With the start of the holiday season comes the festivities of Christmas, the decorations, and the cheerful atmosphere. One of the trademark characteristics of the season that is becoming as synonymous with Christmas as Santa, large trees, and grand light displays is the annual Starbucks cup controversy.

Every year Starbucks releases their seasonal cup design to ring in the holiday season, but for the past few years Starbucks has done the unthinkable, attacking Christianity at its very core, committing the worst offense to the religion since the crucifixion of Jesus himself! They no longer put imagery directly relating to Christmas on their cups! And people are mad… for some reason.

There seems to be a new cultural shift in America that is greatly personified with this growing controversy. It is no secret that there seems to be an ever-growing ease of offense, slowly diminishing what is considered to be politically correct in this day and age due to a person’s need to feel offended, but this idea has been around for quite some time now. This shift in ideology has brought life to a new form of offense. This is the growing offense-ception culture in America: those who get offended by people trying to keep others from getting offended.

Ignoring the overwhelming stupidity of the argument that not having a directly secular holiday image on a cup of coffee is in some way an attack on your religion, the fundamental essence of the argument is strewn with hypocrisy. The entire basis of the offense being taken by the people who have a problem with the cups is that others are taking offense. It is obviously a paradoxical argument in that they are offended because of the potential of others to be offended. If these people truly believed what they are attempting to convey, they would not care that these cups are not celebrating Christmas, instead they would just accept it. But the fact that these people are getting offended by such a minor offense on something they care about proves that they are no better than the people they are denouncing. There is only one real solution to the problem surrounding the sensitivity in today’s culture. That solution is: everyone please, just calm down.