That's a Bad Word?

I work from eleven p.m. to seven a.m. Monday through Friday. It’s my habit to have the radio on whenever I’m driving, and I’m usually tuned in to 1100 KNZZ because I like to hear the news and several of the conservative talk shows. Lately I’ve been extra eager to hear the radio on right after I get off work because the first hour of the Glenn Beck program is now on the air.

Glenn Beck has quickly become my favorite talk show host. He is so irreverent, so funny, and his politics are usually exactly aligned with my own. I haven’t listened to him for a long time relatively speaking, on an off for just over two years now. I was introduced to him three winters ago because his show would be on KNZZ when I would leave Powderhorn to drive home. For a while he wasn’t on anymore, and then they cut out his third hour, but now he’s on for three hours, oddly arranged as one hour in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. So I love to tune in every morning after a long night’s work and be greeted with his trademark, “Hello, you sick, twisted freak.”

This morning a caller wanted to talk about the post-9/11 requirements of photo i.d.’s for everyone. He was trying to compare it to something that the Nazis had done, but he wouldn’t say the word Nazi on the air: he claimed that the call screener had told him not to. I guess he was referring to the requirement that all the Jewish people had to get i.d.’s leading up to World War II and wear the Star of David. Beck asked, “That’s a bad word?” and kicked the guy off the air after confirming with his screener that she had not nixed the term Nazi.

What I’m babbling towards in a round about way is the tendency for people to say a word is bad when it isn’t. I remember hearing on the radio about a high school English teacher being fired because she read the word “niggardly” aloud in class and explained what it meant (“stingy” from Old Norse). I remember during the 2004 debates when Kerry demanded that Bush not call him a liberal. In both cases I found myself perplexed to the point of irritation.

Since when is liberal a bad word? According to dictionary.com “Liberalism is an ideology, philosophical view, and political tradition which holds that liberty is the primary political value.” We don’t use the word in that way any more; the new term for that ideology is Libertarianism. Liberalism has changed from the idea that everyone is equal with the same rights to something very different. A liberal education is something that’s good to have, but use that word for a politician, and even if they are a liberal, they apparently might become offended.

Why are people so hesitant to stand up for what they are? I embrace liberalism in the classical sense of the word, and though I do not share the ideals of the new form of liberalism, I do rigorously defend their rights to speak up for their beliefs, just as much as I defend the Conservatives’, Christians’, Environmentalists’, Polluters’, Socialists’, Libertarians’ right to freedom of speech. I am proud of being different, is there anything wrong with that? Since when is saying what you believe wrong?