There's this really impressive trap here, GUEST, where being taught to 'own' your own words seems to make you think it's all about you. Or your sensibilities.

News flash: it isn't.

Nor is about someome who 'finds' given words offensive. Anyone. Even the actual member of an oppressed group, as opposed to the empathic poseur, which you more resemble.

Culture is culture;it is what it is. History was history, it was what it was. Deal with it. Learn something.

'Traditional' or 'folk' music is, at the end of the day, about *the experience of the people who sang it.* You don't get to modify that experience just because your 2002 sensibilities don't match theirs. Even about the word formerly known as the N-word, and once known as the B-word, but know properly the A-A words. That isn't part of the deal.

Nor do you get to erase those people, who lived, loved, raised families, and were as baffled by their changing world as you and I (such as when they wrote 'Dixie'), from memory.

If you want that, then go dig up some Rogers and Hammerstein. Mid 20th-century Show Tunes are definitely the way to go. Along with liberal doses of the theme from 'Leave it to Beaver.' Immerse yourself up to your armpits in fluff. Plug your ears with fluff until the fluff plugs up your mind as well.

But don't go out to MTV, because you'll hear the N-word all over there, too. And you'll hear anti-Semitic, misogynistic and violent stuff that will curl (or uncurl, as the case may be) your hair.

I firmly stand for a world where we don't tell people what to sing. Or say. Or think.

Everything else seems just a little too dangerous, however well-meaning and correct the thought-police think that they are...this time around.