RULE 21

You’re offended? So what? No, really. So what?

A willingness to be offended at the smallest slight is not a sign of a superior consciousness—it is a decision to be a whiner and an emotional bully.

This may come as a surprise, but living in a free country does not mean that you are free from annoyance or immune to things that offend you, and it certainly does not give you a license to silence, reeducate, or harass people with whom you disagree. If you want to avoid being offended, you should probably try a Buddhist monastery rather than, say, public transportation or a modern university.

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Almost everybody can play the “I am offended” card: minorities, majorities, women, men, liberals, conservatives, gays, lesbians, straights, Catholics, Muslims, Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, feminists, evangelicals, blondes, short people, fat people, thin people, lawyers, and guys who are going bald.

The tyranny of the easily offended is exercised by the sort of people who walk around with sensitivities locked, loaded, and holstered in easy reach in case they encounter the slightest glimmer of sexism, racism, classism, heightism, lookism, or fattism or even excessive amounts of cologne. And they usually find what they’re expecting. In a previous book (A Nation of Victims), I noted that America is increasingly crisscrossed by invisible trip wires of emotional, racial, sexual, and psychological grievance. Witches are offended by Halloween; multiculturalists are offended by school nicknames and books by dead white guys; feminists are offended by mascara and guys who open doors for women. Atheists are offended by public prayer; believers are offended by the objections of atheists; and agnostics don’t know what to believe, so they pretty much stay out of it. Almost everybody, including Scientologists, is offended by South Park. And don’t even get me started on Christmas, which has become a veritable riot of hyperoffended finger-pointing, pitting people offended by carols, crèches, and Christmas trees against militants who are offended by people who say, “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

Even offhand remarks, or the inadvertent use of the wrong word, can stir the machinery of offense into action. The loudest complaints often come from advocates who claim to be empowering the victims of the slur. After the 2006 Masters Tournament, Tiger Woods remarked, “I putted atrociously today. Once I got on the greens, I was a spaz.”94 Hypersensitive advocates for people with cerebral palsy declared themselves offended, and Woods was compelled to apologize on his Web site. But was anybody really offended? And was anybody really empowered?

At one time, people lived by the saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Sure it was simplistic, but it told us not to let the words of others determine our sense of self-worth.

In contrast, the permanently offended want you to react to words the same way you would react to a brick thrown in your face; they assume that “victims” are so feeble that their self-image will be crushed by a word—even if no offense whatsoever was intended.

In any case, the search for inoffensiveness is often frustrating and futile. As attorney and commentator Rick Esenberg has noted, “Trying to find a set of nonoffensive words for characteristics that truly are a disadvantage is a game with no end.”95 A list of the “10 worst words” in Britain, for example, includes such obviously insulting terms as “retard” and “window-licker,” but also terms like “special,” “brave,” and even “wheelchair-bound,” a phrase presumably used to refer to people who are … wheelchair-bound.96 Since terms like brave and special were introduced at one time as inoffensive euphemisms, this is tail chasing with a vengeance.

Of course, the real irony in the kerfuffle over Wood’s use of the term spaz was that he plays a game (golf) that has since time immemorial rated the skill of players using the term handicap.

The lesson here is that if you wake up every day looking for something to be offended by, you’ll find it. My advice: Get over it. Get used to the fact that other people will bother, annoy, aggravate, exasperate, and irritate you. You will run into words, gestures, and pictures you don’t like. But so what? You don’t live in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood anymore.

There is another reason to avoid being offended all the time:

It’s exhausting.

Keeping up with all the resentments is draining; it’s hard being indignant 24/7. If you invite the easily offended to hang out in your head, they’ll take up space, won’t clean up after themselves, and will eat all the chips. So why let them in?