Point well made, although I do think that with this current fixation on Political Correctness, we seem to have reached a conservative extreme in the swinging of the social pendulum. We have reached a point where our speech has become this convoluted parsing of words and an endless discussion of whether tis better to say mentally retarded or mentally disabled or mentally handicapped, when there is no measurable difference between them. As a society it seems we have reached the conclusion that it's best for us to exist in this hypersensitive state of, not equality, but of thought sanitation, instead of acknowledging our differences and moving forward in some meaningful way. Is it wrong of me to laugh at the musings of Dave Chappelle on subjects like government reparations for disenfranchised minorities? I'm white, so probably, but I do laugh, and many white people laugh, because it's funny, and because it's good satire, and because we're such an uptight litigious people preoccupied with this ideal of equality for all, that it's no longer ok for us to even be different. We have gone to the other extreme, where smart, well-educated people are criticized by the less intelligent, less educated, as elitist. Articulate writers are lambasted for using lofty words that aren't accessible to the average reader. What's so bad about bringing the curve up instead of bringing the outliers down? But that's not how we're geared. The nation that roots for the underdog also aggressively marginalizes the talented, articulate, attractive and intelligent. We are petrified of our own shortcomings and failures, and we seem to feel chronically inadequate. How else to explain why we have concluded that our children will be best prepared for life if they have never known the negative feelings of failure or reprimand? Little league teams across the country are no longer keeping score, everybody bats through the lineup, everybody is a winner, and nobody wins.

...The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else...

~Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut