Not Too Long Didn't Read

Originally posted on my Facebook account, May 31, 2023 at 12:05 AM

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Captain Obvious checking in… And I’m going to stick my fingers in the pie and hope the thing doesn’t break apart.

Inequity is real, and we should continue doing something about it.

Seeking an unfair advantage is wrong, and should be opposed at every turn and from all sides.

Defending old systems that preserve unfair advantages is a symptom of fear and cowardice. Cheaters cheat. It’s that simple. If you can’t succeed by playing fair, then you don’t deserve to succeed. Think about it.

The concept of the stupid redneck is a lie. Good honest common folk sometimes rely on common sense and hard work more than they do academic knowledge. That doesn’t make them stupid.

A highly educated individual is just as likely as a non-educated individual to be ignorant. It’s up to the individual to exercise critical thinking skills and examine all sides of a matter in order to become better informed.

The smartest guy in the room might be a generational farmer with a well-earned college education. Think about that.

The concept of race is a lie. It is a social construct invented by those who were in fact the original racists, and there is no basis for “race” in biological fact.

People of all “colors” have become racists about people of other colors. I don’t know how to call it, but let’s call it “forward racism” and “reverse racism.” Both are both wrong thinking attitudes. This knife is all blade and cuts both ways, and only hurts the wielder of the knife. So don’t pick it up Dummy.

Even so, these biases and hatreds are with us in very real and tangible ways. They infect and weaken our human society and collectively prevent us from becoming our better selves.

Therefore, whatever we can do to move ourselves closer to a more accepting attitude, which will be basically blind to all the various discriminators of bias and prejudice, the better off we will be as a species.

The same applies to other forms of bias related to gender, and other forms of orientation and identification.

We live in a time when all of these perceptions are in transition. So it seems like we’re seeing a disproportionate representation in the media, and it sometimes seems the minority viewpoint of any particular group is being given a disproportionate voice.

I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but most of the people that I know are content to let people be people in all of their various forms, shapes, colors, genders, identities, disabilities, languages, cultures, religions, and other things. I am not smart enough to name here all the different things that people choose to be biased or hate about. I’m not sure I even care to know, though I still believe being informed is better than not being informed. What is right is not always easy.

I have grown older and now watch younger generations creating new trends that I sometimes don’t fully understand, and I resist sometimes accepting new ways of thinking and being. And I don’t have to BE anything that I don’t want to be.

But I’m going to keep practicing acceptance, because (setting aside metaphysical sophistry) time marches on, and waits for no being to catch up.

I’ve been giving this question about apparent disproportionate representation in the media some attention lately. If you watch a particular show, and pull out your calculator, and try to run some numbers, then you might say there’s too many of this type of that type for this to be realistic. You might see a creative or artistic recreation of a historical event, which is clearly not historically accurate. And then you could say, “They’re forcing it.” And I think you’d be right. Sometimes they are forcing it. Sometimes they don’t have a choice, because that’s what’s expected these days.

But if you look at the statistics for representation at all levels, we’re not there yet as a society, and to get there some people are being noisy about it. I don’t like noisy or garish people. But even though I don’t like it, I’m okay with that because that is how it has always been done.

Once upon a time it was the beatniks and the flower children and the hippies. The children of that generation are now the executives in power. And they’re facing a whole different cadre of young people forcing progressive change.

Our culture war is like a room full of competing chefs all trying to make the same soup. The soup’s probably going to be terrible, but like it or not it’s going to be a collective effort. Because that’s how it’s always been done.

(Yeah, I used the word progressive in a sentence. Look it up in the dictionary If you’re not sure what it really means.)

I’m okay with some noisy change as long as people do it with good character and proper decorum with an eye towards eventually coming together instead of pulling apart. We need more of that, and less extremism. The ball can bounce but we need to keep it on the playing field.

We need less blaming and finger pointing and less name calling.

We’re not going to get there by unfairly blocking people from the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness.

We’re not going to get there by complaining about the need to do some catching up, and “catching up” shouldn’t also mean denying other people the same fair chance at opportunity based on superficial factors.

There shouldn’t be lowered standards just to balance some numbers. If we create a mediocre society in the name of fairness, then we all suffer for that too.

We should instead create opportunities for all people to become the best they can be and then see what they can become.

We need to stop accepting less and demand more from our schools, which in many cases have become training grounds for mediocrity instead of excellence. We pass kids who should be taking the grade again.

And we penalize kids for being excellent because they are “too good.” Ridiculous.

We should be recognizing the actual abilities and talents of each individual, where they are, and giving them what they need to be their personal best, measured against what they can do. Not what someone else can do.

We are also not going to get there by empowering the very thing that we should be trying to eliminate. The attempts at reversing history, or ignoring it, are both errors.

How does it go? An error does not become a mistake unless you fail to correct it. I don’t know who said that, but I believe it.

What we should all be striving for is to stop that pendulum from swinging and let it hang in the middle for a spell. Then commit to getting to know each other better.

We’re also not going to get there by painting idealistic fantasies. Real people need to be prepared to do real work. While it is still true that you need to “believe it in order to achieve it,” it is also true that imagined excellence and a false sense of entitlement does not replace blood, sweat and tears that it takes to be successful. If you wait for a lucky break, you could be waiting a long time.

We’re not going to get there by continuing stereotypical imagined perceptions of limited capability. This is so insidious that people learn to hold themselves down.

In the past, a lot of different obstacles have prevented equity. Those obstacles should be eliminated in all communities.

It seems to me that if more selection processes were conducted in a blind fashion, so that the actual character and competence of the individual could be measured without regard for superficial and meaningless criteria, then we would see the best of us show their abilities more often. Bias is so sneaky that this concept of blindness is very difficult to achieve.

For that, maybe we need a new shared culture. Something based on a commitment to doing what is the best for all and what is also the best for one. Creating opportunities for shared common experience as well as developing empathy and compassion for others with divergent points of view. Finding that balance so that trying to do the right thing is desired even when it’s not easy. Because in the long run we all have faith that it’s the right thing to do.

Overcoming the fear of change requires believing in a better future, even though we’re not there yet. It requires a daily commitment to keep striving even when we don’t quite know what that better future looks like. We have to believe it if we’re going to achieve it.