refer ad nauseam to Trump as a “fascist,” they’re trying to pigeon-hole him in the minds of Americans as one who would take precious freedoms away. On the other hand, when we have millions of people calling each other “dude,” can we be that surprised when the President of the United States refers to Senator Warren as “Pocahantas” in the middle of a formal address to Congress?

I know it’s easy for me - maybe for you also - to all-too-readily excuse Trump’s often boorish behavior as representing “many years of back payments” as Ebenezer Scrooge would put it. That is, Trump is simply avenging all the wrongs the George W. Bush and Mitt Romney types suffered at the hands of snarky Dems who had little fear they would ever be zinged back. That is, until Trump came along to even the score. However, doesn’t there come a time when “owning the libs” should be secondary to being an effective leader for all Americans?

We’ve seen what standing your ground in an often-hostile culture can do for someone, and an entire movement, with champion swimmer Riley Gaines. By standing up for her beliefs in a dignified way, she has rallied many Americans to support the cause of keeping biological males out of women’s sports, to the point where it’s now on the threshold of being enshrined into law. She didn’t have to go into a snarky gutter to get results, and neither should we as we pursue just results in many other areas. As much as it may pain us to do so, we need to respond to snark with grace, to the extent that we can, and not feel like we’ve been run over.