Can we please just stop firing everybody for literally everything? Please?
What are we trying to accomplish here?
Gary Hahn, a sports broadcaster at North Carolina State University since 1991, was fired last month for uttering the words “illegal aliens” during a broadcast. Here’s what he said to get himself canned:
If you can’t activate the audio there for some reason, the remarks—in the context of sports score reportage—were:
“And amongst all the illegal aliens down in El Paso, it’s UCLA 14 and Pittsburgh 6.”
That’s it. He was literally fired for suggesting that El Paso is currently dealing with a massive influx of illegal immigrants. Do you know what is happening in El Paso right now? They are currently dealing with a massive influx of illegal immigrants. Nobody disputes this or denies it. People will style it differently—some will argue that you’re supposed to use terms like “undocumented migrant” or “person living in the country without authorization” or whatever, and some will argue that the crisis is less about illegal immigration and more about the injustices of the U.S. immigration system itself—but nobody will deny that this crisis is happening, that it involves people living in the country illegally, and that “illegal aliens” is in fact a correct legal way to describe those people.
So why did he get fired? Is it because the term “illegal aliens” is, though correct, nevertheless offensive? Woke language police are always finding a reason to be upset about whatever it is anyone is saying—I have no doubt that “undocumented” will be considered racist in less than five years’ time—but even in the context of woke politics, “illegal alien” isn’t that offensive. It almost feels just antiquated more than anything, like something Henry Kissinger would say. Is it because he merely mentioned the illegal alien crisis down in El Paso? Is that really a fireable offense? Why? Because he mentioned a thing that is happening? Come on. Is it because his remarks were presumably meant to be taken in the negative—that he’s unhappy with El Paso being swamped by illegal immigrants? Again, is that fireable? Is it now considered a bad thing to not want a major city in your country to be completely waylaid by a massive wave of people living in tents and on cardboard boxes? This is a bad thing?
I am just mystified as to why this man’s remarks were considered worthy of termination. I can understand a slap on the wrist for the guy. “Don’t bring your politics into the broadcast, keep it neutral, let’s not have this conversation again.” Canning someone over those remarks, however, feels like an almost comical overreaction, like the guys running the station are scared that someone might even acknowledge that illegal immigrants exist.
But that’s essentially the world we live in now: Everyone is so thoroughly cowed by the specter of woke mobs, and corporate managers are so completely inured to making the most conventional and cowardly business decisions possible, that you can get fired from a three-decade-long career for uttering two normal and unobjectionable words. Can we please stop this? Can we knock it off? Can people just stop being weird and neurotic and hypersensitive and just respond to events like sane, normal, healthy individuals? I promise the world will be a better place and we’ll all be a lot happier if we all do that.