Pay What You Weigh and the Pussification of America

SO the other night the Boy and I were having a discussion.

We were talking about how you can no longer just go into a restaurant these days without some gangly group of wait staff attempting to sing half-assed to some poor sap in a booth some chain-related Birthday song, of course mentioning their restaurants name and some sort of insidious clapping.

How this used to be an occasional occurrence and a few people would smile and think, "How nice" and then go about their meal as though that momentary lapse in silent atmosphere had never happened.

But now it's every 5 minutes. It's always someone's birthday, and every day is special. La-di-frickin-da.

We then got to talking about a place we went to as kids. Where kid's "Paid what they Weighed" for their meal.

How nowadays that would NEVER be allowed to happen. That due to the over sensitivity of the PC Police and the abundance of childhood obesity and fear of creating some sort of eating disorder in the apparently frail psyche of a 5 year old over the possibility of them weighing something more or less than another 5 year old and insighting mental chaos and agony. Clearly.

My boyfriend lovingly refers to this as "The Pussification of America".

As crass as it is, it's true.

There is a Massachusetts town whose high school is eliminating sports team captains. That the school would be looking into "shared leadership". I mean seriously?

Some kids are cut out to be leaders, other to follow that lead. Some kids do not possess the ability to inspire people, but are able to BE inspired. How do they grow up to learn a sense of self, of trying if they are all coddled and babied into thinking we are all equal in life? Because really, we MUST all be the same.

Or how in young kids sports that every team gets a trophy, win or lose. They don't keep score because "everyone is a winner".

No. No they are not.

It's becoming a sort of epidemic really. Kids are made to believe this false sense of security. That they are all going to be treated the same when in reality that is the farthest thing from the truth. Does it suck? Sure. Will their feelings get hurt? Possibly. But how the hell are they going to learn coping or problem solving skills to carry them into adulthood if they are handed everything like its all hunky-dory and will be ok regardless?

We as a society in this country become far too worried about collateral damage. About offending people to the point that I have become offended by the over abundance of political correctness.

It's absurd. Kids can't dress up for Halloween in schools anymore because it may be upsetting to some sort of overly religious people. Christmas and even Hanukah are not celebrated. It's all about "winter".

Fuck that noise.

When I was a kid we had a Halloween parade down the halls of school and it was awesome. We had Christmas parties and even learned about Hanukah and each kid got a tiny dreidel. We didn't grow up offended, we grew up cultured.

We said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, even though it said God and no one thought twice about it. We celebrated things like Flag Day and honored the American Flag because, well , we are American!! We didn't have things translated into 37 different languages because some people may have come from different backgrounds. You were HERE now, and English it was!!

The fact that we bend over backwards to not offend anyone is ridiculous. People come here because we were a country that was based on freedoms and lack of persecutions. But we have been persecuting ourselves and losing our own identity that we tried so hard to define as a nation in its infancy.

If we went anywhere else in the world, no one would cow-tow to what we believed. No one would change laws or policies to not piss anyone off. It would be "my way or the highway". If you don't like it, there's the door.

The Pussification of America is right.