Fair enough. I felt like you were talking about generalities about how you felt we give too much power to people who are offended. I didn’t realize your points were limited to the discussion of this case only.
Do you know why people are “offended” by the word “assimilate”? There are people walking down the street who were targeted by a government program that had a goal of getting them to “assimilate” under which they were taken from their families and put in schools where many were physically and sexually abused. They grew up without parents, many were beaten if they spoke the language they learned as children. I can’t possibly list the horrors here. The last residential school closed in the mid-90’s. This isn’t about reminding people of something that happened hundreds of years ago, it’s about something that happened to people walking down the street looking at the licence plate today.
If you don’t understand this context, then I can see why you wouldn’t think “assimilate” is such a horrible thing to say, but it’s pretty much on par with “watch your parent commit suicide” as a licence plate. It’s obvious that some people who lived through that experience are going to take that pretty hard.
So if your concern is entirely that the people who were offended by this licence plate were too “easily” offended, you should probably know that the person is driving it in a province where “assimilate” would be a direct reminder of childhood emotional, physical and sexual abuse to tens of thousands of people. This isn’t about an undergrad student freshly angered by an introductory class they took.
If you think that absolutely anything should be allowed on a licence plate I’ll accept you have a radical position. But if you think that some things should be disallowed for being offensive, then I think you probably just don’t realize how offensive this plate is.
Yeah, but as you note in your next paragraph, you should probably be thankful that they can’t do the same to you. That’s why I don’t think any contact is appropriate in this case. In your personal life you have to deal with assholes, but when assholes violate rules and you report the violation, you should be able to count on the people who enforce the rules to do their job (which may include doing nothing if you were way off base).
