It is not just political correctness. I have noticed it in family/friends. Make one mistake or say one wrong thing and....”I am done with them” is the first thing out of their mouths. The axe comes out. In the last year I have seen it first hand and dealt with it just yesterday. It used to take something that was actually malicious to make someone outraged or offended. Not anymore. The punishment is swift and final.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
The last two Fortune 500 corporations I worked at where frightening. In one you could be “sentenced” to attend a week long off-campus course in “diversity, gender studies and cultural sensitivity.” There were any number of triggers starting with cultural insensitivity, which could be manifested in, for example, having a bumper sticker supporting traditional marriage. Both of these companies had government contracts as their only income. Much of this madness linked back to requirements in the contracts. Whether the results were actually required or simply implied to HR and the corporate directors, I don’t know.
I attended a mandatory training class on how to react when people told jokes. Both companies had a policy that no jokes could be told because “you don’t know who you might offend.” The teacher was from Central American and a died-in-the-wool communist. He said, “Okay, somebody had just told a joke and people have laughed. What do you do?” I raised my hand, saying, “Well, you know you have an appreciative audience. So, you try to top it.” He stared at me with his mouth open unable to respond. After class somebody said, “You know, I think if he’d had a gun he’d have shot you.” That was my impression as well. And, I did run afoul for an employee roast I gave at a restaurant off-campus. I was almost fired. But their reason for applying work rules (which were not published at the time) to me was that I’d created a work event by inviting people using company email. I wrote to the company legal office and said, “If that’s your reason to apply work rules, by saying my use of email made this a corporate event, what if somebody had gotten drunk and killed someone on the way home? You’ve admitted this was a work sanctioned event. Is the company not then liable for the death? The whole thing was quietly dropped.
But this is almost like living in a Nazi state where you have to watch every word even at home for fear of being punshed at work.