|
Liberalism is boring
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose…. All things are full of labour … The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.What inspired me to quote this ecclesiastical outburst about the repetitive futility of human endeavor? The news in Monday’s New York Times that the Ossining, New York public schools have made it “their top priority” [emphasis added] to improve “the academic performance of black male students, who account for less than 10 percent of the district’s 4,200 students but disproportionately and consistently rank at the bottom in grades and test scores.” Yet even as Ossining, as a thousand school districts have done before, treats as a “moral imperative” this doomed effort to “close the achievement gap between minority and white students,” other parties, namely Michael Myers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, are suing the Ossining schools for racism. “I think this is a form of racial profiling in the public school system,” he says. “What they’re doing here, under the guise of helping more boys, is they’re singling them out and making them feel inferior or different simply because of their race and gender.”
Gee, if you let blacks find their own level, that’s racism. If you make the raising up of blacks the transcendent goal of your community, that’s racism. And we’ve been through this, too, a thousand times before—this sight of liberals being jerked back and forth on the puppet strings of liberalism, a thousand times before. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Email entry |