NO OFFENCE

Well, this is the sort of thing that happens when you’ve got out of the habit of doing something and then you return to it; You can forget the kinds of things that it’s okay to talk about, and what is the sort of thing that’s best avoided.

There is an argument that goes along the lines of “Getting offended is a choice, and if you choose to get offended, then that’s your choice” but some people never can really get their heads around that one.

Equally, getting offended because you have an opinion different to someone else, and choosing to become offended because they state it is really nobody else’s fault but your own. After all, if you make the choice to read something, and then decide to become offended by it does make the reader, in part at least, culpable.

If you didn’t think you’d like what was being said, maybe you ought not to have read it.

Some might argue that not writing something would avoid the whole issue, but if we only “allow” certain points of view to be heard and not others, we’ve crossed a line that none of us should find acceptable in a so-called “free” society.

It’s rather like the days of Mary Whitehouse and the Viewers and Listeners Association choosing to watch a TV show that they know would contain something that they would not like, and then complaining about it afterwards as if they were the only people capable of having a reasoned and acceptable opinion upon it.

Ah well…

So anyway, this return to the weird world of having opinions is a minefield, and it’s fraught with hidden dangers. Granted, it’s in nobody’s interest for anyone to go out of their way to be deliberately offensive, or to preach words of hatred, but surely open and fair discussion and debate, and people having different opinions on a wide range of subjects is what free speech should be all about.

Of course, there are those who go out of their way to be offended, and these are the people for whom things like the internet, Twitter and Facebook are something of a godsend.

After all, where better to express your moral outrage and disgust about the slightest little thing?

Or at least, and this is the important distinction, to be seen to be outraged and disgusted by your peers about something that might otherwise have slipped by unremarkably and unremarked upon until someone decided that this was "terrible" and someone capable of taking the moral high ground should make an issue of it.

Of course, the fact that they might otherwise have found it "funny" if their mate said it in the pub, or that they might even have thought or even said the same thing themselves in different circumstances, is quietly glossed over if someone who has "got above themselves" can be taken to task or brought down a peg or three by such outrage, and maybe forced to apologise.

We live, however, in an era where the "public apology" has become so commonplace that it's almost as if such moments have already been structured into whatever marketing strategy that the day's news agenda has in mind for it, and often for things that actually wouldn't seem that bad if "people" didn't keep taking it upon themselves to become offended on everyone else's behalf all of the time.

So, I guess that I’ll just be shutting up again now, for a while at least, which will allow the critics and those who don’t like to hear other points of view to win another battle, even though I find that I do hope that they’ll go away and really think about what it is that they’ve done.