I Consider You My Equal, But My Government Does Not.
Jul 02 '03
The Bottom Line --Though i acknowledge you as my equal, my government's policies make it embarrassingly apparent that it does not. Racial/gender preferences weaken and divide. Crying-towels make lousy flying-carpets.
ADVANTAGES: None... No quotas, preferences, set-asides, etc., based on race, religion, color or gender.
DISADVANTAGES: ...and handicaps should be considered on a case-by-case; not a race-by-race basis.
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SPINNING LITERARY SILK PURSES OUT OF EXPERIENTIAL SOWS' EARS...
My friend Robert, a.k.a, epinions-user "Brotherman," wrote a list of 100 cathartic reflections entitled: "Brotherman at 100: 100 things you might not have known about me." He, in effect, uses the list to flush out any lingering or dormant "victimism" his bleak childhood might have left festering in his subconcious, lest its subliminal presence beguile him with some reasonable excuse for failing to achieve his dreams. To read Robert's hard-bitten restrospections about his storm-tossed trek to adulthood is to appreciate what it's like to sail through a torrential downpour of adversity without feeling spiritually waterlogged by a resultant experience of pity or pathos. I attribute this to Robert's distinctly "non-victim" mentality. Though each one of his list's proclamations provoked my thought in one way or another, there were two whose "Scarlett O’Hara, I'll never be poor again!" fiery indignation and prescient insights inspired me to write him a responsive comment. I gave the comment a title and posted it as the op you're (presumably) now reading. The two declarations I previously noted are "#73" and "#74" directly below:
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["73 Because of my experiences at Western I have built in a deep seated hatred of being racially paternalized. Motherf*cker, you better give me the same opportunities as anybody else and take me seriously in every thing I do. I m not a victim, I dont need lower standards and the quickest way to get me apoplectic is to assume I do.
74 I cant stand mindless granola Chomsky-styled liberalism either. If you are driving a benz, and are having your daddy pay for your college education, your ignorant a$$ shouldnt be a socialist. Capitalism worked for you. Quit b!tching about what you got."]
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THE POLITICS OF "NON-VICTIMISM"
So why does such an art-oriented, nature-loving, non-materialist, social radical like me, run on the Republican ticket? Of the Hobson's choice we are presented by the two "politically-viable" parties, the one that seems to least support or encourage what I call "victimism;" the self-fulfilling perception or belief that one's lack of happiness or success is due to some oppressive factor outside of his or her control, is the G.O.P.. I think the liberal "quotas and preferences" approach to problem-solving and issue-addressing encourages and espouses victimism, and more insidiously, racial and gender prejudice.
Of course I realize many, perhaps most of the adverse situations we are forced to face and endure, happen to us through no apparent fault of our own. This doesn't change the fact that we have to deal with those situations and problems; "play the cards we're dealt" and "play the hand the best we can." Being a victim of circumstances doesn't make you an invalid, but thinking of yourself as a helpless victim does. Treating other people like they are victims encourages them to see it that way too. Everybody has problems and baggage. Suffering is relative to an individual's circumstances; each person believes his particular version of hell is worse than anyone else's. "I complained of having no shoes until I saw a man with no feet." We're ALL victims of the circumstances life deals us. Whether we choose to be victims or victors is up to us.
Anyone can (loosely quoting William Blake's "The Pebble and The Clod") ". . .create a Heaven in Hell's despite" (or vice-versa.) In this regard, even your own home can become a prison if you choose to focus on your four surrounding walls and ignore your doors and windows. I suspect the misconception that one's circumstances determine, rather than simply influence, one's fate, stems from a failure on the part of the "victim" to recognize that victory (or success, as the case may be,) is the result of a change in one's "perception;" not in one's "position."
Victimism weakens and destroys victims like a spirit cancer. Encouraging or inciting victimism is the insidious means by which an oppressor exploits and manipulates victims of an adverse situation. Oppressors win the trust of victims by appearing nurturing and sympathetic, acting righteous and indignant, inciting "blame" rhetoric and pointing fingers, spreading pessimism, fomenting anger and unrest, in sum, doing everything that aggravates an already negative situation. What they conspicuously do NOT do, is attempt to improve the situation by helping the victims help themselves, specifically, by helping them find constructive, long-term solutions, encouraging individual initiative or bolstering beleaguered spirits by focusing on strengths and possibilities.
