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CULTURAL SHIFT? - There's a new meme in town for Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI): Didn't Earn It. Could this be an important beginning of a cultural shift? Has the pendulum swung too far? Will meritocracy make a return?
Excluding kinetic war, is there a better way to destroy a country than from the inside? From the top to the bottom, we are being divided and disrupted. Our corrupt, America last, Ukraine first DEI supporting leadership is subverting all levels of education, bulge bracket corporations, quality control (Boeing as an example), government agencies, politics, and human interactions. What are we as a society doing when "we" primarily make decisions about job applicants, or which political candidates should get the position due to skin color or some historical connection to oppression? Is this not reverse discrimination? Why does genital preference have anything to do with hiring decisions? Should race and minority bona fides matter if we're trying to hire an engineer to build a bridge? Should we hire a one-legged, trans, mixed-race albino from Burkina Faso? Despite these remarkable qualifications, and in certain circles, they would be treated like royalty; this fictitious person can only build a structurally sound bridge if he has mastered the necessary math, design, and engineering principles. Hence, there is a need in society for mastery, experience, and skill.
As we die the death of a thousand cuts, probably nothing else greases skids like Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. It used to be a good thing to strive to be among the best and the brightest. That is a fool's errand now, as we strive for racial quotas in virtually every category of life. Perhaps the worst offender of this madness is academia. Instead of trying to bring our educational system back from its 3rd world status and woeful statistics in math and reading ability, they are, for instance, getting rid of 8th-grade algebra because too many students of color struggle with it, which is discriminatory to more gifted students, denying them the right to study and excel. If students of certain ethnicities are struggling with a subject like math, in that case, the only solutions are to erase the barriers to equal opportunities and create resources where they can also excel.
Do you know of anyone who would brag that they have found the perfect DEI surgeon to operate on their late-stage bowel cancer? However, you may unknowingly end up with the DEI surgeon because the United States Medical Licensing Exam-Step One, which tests knowledge of fundamental physiological processes, has changed its exam to a pass-fail. So, hospital administrators, when looking over residency applications, have no idea whether somebody passed by the skin of their teeth or is a brilliant doctor in waiting.
Due to its intentional deselection of merit, competency, experience, and pragmatic realism, DEI is ultimately a self-defeating ideology. Take the field of medicine; this is where you would think that the ability to think outside the box and diagnose the problem correctly would be paramount. However, Doctor Robert S Mendelson, who wrote the book Medical Heretic, said medical schools intentionally filter out independent thinkers. They want go along to get along doctors, scary. As we saw during the pandemic, anybody who rocked the boat or even promoted the use of Ivermectin ("horse paste") was subject to savage attacks even though the discoverer of Ivermectin won the Nobel Prize and Ivermectin has been called the 2nd most important drug ever discovered, Penicillin being the most important.
Why do we have to see everything through a racial lens, no matter who it hurts? Mass General Brigham, a large Hospital Group in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, has recently made a significant change and will no longer report suspected drug abuse or neglect to the State if a newborn baby tests positive for drugs after birth. The hospital said this move is to address racial and ethnic inequalities, adding "that substance abuse disorder in the context of pregnancy more disproportionately affects black individuals" (women?). But what about the infant? Is it fair and equitable for a baby to be cared for by a person with a substance use disorder(s)? Is it ethically correct for the baby to be at the mercy and vagaries of an addicted parent(s) without some intervention?
Having a DEI society begs the question of how we are supposed to have a technologically advanced country worthy of the 21st century when everything is being equitably dumbed down. Standards of behavior a few years ago would never be accepted are now tolerated and, in some cases, blessed because of the perceived victimhood-oppression ratio of the alleged perpetrator. We may be in such a mess because the people making the decisions (the Idiotocracy) for us are not the best or the brightest or have a considerable allegiance to an ideology that deletes common sense.
The system that got your elders schooled, jobs, married, and sheltered, with the ability to raise a family, barely exists. If a culture can no longer sustain these minimum qualities of life, it will die; it doesn't matter what else it does. Immigrants came here (legally) because they had the assurance that America was the land of opportunity. They believed that if you worked hard in the USA, your background would be less of a deterrent to a modicum of success or more, than in any other place in the world. When the meritocracy disappears, the fraud, mediocrity, and unfit set upon it, and the mistakes in all our affairs will compound till we have ultimately killed the American Dream and achieved third-world status with shorter, more brutal lives, less freedom, and less opportunity. Without defeating DEI, ideology it is questionable whether we can remain a free country that will control its own destiny in the years to come. The ultimate problem is that not enough citizens in the US have yet to figure out we are a nation in decline.
(Eliot Cohen has been on the Neighborhood Council, serves on the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and is President of Homeowners of Encino. Eliot retired after a 35-year career on Wall Street. Eliot is a critic of the stinking thinking of the bureaucrats and politicians that run the State, County, and City. Eliot and his wife divide their time between L.A. and Baja Norte, Mexico. Eliot is a regular contributor to CityWatchLA.com – [email protected])
