In Ireland, it’s all a matter of how you open your egg. Protestants and Catholics have a different opinion on the matter. Catholics of course believe in the centuries old tradition of eating their eggs from the small end, while Protestants believe in bottoms up all the way. The problem is, eggs are a pretty big deal, and how you open your eggs determines whom you hang out with, and whom you wish to hang. This egg problem is a global one, as Moslems and Christians, Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Turks, Hutus and Tootsies all have their own egg beliefs that they will permit no one to transgress. So groups of folks keep apart, tend their own fields, have their own separate sets of friends, and its all because of their eggs. Of course, most reasonable people believe that eggs may be opened any which way, but that leaves us with the problem of dealing with a century’s old tradition of egg beliefs that have for millennia set in a wild bloodlust country against country, tribe against tribe, and neighbor against neighbor.

Thus I propose a modest solution to the Irish problem. Send out squads of secret police during the night and round everybody up. Then separate all able-bodied men and women from the children, the old, and the infirm. Bring them to a large stadium, and have some of them dig trenches paralleling the bleachers. Then divide them up into mixed groups of twelve or so, and lead each group out singly into the field. Then give the signal to the guards, and ……..

PLAY BALL!

Thus we have the solution to the Irish problem: forcible baseball. Now of course the reader will naturally be skeptical of how team sports can eliminate ethnic hatreds that have lasted hundreds of years. Indeed, how can baseball resolve high-falutin’ metaphysical issues that have set Catholics and Protestants at each other’s throats for hundreds of years? Because it wasn’t deep thinking that set them at each other at all, as thinking had little to do with it.

Our cerebral noggins are after all limited in terms of the people and events they can perceive and model. Indeed, if we had to think about and feel for everyone and everything that was important, our heads would figuratively explode. So our brains simplify or parse the world, and mentally model only those events and individuals who we have to deal with to get through the day.

If there are only a few simple things we have to know about, then our world will seem simple, and we will act accordingly. I turn on the light switch and the light comes on, and ask a waiter for a menu, and get one. I don’t however start thinking about the physics of electricity or the psychology of waiters because I don’t have to. Because its not important, or will likely not signify its importance (as when the power fails or the waiter doesn’t return), light switches and waiters become very simple things.

As the saying goes, out of sight is out of mind, and the further out of sight one gets, the more mindless one seems. For people, the further away they get from us, the simpler do their minds seem to be. So your wife is complex, your aunt less so, and when you get to your eighth cousin in Switzerland, he becomes a mere cipher. And of course, we can erase ciphers all day and still get a good night’s sleep. Or as Stalin once said, the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a mere statistic. When we lose perspective, individuality blurs, and people become as indistinguishable and mindless as a horde of stupid clucking chickens. Thus, if a million Irishmen, Hutus, or Chinese are slaughtered by their neighbors or are swept away by a flood or volcano, so what? They are a million miles away, think simple thoughts, have one track minds, and merely make clucking noises.

It is the trivial issues that form a folkway of isolationism that leads in turn to the eventual mores that make hatred honorable. When people are separated because of the color of their team jersey, an obscure tenet of their religions, or the side they open their eggs, they become social insects, single dimensional creatures with one-track minds. But force them together in a common cause and then they have to cooperate, know each other, and become human again. We become deep thinkers when people are represented to us as deep, as empathy follows when we have to be empathetic to survive. Otherwise, its easy to classify people and their motivations with simple minded metaphors that diminish them, and make them prey to equally moronic philosophies that sanction prejudice, hatred, and even murder.

So baseball’s the key, or in truth anything that compels cooperation. If not, then life will always be us against the insects.

