The word is …

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) -- Several years ago a new word began popping up in our societal conversation. It was not a bad word, in fact it was a valuable word. Unfortunately, it was a word whose meaning could easily be confused with a seemingly similar word.

          That word was “equity.” A word that does not mean “equality” but was used to lead folks to believe it did. And when put forth with two other words, “diversity,” and “inclusion” it sounded as all-American as apple pie.

          But “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” is not American. In fact, as applied by those promoting the DEI ideology, it is antithetical to everything for which America stands. It is the bastard child of a Marxist philosophy that divides people into separate tribes with each tribe being labeled either an oppressor tribe or an oppressed tribe. And those characteristics are used to reclassify society as containing favored and disfavored groups.

          The result has been a complete breakdown of our system of values and priorities, for this ideology has turned our nation from a meritocracy, where individuals succeed on their abilities and work ethic, to a random system whereby outcomes are pre-determined by the tribe in which you belong. And if the skill levels and educational requirements are too high for the favorite group to survive, well then we’ll just lower the requirements. That, you see, will be an equitable result.

          An example of this in the news recently is Harvard’s admission process that tips the scale to favor black applicants and to disadvantage Asian applicants. Asians, of course, mostly due to their cultural encouragement of hard work and education, are the disfavored group, part of the supremacy of the white race. People of color, on the other hand, are favored and need the added help. That’s equity.

          You see, in the leftist world this is true equality: equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. The word, remember, is equity. Ability is overshadowed by a tribal privilege which promotes equal rights by curbing the rights of the disfavored. And as an added bonus it allows the DEI overseers to select winners and losers and uplift or condemn their choices.

          But like the frog comfortable in a pan of lukewarm water who will be “cooked” as the pan is slowly heated to a boil, we are now wakening from our lukewarm slumber to finally realize that we’d better jump from the pan before we too are cooked. 

          It started, as most bad ideas of late, in academia where we have unwittingly turned over our children’s emotional development to a group of tenured mind controllers who have been in-bred to reproduce like-minded automatons as their faculty colleagues. That spawned a wave of similarly brain washed young people who have now taken their place in the media, major corporations – think of Bud Light – and is now branching into the military and medicine.

          Worse, many of its adherents have now taken their place in elementary and secondary schools as teachers and administrators so they are able to get to our kids before they can learn to read, that is if reading is still a desired end for our professional educators.   

          We’ve watched this take place over the past few years. First, left wing zealots complained that advance placement classes tended to make those left behind feel inferior. Thus, to avoid hurting the feelings of some, all advance placement classes must be eliminated.

          Unfortunately, some of the loonies running some of our top-tiered secondary schools bought the argument and eliminated their AP classes, in the name of, you guested it, equity. A similar thing happened in a Virginia school where National Merit Finalists were not notified of their selection so as not to hurt the feelings of those who were not finalists. Again, equity in action.

          Naturally, following the ideological mandate of the DEI crowd, scholastic values were turned, not to math and reading, but to pronouns. In many schools, as well as woke businesses and governmental offices, you can now be disciplined, fired, or expelled for using the wrong pronoun to identify some lackluster individual who cannot determine what he (or she) is.

          And there are some politicians who want to make such misidentifying a crime. I suppose the proper punishment will be time spent in an old Soviet style reeducation camp.

          Now, while all these things are dragging our society and culture down, there comes news that the State of Oregon has suspended the requirement that your kids be able to read and do math in order to graduate from a state high school. It seems the enlightened in Oregon have decided that the math and reading requirement are a “harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students.”  

          So, with that academic barrier removed, the graduation rate in Oregon for the class of 2022 was an impressive 81.3 percent. Good going guys! Unfortunately, only 43 percent were proficient in English, and less than 31 percent were proficient in math.

          Another win for the mindless automatons pushing DEI. We are quickly dumbing ourselves down to the point our culture will be lost in a forest of pronouns, bad grammar, and no historical prospective. Equity will prevail and we will need our friendly overseers to control our lives since we will be too stupid to do so ourselves. All hail the equity police.

          But we may not be too far off of a communal awaking. In the past few months the grumbling about DEI is starting to surface in quarters where such discussions would have, and probably still are, prohibited. One by one noted liberals are beginning to see the harm that DEI is doing and speaking out about it.

          Notably the famed liberal journalist and former New York Times editor Bari Weiss has joined the fray and several states, including mine, have ordered an examination of the use of DEI in the classroom. Our board of regents has also taken up the issue and is now developing guidelines to reduce the influence of DEI in our state universities.

          Small steps, but hopeful signs. Next year is an election year and this seems to me to be a movement we need to promote. That is unless you agree with the perversion of the word equity.

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every weekend on Faith On Trial or podcast at https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/)