The New Normal

A friend from Costa Rica recently asked me read and review an article for him.  It was an online opinion piece: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-l-scott/is-vulgar-the-new-normal_b_2783646.html and I thought it was pretty well written and dead on point.  At my friend's request, I posted a short video of my thoughts for him to use.  Unfortunately, the time for the video was too short for my thoughts to be fully developed.  Here they are in a somewhat more expounded form:

Yes, the author is right, and that is sad.  There was a time in which vulgarity was the province of a minority of people, and outside of that it was used to shock the senses.  Now, sadly, it has crept--or maybe been driven--into the vocabulary and mindset of the majority and no longer has that effect when it is used.  Rarely does a conversation occur into which some level of profanity does not creep,  What was once called polite conversation is rarely that any more. It is punctuated by words that two generations ago just WERE NOT used.

For the most part, foul language among women of any class was nearly unheard of.  Even the men who used it shook their heads at the women who could "cuss like a sailor."  Now, we hear women--of all classes--using the same vulgarities with near-equal regularity.  I guess we've lost a level of civility in the interest of equality.  Once the presence of women had at least a slight effect of keeping the tongues in check.

The article's author brought out the vulgarity of violence as well as language.  Since we've allowed reality TV to invade our lives--often with set-up confrontations between talk-show participants--we have made violence part of that new norm also.  The willingness to fight both verbally and physically has been pushed so that fighting--really down and out fight fighting--has come back to acceptance, making peace seems to be a forgotten virtue.

No doubt, this topic could be developed in far greater depth, but for the moment, that's all I have to offer and wanted to get it into print before I went to work.