Bitching About Stupid Shit

The amount of absolutely stupid shit people find to bitch about continues to surprise me. Today’s example of a totally irrelevant occurrence rustling jimmies is Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl commercial. Although I didn’t see it I do know that it involved the song America the Beautiful being sung in languages other than English. How do I know this? Because quite a few people are very upset about it:

The response to the Cheerios commercial Sunday night, however, was all positive — the bigoted social media backlash instead appeared a few minutes later when Coca Cola aired its commercial with “America the Beautiful” sung in different languages.

The calls for boycotts came immediately with tweets like this one from @HappieDays12: “I will not be purchasing any #CocaCola products for the foreseeable future. Pretty sure we speak English in America.”

Similarly minded @Lady_Jay_J tweeted, “Since when did the national anthem get sung in Spanish?! Not a good idea #CocaCola.”

Even today there are people tweeting about this commercial. I’m left wondering why anybody cares. Of all the problems that exist in the world why does anybody waste the time necessary to be upset about the language a song is sung in? Is it because America the Beautiful is the national anthem of the area inside of some imaginary borders referred to as the United States and that most English speakers inside of those lines believe English is the official language? If that’s the reason these people are upset let me help them overcome their pointless complaint. The official language of this area known as the United States is whatever the fuck you want to speak. Nationally, which is the scope we’re working on as the song is the national anthem, there is no official language in the United States.

Now that I have resolved this crisis feel free to find another pointless thing to complain about. I suggest getting upset at the people who don’t know the difference between there, their, and they’re. If you’re going to get upset about something involving the English language then it might as well be something that’s relevance to the language.

Not Everything Involving Race is Racism

Racism is one of those things I will never understand. Basing personal judgements on the color of another person’s skin ranks right up there with judging another person based on the color of their shoes. It’s a characteristic that tells you nothing about the person’s character, which is what I give value to. With that said, there are times when a person’s race is a notable characteristic. Namely when you’re trying to describe a single individual out of the seven billion that occupy this planet. In such a case any physical characteristic such as height, weight, race, eye color, hair color, hair style, clothing, tattoos, physical deformities, overt injuries, nose shape, etc. are valuable criteria points. This is why I this request rather absurd:

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – School officials at the University of Minnesota are working with black student and facility organizations after they wrote a letter to the school’s president about the racial descriptions given in crime alerts.

According to the story the letter requested that racial descriptions be omitted from suspect descriptions given by campus security. The organizations that submitted the letter were concerned about racial profiling due to the racial descriptions given of robbery suspects near the University of Minnesota campus. While profiling is certainly unwarranted and should be actively fought the inclusion of race as a description of a suspect is not, in of itself, racist so long as it’s accurate.

As I said, there are seven billion humans on this planet. Trying to uniquely describe each one of us isn’t easy. Unless you have every available physical characteristic in hand you’re going to have a hard time. Race is a common description given by victims because it is an easily noticeable characteristic. With a quick glance we can generally note a person’s skin color, height, weight, and a vague idea of what they’re wearing.

When discussing social issues like racism and sexism we must keep in mind that there are legitimate reasons to note such features as race and sex. The important thing is to separate the legitimate reasons from the illegitimate reasons and work to fight the latter.