Friedrich, the Court's decision to uphold (for practical purposes) preferences in college admissions -- as long as you claim it's for the sake of diversity rather than affirmative action -- has to be seen in the context of the whole constellation of racial-ethnic-gender consciousness enforcement that exists at colleges across the land.

I envy you your ability to laugh (even while you feel like crying)at the pathological indoctrination to which practically every college student is now subjected, as you expressed in a commentary last November about Dartmouth. It reminds me of the era of the Chinese Red Guards and Russian purge trials; now, instead of confessing publicly to harboring secret bourgeois individualist tendencies, you are required to stand up and acknowledge to the world your nondiversity sins -- even if that consists only in not having previously listened to a harangue about growing up in a black environment.

Most sick jokes (e.g., the schoolboy classic: "Daddy, why am I walking in circles?" "Shut up or I'll nail your other foot to the floor")are tolerable because we know, even as we wince a little, that the premise is absurd, a flight of imagination.

But the racial, ethnic and political catechism imposed by our Stalinist educational bureaucrats and enforced by teaching faculty and diversity commissars isn't imaginary. I can't laugh at jokes about a real plane crash or act of torture; by the same token, I can't laugh at an act of violence against free thought and free speech.

You can argue that laughter is the best antidote for the cult of political correctness and racial polarization. That would be true if it were an isolated phenomenon, a local infection. But it's gone way beyond that: the religion of diversity has -- to carry on a bit with the medical metaphor -- spread throughout the bloodstream of society. It's everywhere: grade schools, high schools, universities, network TV, the majority of newspapers, the courts ... just about every public realm.

That isn't to deny that many people -- mostly of older generations, alas -- dislike and oppose multi-culti brainwashing. The trouble is, they can't do anything about it, and they know it. They understand that the social engineering priesthood is in charge of education; that elected representatives are, at the least, too fearful of having the racist label pinned on them to publicly oppose the diversity inquisition; that the judiciary, right up to the Supreme Court, and even the business world have buckled under to the ideology of diversity.

I can't laugh because I'm scared. I don't want to end up in a forced-labor re-education camp.

Does that sound ridiculous, melodramatic? A few years ago I would have said so. I believed that the common sense of the American people, their historical aversion to ideology, would in the end blot up the spread of PC.

But it hasn't happened. Let's not kid ourselves. The diversity bullies have won. They're in charge. And we can't afford to place our hopes in the idea that today's students, so blatantly confronted at every turn with propaganda, held up to ridicule by their teachers and fellow students for any thought crimes against diversity totalitarianism, will get their fill of it and revolt. It's too much to expect that young people with no power and no opportunty to develop an independent point of view will become martyrs to free thought. Early imprinting counts: as the Jesuits used to say, give me the boy for the first fifteen years and he's mine for life.

No, no one is now proposing re-education camps for the rest of the population that doesn't throw incense on the altars of diversity. But when this degree of conformity is embraced by our institutions of higher learning and approved by what many still think is the country's most prestigious newspaper, does it really seem impossble that we will see such a thing come to pass 10 years down the road?

I'm starting to make contingency plans. I have a question for those who read this: if it becomes necessary to emigrate, where can I and my loved ones go? Is there anywhere in the developed world that is reasonably free from savage multiculturalism and, just as important, is likely to stay that way?

Over to you.

Posted by: Rick Darby on June 29, 2003 10:20 AM