It’s interesting how the term ‘politically correct’ has generally had a negative connotation. It means you’re just saying things to look good, helpful, inclusive (if I may still use that word), but without really meaning it. Of course, a whole bunch of people actually did mean it. They weren’t being ‘politically’ correct, they were simply being ‘correct’, as in doing the right thing for the world or humanity. They often met with derision and were labelled ‘hypocrite’ or worse. Almost as if decent behaviour or good intentions can never be genuine.
Or did this correctness create a flicker, a glimmer, a slight glitch in the conscience of those who scorned it, a slight discomfort that had to be stamped out with brute force lest it take root and grow? Doing the right thing became like an illness, the ‘woke virus’ for which a cure had to be found stat. Even things that make logical sense, like saving one’s own habitat, were thrown on the scrap heap of political correctness. And now, it is dead.
Companies are tumbling over each other to throw out their green plans and DEI policies while their uber-rich leaders are sipping champagne on their private jets to Davos. There, they will no longer discuss how they can benefit the world, but only how to get richer even quicker. Gone is the political correctness – they obviously never meant it anyway. There was never any correctness behind the political. The pretense is gone. And that is a good thing.
For now we can see unimpededly that these corporations don’t care about us, about clean water and air, about a living wage, about housing and healthcare for everyone. They just want to squeeze us till the last drop, until our last ounce of effort and money are gone, after which they will simply discard us. But still, they don’t want us to realise this. So, correctness also had to die and be replaced by ‘alternative facts.’
So, now the (supposedly) most powerful country in the world has a convicted felon aka mobster (aka con man and rapist) as its leader. He makes no secret about wanting to destroy the environment for profit, about curtailing freedoms for women and lgbtq+ humans, about denying workers a living wage and making it even easier to fire them. No more political correctness, no more correctness: right is now wrong and wrong is right.
He has surrounded himself with the saddest losers you can imagine – except that they are so wealthy that nobody can go up against them. And those losers are cutting search words such as #democrat from their media platforms while promoting hate speech and disinformation. One of them openly made the Nazi salute (twice). There is no question what kind of regime has been instated here. But at least there is no political correctness anymore to obfuscate what is really going on.
