The View?

What the fuck, right? Why would I watch the View?

Well, every once and awhile, it's fun to watch a train wreck.

Elizabeth Hasselbeck is insane, everyone knows this. She fully endorses Sarah Palin, which is funny.

The hilarious thing about this, is that she breaks down during a conversation about the dreaded "n"-word. She gets incredibly upset because she doesn't understand why white people aren't allowed to say it, but black people are. She even says "we live in the same world," reasoning that we are all somehow immediately equal because we are all equally represented on billboards, commercials, and in films.

Elizabeth, I have some news for you: not everyone grew up in the middle class white America. Not everyone has that "unique" perspective on life, racism, equality. And you're forgetting to mention the other thing, the important one: White people don't want to hear the word because it reminds them of their guilt. And most white people, at least the normal, non-racist ones, do feel guilty for the past. They don't want to hear the word, because it makes them uncomfortable.

I say let us hear it. Scream it from the fucking rooftops, and then beat the shit out of us if we use it. Some people need to have their comfort zone rattled a little.

But again, this all goes back to one thing, and that is this: context. It's all well and good to say that no one should say a particular word because it offends your sensibilities, but what are you really saying? You're requesting that people stop using a word, a word, which intrinsically has absolutely no meaning. Who cares if someone wants to say it in the privacy of their own home, or even to a friend in public? It is the connotation of the word which matters, and the meanings of words change constantly. The English language is an enormous shifting database of words and phrases.

By spending so much time focusing on why words are bad, they are given the power to be upsetting. By focusing on not saying them, you have done precisely the opposite. You are announcing to the world that these words are taboo, which of course means that people will use them more often. Talking about them makes them part of our lexicon. Want a word to disappear from use? Just wait. Time is the only thing that does the trick. In time, language will change again, and fuck might not be the go to curse word for almost every situation.

The truth is that there is a double standard that people like Elizabeth don't understand. They don't get it, because they don't live in the same world we do. Hollywood is in its own fucking microcosm, and she has no clue how things work. My black friend can call me a honky, and I won't take offense, but you can be damn sure if I were to refer to him with the terrible word, he would be upset. And he should be.

We are not at a point in America where the race barrier has been broken. It still exists in an extremely pronounced way, and as long as it does, we have to continue to watch what we say. Obama has stated many times that this is not a white America, or a black America, but a United States of America where everyone is equal and awesome. That may be what he wants to achieve, but we still have a long way to go to claim that we are, indeed, a cohesive group of Americans united under the same principals and freedoms.