It is beyond dispute that the Santa Barbara Unified School District needs a new board and new administrators. In addition to hiring Just Communities to promulgate propaganda relating to alleged implicit bias in our society, a move that seeks to encourage our youth to have a victim’s mentality, the district also tried to eliminate the GATE program for gifted and talented children in the community due to concerns of “perceived” institutional racism.
We should all take umbrage at the use of the word “perceived.” In this day and age, when the last vestiges of institutionalized racism have long been vanquished, these wanna-be social justice warriors have been left without a hill to die on. They wallow in their own distorted perception of reality, because without a victim class to exploit and manipulate, their political power base ceases to exist.
Decades ago, I saw a movie that changed my world view. The movie was “Harrison Bergeron” based on a short story by Kurt Vonnegut. The movie was set in the year 2081. By then, the dream of all egalitarians was finally realized, for everyone was truly equal. However, the devil is always in the details, isn’t he?
One means by which everyone was made equal was the requirement that every person wear an electronic head-band type device that served to dumb down everyone’s IQ to the lowest standard denominator. With respect to physical agility, superior athletes were fitted with weights and other encumbrances to ensure they would not have a competitive advantage over the competition.
Vonnegut’s prescient vision is classified as a dystopian science-fiction story. The definition of dystopian is “relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering of injustice.” Progressive egalitarians are always blaming the system, including various scapegoats, for the plight of the poor and less fortunate, such as “white privilege,” corporate greed, the 1 percent, Wall Street, capitalism, etc., etc. They simply don’t want to admit that some people are smarter and more gifted than others, or that they are more disciplined, or that they were willing to sacrifice and take risks that paid off.
No, the progressive egalitarians believe it is up to government to lift up the poor, but what they never want to admit is that their plan invariably involves bringing down the successful.
Well, as Vonnegut points out, that simply leads to a different kind of unjust suffering on the part of people who should otherwise be allowed to use their talents to better their own lives.
The following words, lost on today’s progressive-socialist movement, were written by the Presbyterian minister Rev. William Boetcker in 1916, excerpts of which were quoted by Ronald Reagan: “You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help strong men by tearing down big men. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”
Preventing a child from taking advanced classes in order to get ahead is in itself a despicable form of discrimination. The fact is, the biggest problem these education justice warriors have is the number of over-achieving Asian students, many of whom are recent immigrants. How are they a problem? Despite being language-challenged, and racially and perhaps even culturally distinct, they are outperforming everyone, including the children of so-called white privilege, despite the aforementioned alleged perception of institutional racism.
