Yeah, I said it - put it right there in the title, offended? Well, I don't care - grow up, If your mum was any good she'd have told you words can't hurt you.
I've been overseas for the past year and keeping up to date with the news back home there's something I've noticed- You guys have developed an anger problem.
More after the jump
It seems there are people in our country who can only be happy if they are in a constant state of outrage. If it isn't something the Chaser did, then it's a baby's shirt from Cotton On (I think they deserve the publicity).
You know what I did when the Parents and Concerned Guardians of Society and Moral Values told me about the kids shirt with 'They Shake Me' printed on it?
I laughed.
Who exactly is this offending? It wasn't racist or sexist and I doubt the babies care.
Tasteless might be a reason not to buy the shirt, but why bother with the outrage?
The same goes with the 'sick kids sketch'. If you can't handle abrasive humour then you shouldn't watch the Chaser. Furthermore, unless are terminally ill patient, you don't have any right to complain - and even then you need to say something interesting instead of just being 'outraged'.
Anyway - if all this stuff is so hateful and hurtful - then why do all the 'outraged' people go round telling everyone?
Only the roughly 1 in 20 Australians who chose to watch the Chaser late that night would have seen the skit if it wasn't regurgitated in tabloid newspapers and desperate TV shows the next night.
I don't buy it, I don't think anyone is actually offended by these thing - They're attention seekers.
Their lives are boring and they've got nothing better to tweet or facebook about. Oh how nice it feels to be outraged surrounded by a group of other outraged people. Even the prime minister is there to pat you on the back. How good and mature and upstanding you must be because you are so very very outraged...
Only you're not mature - you're weak minded. A rational and mature human adult can think for themselves, they can make their own decisions about what they do and don't like, they can see something they don't like without calling for it to be banned, they know that unless it's a call to arms or personal insult - then words can do little harm.
Then there are the people that fear offence, the ones that laugh but then look around to make sure nobody saw. They worry that it will offend someone, so they make a pre-emptive strike. You know the sort, "I'm not offended personally, but I can only imagine if I was a sick child..."
Well that's just it, you can only imagine. Leave it to the person who has a right to take offence to do so - most of the time I doubt they care that much - perhaps they laugh too.
Politicians jump on the band wagon to get the grey votes and the family values votes. The media (especially online publications) love these stories because they go on for days and get a reaction out of readers.
But we still need voices out there that say:
"No - actually it's not an outrage - it's just words - cancer is an outrage, youth suicide rates are an outrage, poverty is an outrage - that? that was just words"
If you want to get outraged over something, pick something real - human rights or obesity or animal welfare or the rapidly shrinking size of biscuits these days. They all matter more than a few bad taste jokes.
Paternalistic moralising infecting our entire country? Now that's an outrage!
Original image from
here
