The game of political correctness
June 30th 2005

I am not the biggest fan of political correctness, but I do understand that some things can be hurtful. Take the NFL’s Washington Redskins.

Now, you can spin that any way you like, but it’s still just wrong.  Because it is a team name, however, Washington is able to keep it, using the excuse that it’s tradition and that they are honoring Native Americans. It’s just a game after all.

I am no stranger to games. We had a game sort of like rugby in grade school. At least, it was sort of like rugby as far as I can tell.

My understanding of Rugby is as follows:
· Every play results in some type of score, or a scrum
· Scrums involve a lot of inappropriate touching and fondling.
· Someone gets the ball and runs. If someone gets near him, he throws the
ball away.
· Seven or eight times a game, a player gushes blood. I believe it is in
the rules.

The game my friends and I played had a few of the same rules as rugby, I'm sure. It was called "Smear the Queer."

The rules of the game were as follows: Someone got the ball and everyone else completely obliterated that person.

There were no points, no sidelines, no out-of-bounds, no anything. One kid got the ball, the rest of the kids tried to chase him down. If the kid with the ball threw the ball away, in an effort to have people stop chasing him, he was then creamed much worse and with malice.

So, to recap: Kid gets ball, kid runs like hell, kid is gang-tackled.  Repeat as often as possible, until the game has to be stopped due to excessive compound fractures.

Now, the violence of this game is not what makes me regret it. On the contrary, at 10-11 years of age for a boy, being physically hurt or physically hurting others is part of the job description.

No, what makes me regret it now was the name. Smear the Queer? What were we thinking? We may as well just called it “Smash the Crippled Kid” or “Kill the Retard.” It’s almost as if we voted on the most insulting name we could come up with, though I defy any of you to come up with a better word that rhymes with “Smear.”

But you see, those were carefree days of youth. We didn’t know what political correctness was. We didn’t know that we were offending anyone.  Well, anyone other than the kid with the ball. He would tend to get seriously offended.

Also, we didn’t allow girls to play. OK, that may or may not be correct. Part of me seems to remember that the girls thought we were all idiots and wanted no part of the game.

Mind you, this was the mid-1970s. These were the days that homosexuals were terrified to leave their closets. People went so far as to refuse to believe that Liberace was a homosexual. Back then, being attentive to others’ feelings wasn’t such a big deal.

But ignorance is no excuse. I was wrong to play that game. I should have stood up and said “Hey, this is wrong! This name is hurtful to a sect of society.” Maybe I would have felt better about myself after I recovered from the endless barrage of rabbit punches that come for an 11-year-old boy making moral statements in school.

So, to my homosexual brothers and sisters, I apologize. We were just kids playing a game. Sure, it was a game based on a slur and involving immense physical discomfort, but regardless, something about it wasn’t kosher ...
I mean, correct.

William K. Wolfrum is a freelance writer based in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
His work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers
and Web sites.