It would be silly to suggest that our races, genders, social positions, financial status, physical appearances, etc., don't effect, for better or worse, our so-called "lot" in life. A stacked deck exists no matter where you live or who you are. Fairness and justice are ideals, but never the reality. The proportionate levels of poverty, crime, squalor, abuse, addiction, etc., we're forced to endure has historically been stacked against minorities and women. Whether we like it or not, this is the reality with which we have to work. Whether I like it or not, I'll always be a foot too tall to be a horse jockey and a foot too short to be a center for the Lakers. I accept that. I would expect to be laughed at in my face (and have a hard time keeping a straight face,) if I demanded a 5-second head start for my horse before each race because it would be unjust to hold my height and weight disadvantage against me, or demand that I should be spotted 10 points per game to compensate for the unfairness of my not being born tall enough to dunk over Shack's head. Nonetheless, if I was to discover a way to compensate for these "handicaps;" prove that I could outride Pincay or consistently leave Shack on his butt as I power-slam graceful and authoritative two-pointers, then "who I am" physically should not be a bar to my getting an opportunity to prove it, right? Well that's my position with regard to racial and gender equality.
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CALIBRATING THEORETICAL SCALES
I consider any attempts to redress what some characterize as a theoretical, "present imbalance" caused by a series of theoretical past injustices wrought by my theoretical forefathers, even more problematic and unjust in its execution, than it is illogical in its theory. In brief, it adopts and embraces the very mind set and behavior it was adopted to correct, to correct the very problem it continues to cause, which are caused by its attempt to correct and compensate for the very injustices it's original adoption caused in the first place. It's logic flow is the tautological equivalent of a "Keystone Cops" silent movie.
It forwards nobody on either "unbalanced side" to attempt to artificially compensate for past systemic bias. "Two wrongs don't make a right." Period. To assert by way of preferential treatment of any kind, that they do, demonstrates that we are STILL ignorant idiots who haven't learned the lesson our past ignorance should have taught us: Treating people unequally based on race, creed, color or gender is not only fundamentally unjust and not only doesn't work, it is reverse-progressive and downright destructive. I'm quite certain the idea is to learn from past foolishness, not to insure its future perpetuity.
All quotas and preferences do is reinforce the SAME loathsome mentality that began the injustice in the first place. If an injustice is truly unjust, it's unjust for ALL members of humanity; not merely one small subdivision of it. EVERYBODY is lessened by it-- One can neither go back and undo what has been done, nor "counterweight" one of justice's scales to compensate or offset a perceived injustice. In order to do this, one would require the omniscience to understand what the scales should look like when their (theoretical) balance IS perfectly calibrated; have an account book that keeps a perfect record of every little justice-related "plus/minus" that has ever occurred, from the beginning of time to present. Even if these WERE possible, who would be chosen to interpret "what is and what is not an injustice?" For every one person or group that perceives an act or occurrence as unjust, there's another person or group who is equally certain it is fair and just.
The only aspect of justice we have at our disposal is "prevention." More specifically, all we can ever do is acknowledge our mistakes, learn and understand why the mistakes ARE mistakes and by way of that learning, minimize their future-occurrence potential. "Evening the score," on the other hand, propagates the false and universally-damning notion that one can justly achieve benefit or justice at another's expense; that one subgroup of humanity is more important than another, or than all of humanity taken as a unit. This "justice" model represents the "Tom & Jerry" tit-for-tat treadmill composed by our forward-moving time-line anchored to our stationary-remaining history, as represented in the cliché: "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
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DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN "EQUAL OPPORTUNITY" AND "EQUAL DISTRIBUTION"
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding people make about the idea of "Equality," which I attribute to a failure to distinguish between "being treated in an equal, or fair and evenhanded manner" and "receiving an equal proportion of available resources," which basically equates to Socialism. To delineate this distinction, I analogize "societal equality" to a "foot race." I distinguish between:
1) "The government assuring an individual an equal position at the foot race's starting line," which represents "equal opportunity"
and,
2) "The government assuring an individual an equal position at the foot race's finish line," the equivalent of "equal distribution."
The idea that the government owes any particular person anything beyond an equal position at the starting line is morally repugnant. If you're of horse jockey height and you measure your vertical leap in millimeters, then nobody owes you a basketball career. Not everyone has everything it takes to win every single race. If you don't think you have what it takes to compete in a race, then get out of the way of the person behind you who does. If you do believe you have what it takes, then may the best person win. Equal positions at the starting line don't guarantee equal positions at the finish line; nor should the government. Success and high achievement were never meant to be savored by the weak-hearted and the spiritually self-handicapped because (the former two) derive their perceivable value both from, and in proportion to, the effort expended or sacrifice made by a person in order to obtain them.