It’s all about squeezing the cucumber. Evolution saw to that. For the male of the species, family ties, marital vows, or social convention do not count. The cucumber must be squeezed. It’s not an emotional thing, it’s not a sentimental thing. Just routine maintenance, that’s all. Of course, the cucumber, like the Thanksgiving turkey, can be dressed up in sentiment, tradition, and be only trotted out on special occasions, and squeezed by only certain people. But despite social conventions, the need is still there, and men know deep down that the cucumber must be squeezed. Squeezing the cucumber is a task of great delicacy, not just any instrument will do. Power tools are definitely not suggested. Ideally, it needs to nestle in a soft, round, moist place with a lot of curves. More commonly however, one has to take things into one’s own hands.

That’s a shame too, but not unprecedented. Other items have the same problems. Melons, buns, nuts, and other low hanging fruits also need to be periodically jostled, pinched, and otherwise stroked. But tradition decrees otherwise. So they all end up wrapped, priced outlandishly, and stored just out of reach and seen mainly in catalogs.

Its all for our protection of course, an insurance for our good health and fidelity to our in house vendor. But we know otherwise. It’s a restriction of trade, an interference in the free market. But we can’t rebel; otherwise the cucumber would never be stroked. And that we cannot abide. So we put up with this restraint in trade, knowing full well that in a free market for cucumber squeezing, we would be healthier, happier, and would visit our in house fruit vendor just as much, and with an enthusiasm undiminished.

Modern Americans are a sorry lot, namely because they feel they continually have to say they’re sorry. Nowadays, it is the correct and fashionable thing to ask forgiveness through paying reparations, erecting monuments, establishing national holidays, granting preferences, designating parking spaces, and even renaming the title of the race. But does such penance serve to change behavior, or merely to excuse it?

Inquiring minds want to know. After all, if people can really change their hearts and minds through symbolic acts of contrition, mankind would be improved immeasurably and on the cheap. Peace on earth and goodwill towards men, and all for the price of a designated holiday or two! Unfortunately, symbolic gestures are small and incremental things, and like eating a cream pie each day, you won’t know that cream pies add something to you until months later when as a rotund gelatinous mass you crash through the floorboards of your house. Likewise, if you want an era of brotherly love, its important to know if changing a street sign will inspire good feelings and good deeds that will accumulate in time.

So how will we know if PC is good for us? A good way to find out is to take a cue from the long suffering little creature that has indirectly warned us of the evils of nicotine, overeating, and saturated fat, the laboratory rat! Feed rats their body weight in saccharine, and if they die next week of cancer or tooth decay, or just explode, we will know it is all due to artificial sweeteners. Just give them heaping helpings of whatever you think may be good or bad, and they will tell you soon enough. Unfortunately, rats do not respond to honorifics, compliments, knighthoods, or rat reparations, hence we have only Homo-sapiens as a proper experimental subject. Of course, since people are generally an impatient lot, we need to find out fast whether our golden age is just an affirmation away.

So, to quickly discover if PC is the way to Utopia, we should pile on the things that will make us feel good, or at the very least, sorry for ourselves. We can start by renaming ourselves. Indeed, why must we be just Americans when we can divide ourselves up into ethnic groups? After all, give or take a few hundred wars, pogroms, and massacres, the Germans, French, Russians, and English among others have lived in Europe in peaceful harmony over the centuries while relishing the superiority of their individual identities. The Negroes were the first to get it right. Why use that bland and offensive moniker if you can be an African-American? Better yet, why not employ an even better respect getting title like Royal African-Americans with Distinction? Following this precedent, why not make a name for yourself by renaming yourself? Similarly, why be a mere Caucasian when you can be a European American, a German American, a Florida State American, or a blood-donor, hearing challenged, lesbian, Armenian American? Moreover, why be burdened with responsibility, accountability, and some antique sense of sin? It’s a softer and altogether preferable fate to be challenged rather than handicapped, to be misguided rather than evil, or to be uninformed rather than stupid. We can define everything away except death and taxes, but even that will yield to the power of semantics.

And when we have redefined ourselves, we will all likely revolt, trash all the fancy names, and become just human beings again. Which ironically is where we wanted to be all along.