Some Fortunes Are Politically Incorrect

We have started another year of the Asian calendar, the Year of the Snake. Snake...no that has nothing to do with me. Stop thinking about me and snakes being compatible. The reason I bring this up is that European and American political correctness may be coming to the eastern world in the Year of the Snake. How do I know this? Well, sad to say that one of my favorite things about Asian culture, the like of feel good nonsense and instead presenting a more realistic world view, is disappearing in that great faux Asian traditions of the fortune cookie.

Yes, I know the fortune cookie was invented in San Francisco by a Japanese fellow and has nothing to do with traditional Asian culture, but go to any Chinese restaurant in this country and you get a fortune cookie. It's always to be fun to read the fortune inside (and those lottery number suggestions that never win), just like reading those silly astrological fortunes we don't really believe in. Inside a fortune cookie (oh... but those taste nasty) you could get anything from a Confucius line to a tongue in the cheek remark like "Avoid taking gambles" that was followed by those lottery number suggestions which they expected you to gamble.

But now the world's largest fortune cookie manufacturer has cut the heart out of the fortune cookie by removing romantic messages that one sometimes found inside. I say, what's wrong with reading a fortune that says, “The evening promises romantic interest”. This "no more romance fortunes in cookies because they might offend" is nothing but the crazy Western politically correct response about a fun Asian concept. In this case it's a few complaints from politically correct parents of young children. “Some parents sent us e-mails. They said they didn't want their kids reading them,” said Derrick Wong, a VP at the Brooklyn, New York based Wonton Food in justification for taking the romance out of fortune cookies..

Are they kidding? Do they think anyone really expects those cookie fortunes to be guidelines for a kid to follow? Hmmmmm Protecting kids from fortune cookie messages. I can think of a few other real world threats that might be better addressed instead. Wonton Food churns out five million cookies every day from manufacturing plants, shipping them to stores and restaurants nationwide. It boasts a catalog of about 10,000 fortunes, keeping about 5,000 or so in rotation at any given time. And they claim that the romance fortunes are the worst of the messages inside?

So I assume that parents are teaching their kids that there may be some truth to these fortune cookies messages. That itself is an oddity. In that case I think those parents should be wary their kids not read the words on the little Sweetheart Valentine candy too. Those Sweetheart candy hearts even ask the recipient to "Be Mine" and have the audacity to proclaim "I Love You'. I wonder how the western political correct police have let that that threat to their children go uncensored.
Die romance! But long live the idiocy of political correctness! We must protect our is from romance before it destroys them.