In Conclusion; Inclusion.

If you feel that you were slighted this year. You're not alone. This year marks a year chock full of heavenly nuts; and nuts is where many people caught their slightings. We had slurs, jurors, and naked celebrity beaver. This year marked an all time high (and low on many levels) for Offensiveness/Offensensititvity. These two usually travel in pairs in our society. People will offend, someone will be offended, and someone will be sensitive to their and everyones needs. This is Political Correctness at it's most lethal. You can't swing a dead cat without offending the A.S.P.C.A. or hitting someone who will claim to be hurt by our actions. Shouldn't we really talk to the cat first? But I ask wouldn't it have been alright if at the beginning of the year we all took a breath and said,"We all have our turn of being parodied, I will accept my turn, and keep score to make sure everyone gets a piece of this satire pie."?

You shouldn't offend maliciously, that's covered by the Golden Rule. If we only would do unto others as we would have done, we'd be utopian, but when you get near that line of Humor bordering on Mean, well you can't scream "foul" without offending an impatient duck-lover (which is funny on two levels, three if you let them marry). There would be so many less instances of Outrage if we all took a breath and said, "Chill out, the source is an idiot." Everyone got a dose of Bitter Pills this year; Blacks, Gays, Jews, Soldiers, Women- that list was alphabetical so as not to piss off grade school teachers. Bullshit was spread around near and wide. Fortunately we know that manure has a way of making things grow when you spread it around. Hopefully we can grow a sense of humor and a sense of purpose. We tapdanced our way through a maze of spin this year as icons fell like saddam statues in Bagdhad, ooops, I'm sure I just offended statue makers in Iraq. So many people said some of the craziest shit, and always within microphone range. We were served a cornycopia of hate and stupidity from so many different sides. The internet became a circus net catching all the crazy acts as they plummeted to earth. Look back on these instances as widespread acts of morons (W.A.M.'s) similar in effect to random acts of kidness. If the acronym offends the George Michael fan club, please strap on a leather mask, take a bong hit and mellow out. George would.

This year we had DUIS, AWOLS, N-WORDS, F-BOMBS and A-HOLES. We strove to put acrid in our acronyms. We had a year of many sacred calves being slaughtered in the media, for our entertainment. We were titillated in text, tv, internet and radio. One would think we would require a week offfrom all the scandal and celeb wars but we're still tuned in for the next comb-over joke or blogspeak vocab world to learn. If we can only remember on our relentless pursuit of knowledge that perspective lends it's self to objectivity and from objectivity you can draw an informed conclusion on what you've read. Maybe it's not as offensive as we once thought, when we review something with the proverbial grain of salt. And trust me, salt makes the tequila go down nicer than a spoonful of sugar does the medicine.

In conclusion, we really need to be inclusive. Not just in tragedy, in everyday life We can laugh at a brother as long as we know, we may be next. And that's cool. If we missed offending anyone this year, such as coffee growers, daycare operators, parakeets, Ty Pennington, geometry teachers, little people, ex wives, jell-o, sandanistas, spatulas, shetland ponies, magazines, old neighbors, Margot Kidder et al. please consider yourselves told off in some base way offending not only you but your constituents too. And your little dog. Remember that we were just kidding, Kidder, kidding. Except about the dog.