Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

 - jim Young 20210402

“You can believe me now or you can believe me when you find out I’m right. It doesn’t matter to me.” - Jay Benson (one of my mentors at Kolmar.)

My father always taught me that I could do anything that I really wanted to do if I put my mind to it. My father was wrong of course, but I never held it against him. I quickly learned that there were sometimes outside forces that I had no control over working against me. Gravity, for one, comes to mind. I’m sure you can figure out what THAT was all about.

But I also learned my father’s lesson was not intended to be taken literally. The emphasis was on “putting my mind to it” and learning to try.

In a recent, obvious attempt to discredit Joe Biden, Brittany M. Hughes has attacked a speech made by Biden about teaching his granddaughters the same basic lesson.

Hughes is not wrong in her theories, of course, but she might want to cut Biden a bit of slack here. Whether you like Joe Biden or not, it’s not just Biden that has made this common mistake. In the name of political correctness, for the past half century, men all over the world have been conditioned to believe this concept.

Hughes’ criticism might be better directed at the women and feminists that have been responsible for creating this definition of “equality of the sexes” since the late 1960s.

“You need different ingredients. Just like men and women. And these differences play out in the workplace. This is not a secret. There’s a reason women tend to make 81 cents for every dollar a man makes and it’s not because they’re actually getting paid less for the same exact work…

… According to one Harvard study men are also twice as likely to pick up overtime as women. Why? Largely because women are much more likely to want to head home to take care of domestic stuff or to take time off to care for their young children - not just because we have to. Many of us genuinely want to.”

You should take 7:22 minutes out of your life to watch the entire video to fully appreciate the context.

But this is just an example of what Hughes says that I've been preaching since the 1970s. For that, I have been labeled a "Male Chauvinist" and even “Misogynist” by women and feminists alike.

While most men were trying their damndest to be “politically correct”, I wasn’t buying it.

It almost seems as if we’ve gone full circle in the political correctness spectrum. (That is not to imply that there haven’t been some real benefits to come out of the feminist movement.)

In the meantime, I’m just going to stick to my beliefs - political correctness be damned, and take comfort in knowing that eventually my views will come back into fashion one day.

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