Guilt and pity are the cobblestones and mortar a compassionate-seeming racist uses to pave the victim's proverbial "road to hell" with "good intentions." Strip away the outward show of compassion and you've got a drug-dealer/junkie relationship; the victim takes the handout, is temporarily gratified by the moment of respite it provides, but comes back to an unsolved and neglect-aggravated problem. The handout-provider buys a moment's worth of peace of mind and gets to look like the great benefactor of his "oppressed inferiors" without having to dirty his hands. Both sides end up resenting each other because the victim loses his self respect; begins to believe that he is inferior and worthless because someone else has to pull his weight for him, while the handout-provider doesn't understand why the victim doesn't kiss his feet with gratitude, then leave him alone to enjoy the guilt-free conscience he "bought fair-and-square." Nobody wins because no solution is ever reached, or even sought.
PITY VERSUS COMPASSION
Pity is for animals and invalids; living creatures who are physically or mentally incapable of taking steps to improve their own circumstances. Connotatively, "pity" reeks of condescension. So does "charity." The ideas they represent have little if anything to do with genuine compassion. Compassion acknowledges that "we're all in this society thing together;" it either works for everybody or it doesn't work. Haves and have-nots operate as equals in the common search for a solution to a problem that ultimately adversely effects all parties. "Throwing money at a problem's visible symptoms" does not qualify as a solution; it's a diversion.
Being successful or happy was never about getting "what's fair" or "what's equitable." As Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven" character, William Munny, shrewdly notes in his response to Sheriff Little Bill's (Gene Hackman's) protest, "...but I don't deserve this," before blowing his head off: "Deserve's" got nothing to do with it." The universe is indifferent. One either comports with its laws and principles or one becomes a victim of them. Unless you're the animated lead in a Disney movie, "fairness of outcome" is irrelevant; a subjective value judgment. If the view offends you and you're unable to change it, change your perception of it. The truth is, we live in a perfect world; hell lies in the variation between our perception of how things could be, should be, would be, and how they actually are. [Jeez, you just KNOW you're a pompous ass when you start quoting your own stale aphorisms... Aaaah, screw it, I'm on a roll here...] Problems are all we've got. The successful person turns his obstacles into assets. The unsuccessful person turns them into his excuses for failure and instead of getting to be happy, he gets to be right.
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UNDER COLOR OF THE LAW
Recently, an ambivalent and sharply-divided U.S. Supreme Court used its decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger/Gratz v. Bollinger to both affirm and strike down affirmative action. Its 6-3 decision in Gratz v. Bollinger, restricted the use of rigid, "Quota"-type point systems, but its narrow 5-4 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, acknowledged that race can still be used as a limited factor in determining the eligibility of College applicants. The following editorial discusses the rationale underlying the use of racial quotas.
So, what has the Supreme Court done by extending affirmative action? It has once again, affirmed that racism is an acceptable basis for classifying people. It has once again declared that people of different races aren't equal and should not be treated as though they are. In addition to belittling minorities and reinforcing the mentality that non-whites don't have what it takes to measure up to whites, it has adopted an inherently flawed, racism-exacerbating, "blanket" approach to address a problem that has too many different forms and faces to be addressed in a "one size fits all of some, but not all of others" manner. Efficiency is a poor substitute for justice and fairness.
If I'm a college recruiter, I don't need affirmative action to be more impressed by the ability and potential of a South Central native black man from a single-mother family of 8 kids, who managed to avoid drug abuse and gang-banging to earn an "A" average in school, than I would by the ability and potential of a white man with an "A-plus" average from a top prep school that he got into because his Fortune 500 company CEO daddy just happened to be an alumni. I just need common sense and 20/20 vision. However, apply the "actual circumstance"-blind, statistical vacuum of affirmative action to the same situation, switching the white guy to the black guy's scenario and vice-versa and the white guy ends up having the deck DOUBLY stacked against him, while the black guy gets a race-based helping hand he neither deserves or needs. The Supreme Court's endorsement of academia's use of broad-based, racial generalities to measure specific individuals, is the jurisprudential equivalent of declaring that "all Irish are drunks," or "all Jews are cheap." Misleading generalities have no place in the decisions of an institution that derives its credibility and integrity from its trusty application of universal principles to objective facts. Even slightly more reliable "statistical" generalities are worthless absent a proper context in which to evaluate them. For the Court to assert otherwise is to assert that determining truth is more reliably accomplished by pursuing unverified generalities than by ascertaining actual facts.
