Making Dinner Conversation

We thought that a blog on today's American culture should address a key element of the initial culture shock that any foreigner in this country would experience and will find most entertaining and somehow disturbing: the obsession to be politically correct!

As educated young professionals we both thought that applying common sense would be enough to guide us through a dinner conversation without hurting the varied and complex sensitivities of our conversation partners but most times than not we kind of sensed that pleasing everybody in a conversation and express your true and honest point of view is virtually impossible. 

The obsession to be politically correct has permeated all levels of society and everything that you knew, the difference between right and wrong has somehow shifted and became an exercise in which nobody is right and nobody is wrong where the focus is on making sure nobody feels bad about anything, where you cannot express a judgement, your very own opinion because somebody somehow will take one of the forbidden words that came out of your mouth and distort them to read a negative judgment. Yes, because positive judgements are acceptable negative ones have to be wrapped or repackaged in some positive ones. For example, Bibi was being introduced to a group of fellow interns at CW11 and when she was told she would be working closely with Antonia she asked which one was Antonia since they were at a distance and the other person was trying to describe Antonia without mentioning her ethnicity althogth she was the only African-American (I will be politically correct). After a difficult 5 minutes in which Antonia was described as the person wearing black pants, although two persons were wearing black pants, and she had short hair although there were other persons wearing black pants and had short hair, Bibi decided to relieve the politically correct person by suggesting that Antonia was the only black girl (Bibi is allowed to say black, because she's black, so much for equality). 

All in all, one of America's greatest pride, the freedom of speech is now locked in a check mate position where you can only stand still and talk about the weather and what the Yankees did. 

In order not to hurt anybody's sensitivity, what makes nowadays dinner conversation is stuff that is so boring and stale that many people prefer to keep their mouth shut rather than go  walking on egg shells.