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I’m PC (Polite and Courteous)

Posted on January 2, 2022January 18, 2022 by Greg Bulmash

If Trump Republicans were tweeting in biblical times…

“OMG! That thing with the loaves and fishes. Could Jesus have been virtue signaling any harder? Would a real son of God be such a f***ing libtard? #notMySonOfGod. Sad!”

Some people might notice that in the About Greg page, I add my preferred pronouns with the first instance of my full name. It’s not in the page title because I try to keep that very short, but it is right after my name in the first paragraph.

If you look at the About LMPC page, you’ll see I also gave up my former blog title and an identity I’d spent some time building a brand on, Yiddish Ninja, because I came to the realization that my use of Ninja was culturally appropriative.

I have been accused of being “woke” or “PC” or “virtue signaling” because of this kind of behavior.

I am not “virtue signaling” when I do these things nor demanding others follow my example. I am trying to follow an ethical concept of treating others the way I’d like to be treated. I know… “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a radical, new-agey, liberal snowflake philosophy. And do you know which liberal snowflake is most famous for saying it? According to multiple gospels, it’s Jesus.

And yes, I’m not a Christian. I mean I plaster my Jewish identity all over this site. But I do respect Jesus as a philosopher and teacher, even if I don’t buy into his divinity. He was a rabbi who challenged the status quo of a corrupt society, trying to bring it closer to the core values of loving, respecting, and caring for one another. He tried to make God’s love the core of his message rather than God’s vengeance. But I digress.

So why do I share my pronouns?

We live in a world where traditional gender roles are transitioning. Women go to war while men stay home and take care of the kids. And in a place where people feel enabled to be their genuine selves, sometimes they feel like they need to change their gender identity OR they feel traditional gender labels carry too much baggage. So they opt to state their preferred pronouns to express who they feel themselves to be. I’m a cis-het (heterosexual and in alignment with my genetic/phenotypical gender) white male. People use my preferred pronouns by default. And if someone deliberately calls me “she/her,” I have both the privilege and self-confidence to know that says more about them than about me.

For people who don’t fall into the historically normative categories, I not only want to know their preferred pronouns, I want them to feel more comfortable about expressing them. If lots of people are doing it, it’s easier for more to do so. I’m literally not trying to stand out, but to help make the crowd of people doing it so big that no one does; basically to help others who don’t have my privilege blend in on their terms.

And why not use Ninja?

Cultural appropriation is about taking something… a dress style, hair style, food style, historical figure… from another culture without showing respect and love for the culture and its members.

I realized my use of “Ninja” was not in line with the cultural and historical meaning of the word in Japan. And while most Japanese people may never even know I did it, I chose to stop doing it because I came to believe it was disrespectful.

You earn respect by showing respect

For centuries, white people have demanded other races show them respect (often at the point of a gun or sword). For millennia men have demanded women show them respect. For the longest time, western culture has made people who didn’t fit the norm hide themselves or their true selves away to be respectful of the discomfort it might cause others, while those of us comfortable with the norms got to be ourselves.

I came to the realization as I grew older that I wasn’t showing others the respect society raised me to believe was my due. And over time I changed my behaviors, not to show people how down I was with their deviations from the norm, not to be subservient, but because I started to see the norm as flawed and in need of expansion. I’m trying to make the umbrella bigger. I’m modeling the behaviors I believe are good. I’m trying to be the change I want to see in the world. But mostly, I’m trying to be polite and courteous to them in the way I’d like them to be polite and courteous to me.

And every time some conservative calls me “woke” or “politically correct” as insults, then goes on to complain about how members of their religious or ideological group are victims, I pray for them to see the arrogance and hypocrisy of insulting my moral/ethical belief while demanding I respect theirs. It’s actually infuriating when they claim their ideology requires them to insult and demean others, then play victim when people call them out for that.

For me, PC means being Polite and Courteous. It means trying to make those around me comfortable and not be an asshole by disrespecting their identity. It’s not “virtue signaling,” but just trying to be more Christlike, even if I do so as a philosophical tenet rather than a religious one.

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