Mizzou, Cry-Bullies and Affirmative Action

I am strongly in favor of affirmative action programs.  Of course there are sensible limits to all of this.  Should a woman my age be playing professional football?  The money is good.  We make up 4% of the population so why shouldn’t 4 percent of all professional football players be 69 year olds? 

Oh, you think something other than demographics should be involved?  You think there should be some level of skill, training or talent involved? 

Equality does not mean that five year olds get to drive a car; a vagrant does not get to perform surgery; an addict does not get to drive the school bus; the flight attendant does not get to fly the plane. 

Of course every one of these people get to aspire to whatever they want.  A flight attendant can learn how to fly a plane; an addict can get clean; five year olds grow up; All of this can happen and Americans encourage this kind of upward mobility.  Some of it requires affirmative action, but that does not mean a disregard for the three legs of success: talent, training and the self-discipline to develop skill. 

Talent is innate.  You can’t put in what God left out.  But talent requires training and discipline without which the talent languishes.  A long distance runner once told me that the will to win means nothing without the will to prepare. 

So what does intelligent affirmative action look like?  Whether we are talking about schools, jobs or representation in any organization it means that you have a standard of performance that you require for success.  Surrounding that standard you have a swath of variables that add or detract from the pool of candidates.  They form a gray area of acceptability.  Some of those variables are diversity of sex, race, ethnicity and physical disabilities which do not affect the standard of performance.  Within that gray area we should try to even a playing field roughened by history. 

But, and here is the fact that I believe is making modern academia a place of ridiculous extremes right now, at no time should affirmative action move outside of that gray area of performance standard.  Nor should you exceed the largesse toward one group at the expense of another.  Our current crop of African-American students are angry, rude and out of control for a reason they are not even aware of.  They are no longer our majority minority and they have not taken adequate advantage of the spot they have now lost.  If we divvy up affirmative action according to percentages, 16% of all gray area assignments should go to Latino’s and only 12% to Blacks.  Asians should get 5% of those assignments. 

Education is not a right, nor is a job.  Both are something you earn.  If you know that people around you are excelling by virtue of how hard they are working, how disciplined their lives, how strong their drive for real, measureable success, and you are not, for want of those same qualities, then you become angry at yourself. 

The cry-bullies suppressing free speech and demanding privileged treatment at our colleges and universities need to learn a few things.  There is no education without study.  There is no money without work.  There is no respect without morality.  There is no power without responsibility.  You are entitled to nothing other than equality under the law.  Grow up.  Get off your mother’s tit.  Earn your place in the sun. 

Sometimes you have to teach a person how to keep the faith.