Since I started writing here I have tried to leave most of my political beliefs out of my articles so that those who do not agree with me would not be immediately turn away from my writing. However, I think that now is the right time to finally share some of my beliefs. One, in particular, is about President-Elect Donald Trump.

I do not like Donald Trump as a person or as a politician, mainly because of many of the strategies that he used during his campaign and the policies that he proposed. This does not mean that I think that everything he has ever said or done was wrong. There is one important thing that I think he is right about and that is that our society of America has become too politically correct.

I do not believe as President-Elect Trump seems to that people should say just whatever they want. There are many things you can say to people that are offensive and discriminatory and should not be tolerated.

I think political correctness is important to being respectful to people but in quite a few cases America has gone too far and many people who have unintentionally said something that they may not have known was offensive have been labeled as bigots for a simple mistake. This problem is not something that the majority of Americans contribute to but there is a a very outspoken minority that chastises anyone who says something that is not up to their extremely high standard of political correctness.

One awful example of this was back in August in Seattle where Rudy Pantoja was interviewed about the opening of a new police station. At the event there were a number of Black Lives Matter protesters who were against building the police station. After Mr Pantoja had been interviewed and given his support to build the new police station he was approached by one of the protestors, Zarna Joshi. Ms. Joshi asked Mr. Pantoja his name and instead of giving his name he said that his name was “Hugh Mungus”. This angered Ms. Joshi and she claimed that this statement was an example of sexual harassment and eventually began screaming at the man because she thought he was referring to his penis. Mr. Pantoja says he was referring to his weight since he is not the most fit man. Eventually Ms. Joshi was removed from the building. Although Mr. Pantoja maybe was not in the best situation to be telling jokes with the tense situation around him there is simply no reason that such a light hearted statement should have caused him to have to deal with such an intense incident.

This incident shows how some Americans overreact to the most minor comments that are not exactly what they want to hear. Most Americans would see this statement by Mr. Pantoja at worst as weird joke and would probably just ignore the comment or ask what he meant but for the last few years it seems that more and more people become extremely offended by little things like this. Incidents like this have began be referred to as “micro aggressions” and it seems that the simple adaption of the term has given many champions of political correctness something to point to when they do not like the way other speak to them

For the most part I try to go out of my way to be politically correct and not offend anyone but sometimes I do by accident and that is ok because nobody can know exactly what will offend every single person, especially when you have just met the person. Some people however expect everyone to know what will offend them and if you say anything that is offensive to them no matter your intent or knowledge of the person's feeling. These are the politically correct people I really have a problem with because they are actually hurting their own cause by labeling people who made a mistake or lack knowledge on a certain subject as bigots and in turn motivating these people to see political correctness as something much worse than it is meant to be. I find this extremely hypocritical because they often preach acceptance of everyone but then shun those who make one comment that they did not mean to be offensive.

It is hard to figure out what the solutions to incidents like this may look like, but it is certainly not to let them control how society speaks. It is also not embracing the Trump way of just saying whatever you want and not caring who you offend. It is important that our culture finds a

happy medium where people can say what they want and mean and know what kind of things are wrong to say. If we find this it will help us close the gap between the political left and right.