What Is Offensive?

The latest "you hurt my feelings and have no right to do that! moment came after a Halloween costume was pictured on the front page of the British newspaper, The Sun. The headline labeled it  "Towering Stupidity."  In the image, two 19-year-old women who were winners of a nightclub costume contest on Halloween night are shown wearing tube like costumes labeled "North Tower" and "South Tower." The costumes, which include hats with American flags, depict planes crashing into the Twin Towers in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

The women, both students at the University of Chester, later apologized, saying the costume "was not intended as a joke," but rather meant to "depict a serious, modern day horror." That's good enough for me. I wonder why people today get so upset about "their feelings being hurt" by every day, innocent life experiences like the costume. It used to be that more than ten years from a tragic event, people would be open minded enough to accept satire of it. Not any more.  Surely, that costume might remind some of a bad event itself  and may be offensive to the more sensitive of people who were directly effected by the 911 terrorists act.  But should we castigate the two women and ban such costumes? Is it "not right" to use satire and cynicism anymore because a few humans won't like the parody?

I say "cheers"  (imagine a British accident for full effect) to those two Brit ladies. They have imagination and have de sanctified an event that has become way too sacred to many Americans. The over sensitivity today, as in when we have those almost daily insincere but politically correct "apologies" by celebrities for public statements or behaviors that some dislike and find "offensive",  might be the result of the blur between the real world and the virtual one many people have sought refuge in today. I wonder if humans are beginning to fuse reality and the virtual now, given they are addicted to vacuous devices like cell phones. Before the explosion in communication media we were not "offended so much or so often by satire. People might feel better about themselves and their lives if they did not seek offenses that others commit against them.

Do we now even know what is real and what is not? Have we started to define the two the same way? Being offended by a Halloween costume? Ugh! Because humans have flaws life is a mixture of the offensive and non offensive. It's not nice to hurt anyone's feelings, but we do have the right to do so. If not, we confine ourselves to living in a politically correct bubble, and that's something I find very "offensive". Maybe a better approach to not liking a Halloween costume is to simply ignore it, not roar about hurt feelings and offense. Focusing on what is truly important in the real world might reduce a great deal of the alleged offenses with which others present us.