The Ridiculousness of Political Correctness

Ella keeps asking for friends who can’t walk either. She often gets left out when playing with her local friends, and they get impatient with a playmate whose disabilities limit what she can do…so she asks me to find other kids on crutches or in wheelchairs. She wants to feel normal so why can’t we hang out with kids like her?

And I began searching. The lack of a diagnosis has made it nearly impossible to find the groups I know are there. I googled search words like “children” “crippled” “disabled” “handicapped” “unable to walk” – anything I could think of for days in a row and found nothing. There were groups for those with muscular dystrophy and multiple schlerosis. I found children with cancer and some with spinal injuries, but no general groups of families with handicapped children. 

I know they’re out there. This isn’t somewhere in the sticks. This is Dallas for goodness’ sake! They are here. It’s statistically impossible that she’s the only non-walking child in the entire metro area….and yet we couldn’t find them. 

I’ve talked to several families of children with other issues, and they all say the same thing – why can’t we just call things what they are? Who does it serve to make it socially unacceptable to just speak plainly? The people who don’t live with such things have become so uncomfortable with the idea of imperfection, that the words and phrases which best describe them have become forbidden in the interest of keeping other people happy.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic and I keep coming back to it not helping us at all, it only helps those people who aren’t sick. We as a society are so uncomfortable with the very idea of disease, disability, and even the possibility of death that we hide from the words. We find comfort in taking the harsh words of reality because reality can be ugly, and we reject ugliness in all its forms. 

We act as though this “prettying up” of the English language is a sign of how far we have come as a people, and I suppose in a few instances it may be, but in most cases, I don’t think that’s the way it is at all. I think it’s a sign of our insecurity and fear as a people. As we’ve moved further and further from God, we’ve become ever more uncomfortable with the truth. We turn away Him, and the weight of reality becomes too heavy to carry, until the only place I can find playgroups of handicapped and crippled children is under ambiguous terms like “adaptive athletics.” Heaven forbid that we should call things what they are.

If God is the way and the TRUTH, it makes sense that an increasingly post-Christian society would become increasingly uneasy with calling things by their names. Our society has turned its face from Him, and we’re seeing it plainly in the way we speak.