My Shirt Says “I’m Tired of Political Correctness: Let’s Address Real Problems”
Ever the naivete, I was completely caught off guard this week when I listened to a story on National Public Radio while driving to work. Apparently, angry consumers have been turning to online petitions to try to change what retailers put on their store shelves. To wit, J.C. Penney had to scrap a shirt that read “I’m Too Pretty To Do Homework, So My Brother Has To Do It For Me,” after an online backlash by consumers.
Before the story unfolded, I was ready and eager to sign such petition. In my house, homework for my 7 and 9 year old is akin to the Battle of Leningrad: inch by inch, trench by trench, slowly and at great pain and high cost. But it must be done so we slog on, to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld. Still, children’s academic obstinance is a cause I’m ever ready to grab my musket and tri-corn hat and fight against.
But as it turns out, our cultural aversion to learning important things is not what had the “Romans” up at arms: the shirt is deemed sexist by these modern day Susand B. Anthony’s. I guess if the shirt said “my sister has to do it for me,” that would’ve made the shirt more politically palatable, even if not less ignorant.
Thus, when a New York resident saw a photo of the “I’m Too Pretty To Do Homework” shirt on Facebook last August, she started a petition on the social action website Change.org and, of course, the mainstream media picked up on it and she was later interviewed on CBS, where she said, “It was outrageous enough to be posted on Facebook, but it was actually more outrageous than that — and I felt like I needed to do something about it.” Right behind her was the director of women’s rights organizing for Change.org who said “From the time [of] the petition on Change.org and J.C. Penney pulled the shirt, it was about 10 hours, in which it got over 2,000 signatures, and at one point was generating over 400 tweets a minute.”
That’s nice, but let’s do a sanity check for a minute. Women’s right to vote, or any other rights, are not going to be eviscerated, let alone even affected, by a silly slogan on a t-shirt that people may or may not even read (now if it is tweeted or YouTubed on an I-[Whatever], then we may have a cultural mass-indoctrination problem to address).
And the real problem, most Liberals and Conservatives will agree, is the relentless academic downward spiral of the pre-college U.S. student. In current trajectory, the end of this century will see the U.S. playing catch-up economically and otherwise with many other countries as much of the world surpasses us in the knowledge race. Perhaps this will make a liberal immigration policy an even stronger case, but the best option is an organically grown educated population.
So while our New York cultural patriot may have dealt with a seeming threat to the hard-earned victories of the feminist movement, the heavy-lifting of declining academic performance goes conveniently unaddressed.
-I.M.Windee
