Safe Speech

"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)

Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike.  Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's  mouth shut.  That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in  -- she construed it as sexual harrassment.  You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble.  In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion.  To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be.  Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?

Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed.  Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals.  Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior.  The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the punk's 'culture.'

You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them.  My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains.  She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips.  Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.

The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs.  But I will.  Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose. 

Companion post: Idle Talk