Everything Is Bigger In Texas - Including Idiocy

I first came across the story linked in the title from the "SciGuy" column in the Houston Chronicle (http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2008/07/is_black_hole_a.html).

Quoting the article on a Dallas County Commissioners meeting about traffic ticket collections:

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

The author of the "Go Play In The Street" blog you are now reading, who is white, is sick of the overwhelming effort by many in this country to go out of their way to find or, if necessary, manufacture out of whole cloth racial or other insensitivities where they do not exist.

Memo to Commissioner Price and Judge Jones: Anyone who has successfully escaped the first half of a public school education in this country is more than passingly familiar with the concept of a "black hole". Not just the term itself, but the properties of the phenomenon. Anyone who does not comprehend the meaning of the term, nor its vernacular usage in common American English is not competent to wander the streets unsupervised, let alone hold public office.

Many terms in our language employ color, and while with tremendous effort could be construed as doing so do not actually posses any racial overtones whatsoever. "Red tape" is not a slur against Native Americans. "Brown out" does not implicate Hispanics. "Yellow anything" is not intended as denigration of all things Asian. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a color is just a color.

In 2007, Bo and Luke Duke (John Schneider and Tom Wopat) from the "Dukes of Hazzard" television series had their participation in a Cincinnati Pops Orchestra presentation canceled. Indeed, the entire concert was canceled over their proposed participation. Why? Because a local NAACP representative opined that the actors' participation in the series thirty years ago, in which the General Lee had a Confederate flag boldly emblazoned upon it, might indicate tacit support of the racism that flag promotes in the minds of some by the Cincinnati Pops.

Yes, the most dedicated practitioner of mental yoga can find insult in almost anything if they try hard enough. Wouldn't it be better though to assume insult is not intended until the one giving insult makes it inescapably clear that insult is indeed intended?

Approaching most of life with a positive mindset just might make much of the bovine fertilizer medium we find ourselves compelled to trudge through daily disappear forever down a black hole of common sense.