Lady Justice's blindfold and scales were intended to represent the idea that Justice is blind to whom her principles of justice and fairness apply; that justice is applied to individuals, not statistics or classes, that a practice deemed unjust for one, is unjust for all. The Court has long since recognized that race-based preferential treatment (a.k.a., racism,) is an unjust practice. It logically follows then, that preferential treatment, by definition, is unjust. Yet, by affirming Michigan U.'s racist admission policies, the Supreme Court in effect, declared that "the end justifies the means;" principles are entirely irrelevant. "Ya wanna make an omelet, ya gotta crack a few eggs." Instead of blindly applying principals of fairness and justice, regardless of the result, it did the diametric opposite. It abandoned its principles in SEARCH of a particular result. That's Congress's job. (Amusing though that may sound, I'm not being facetious.) Well, it would be if Congress wasn't precluded from statutorily accommodating "race-based selective fairness" by the Equal Protection Clause.
Yet even if the means COULD be justified, the "end" affirmative action seeks to achieve is flawed and undesirable: You can't "reverse injustice" (see "Calibrating Theoretical Scales," above,) you can only prevent future recurrences of the injustice by learning from the mistakes that caused it. As the Court so clearly demonstrates, when you fail to learn from your mistakes, you ignorantly persist in causing the same injustice by making the same mistakes all over again. Justice should be blind; not Wisdom.
As previously noted, when one person suffers an injustice, everybody is lessened by it. While it may not always be apparent how everyone is lessened, the various permutations of affirmative action's injustice seem fairly evident. Minorities are "kept down in their place," condescended to and belittled, buy into affirmative action's implicit "you're inferior" message and adopt a self-defeating "victim" mentality. Whites are unfairly passed over. Society is (technically) cheated out of a more qualified applicant. Prejudice, resentment and racial division increase instead of decrease. Additionally the Supreme Court; a role model for so many different institutions, by endorsing the use of race as a criteria and justification for treating people differently, ensures the institutional proliferation of, both racial prejudice, and the use of misleading generalities about races to measure the worthiness and worth of individuals.
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"ALL I SEE IS CRITICISM-- WHAT CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTIONS DO YOU HAVE TO OFFER, 29TH?"
1) Eliminate government policies (like quotas and preferences) that focus on "kinds" of people, rather than simply on people.
2) Discourage "Political Correctness." Emphasize "honesty."
3) Make quality education and/or useful training programs available to all citizens. Make further loans/grants contingent upon matriculation, or at least a show of serious effort.
A WORLD WITHOUT RACE-BASED PREFERENCES
Try to imagine a world purged of government-sanctioned racism; color, race, gender, and religion-blind equality for everyone, straight across the board. No past injustice considerations, set-asides, quotas, favoritism, etc., for anybody. It's been my experience that when equality reigns, everyone gripes and complains about unfairness equally. By stringently enforcing "favoritism-free" equality, the government would quickly become the common enemy before which all races, religions, creeds and both genders would form a united front; come together as one. The "brotherhood of mankind" of which our "flower-children" parents dared only dream, would materialize before our very eyes. People would dance in the streets. Curses would be lifted. Bad habits dropped. Pencils and paper would remain stationery. Men without legs would get up and walk. Policemen would turn in their badges. Ken Sordid-1 would be consumerly-helpful (or maybe not.) Even lepers would find a way to pull it together. Up in the heavens, the faint, euphonious tinkling of the music of the spheres would gradually crescendo into the arpeggio chords of a 1000, plinking Seraphin harps, which in turn, would be set off by celestial choirs of angels singing out in choruses of ethereal sweetness. The light of heavenly grace would shimmer down on the happy faces of the people, creating a glowy, ultraviolet starshine on their toothy smiles. "Political Correctness" would become a term used to describe the dishonest, minced-phrase terminology people used to avoid openly offending politicians and members of the government. There'd be no more hunger; no more want or worry. Tiny Tim would be cured... God bless us... every one!
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Oppressive situations and oppressive people can take your possessions, your lifestyle or your money, but they can't take away your capacity to be happy or your ability to succeed. The would-be vanquished or defeated who refuses to yield his heart, takes home a greater victory than the would-be victor might otherwise have gained. In refusing to capitulate, the undefeated spirit not only takes affirmative control of his own life, but he learns that he is a source of great power. He discovers he can triumph over any adverse situation by overcoming the oppressive victimism of his most formidable and indomitable enemy, the only opponent capable of defeating his spirit; ...himself.
Thank You For Reading,
--the 29th
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Member: Jim Scileppi
Location: The 29th Congressional District, CA
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Trusted by: 516 members
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