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‘Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious or secular practices of your choice—‘

Believe it or not, this was the beginning of a Christmas card I received online from one of the jokers on my old high school chat group.

Now, it went on and on, chock full of politically correct nonsense. And that’s all most of the PC stuff is, nonsense.

Now, there is PC, and then there is more PC. I agree racial and cultural slurs should never be uttered, but let’s don’t go overboard. Such slurs are moral violations, not political.

Last December 31, at the Armed Forces Bowl in Fort Worth, the University of California at Berkeley played Air Force. You might not know it, but Berkeley is a hotbed for political correctness.

They carry it to the point, in my opinion, of absurdity— Hold on! I guess I should have said, ‘being ludicrously unrealistic.’

In fact, a number of journalists in Fort Worth, Bud Kennedy especially, got a kick out of the most politically correct pocket of America visiting the least politically correct, Texas.

Can you imagine, he said, the cultural shock of a Berkeleyite going into a Fort Worth restaurant with a sign on the door stating, ‘Yes, we’re open. No Concealed Handguns’?

I couldn’t help cackling when I read a California journalist friend of Kennedy’s tongue-in-cheek PC translation of a Texas menu featuring smoked barbeque brisket and beans on a paper plate.

‘Locally produced ungulate drizzled with a muddled tomato-based sauce originating from a Spanish-Creole culture, accompanied by savory chestnut and ecru-speckled legumes’ (pinto beans) ‘with pain au levain blanc’ (white bread) ‘and confetti-shredded winter vegetables’ (cole slaw) ‘served on a biodegradable serving dish that will become organic compost.’

Now, we can laugh at this, but believe me, those folks out there take the pc nonsense seriously. Bell Helicopter sponsored the game. Weird as it sounds, there was Berkeley talk of boycotting the game because it was sponsored by ‘instruments of death.’ Talk about someone’s elevator not going all the way to the top floor!

What else could you expect from loonies (I know, I know, loony isn’t pc. Tough) who on the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the Americas changed the celebration from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.

'Said the mayor, Lonni Hancock, “previous celebrations had been ‘eurocentric and ignored the brutal realities of the colonization of indigenous peoples.’

Then a few years later, in April 2005, Berkeley again stirred the PC cauldron by renaming Abraham Lincoln Elementary to Malcolm X Elementary and Christopher Columbus Elementary to Rosa Parks Elementary.

Now, I’ve always considered myself an open-minded individual, so I wish some diehard PC advocate would explain to a dummy like me exactly what is politically correct in those two name changes.

Or it is just another example of their being ‘ludicrously unrealistic?’

You want to know how ridiculous we’re becoming. There is even a movement to substitute the expression ‘word chart’ for ‘flip chart.’ And never in a thousand years can you guess why? Seems like the term flip chart might prove offensive to Filipinos.

To quote the wise old sage, Gaylord Z. Putz, ‘Unbelievable!”