WHY NOT FOCUS ON EXCELLENCE?
Equity is the Opposite
I had forgotten the book, “Harrison Bergeron,” by Kurt Vonnegut, till a recent article appeared speaking about why we love watching the Olympics. In the book, everyone must be made to be equal. If you are strong, you have to carry weights all the time to ensure you are no stronger than anyone else. If you are good-looking, you have to go around masked, so no one feels less than you. Intelligent people wear earpieces piping distracting noise into their heads, making it hard to think. This approach is the logical conclusion to the idea of “equity.” The Left wants to ensure that everyone has the same outcome, which means elevating those who either started farther behind and also those who have failed to make the kind of extreme effort that results in excellence and success.
Kamala Harris leads her campaign with the idea that “all of us should end up in the same place.” It sounds appealing on the surface, until you dig down to understand what this really means. For her, this is mostly economics. If you’ve spent your life working hard at school, making it through med school, internship and residency and are finally out of school debt and making money, someone who has done nothing with their life should have the same income. This is what she truly believes, and, if elected, what she will try to heavily tax those of us who have earned our success. This philosophy makes no sense, when you consider people like Clarence Thomas or Ben Carson, who started out in extremely poor families with parents who weren’t educated. Nothing could stop them, and no one was out there giving them anything. Anyone can do achieve personal success, as long as they are willing to put in the hours and the effort.
The Olympics
The Olympics draws huge crowds every two years, and millions tune in each night. If we believe in equity, why would we do this? It’s because we admire excellence. If it were easy to make it to the Games, and then win a medal, we wouldn’t bother. We enjoy watching people accomplish things that most of us could never even attempt. As a very young child, my father was thrilled to discover that I was good at swimming. For a few years, I was at the pool every night, competing, even as I was only 5 years old. It was a lot—too much for me. I was no Katie Ledecky. Yet this is what it takes to be great. Not being born into the right family.
Yes, it takes natural talent and a body configured in a way to achieve excellence. I admire pitchers because I have the typical female “throw” which looks silly and accomplishes nothing. But natural talent alone isn’t enough, as you can see from my aborted swimming career. It takes incredible effort and dedication. Since many of these athletes start young, they are juggling school along with their practice sessions, sacrificing the fun most kids enjoy.
Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, conditions herself in a variety of sports to ensure that all her muscles are where they need to be and that she has the endurance to make it through challenging routines. This discipline takes seven hours a day. How many of us would be willing to take that on?
There is no DEI in sports. If there were, we would see more short Asians in basketball, women playing against men in all the major sports and a demand for proportional representation. We don’t. No one would pay to see a short woman compete against the top male basketball players, except to laugh. No one wants to see the 90-pound weakling try to box against a muscled player. In the world the Left dreams of, everyone gets a medal, regardless of effort and identity and “feelings” matter more than earned merit.
The Results are Already Here
Military standards have been lowered to ensure “equity.” Not only does this result in the US being less competitive on the field of battle, but it also destroys the concept of teamwork, where each member of a unit feels that their unit has their “6.” Too many of the latest leadership in the military shouldn’t be there.
We now have men deciding they are women, competing against much smaller women who have never had the benefit of a testosterone boost, and, in some cases hurting them badly.
We see more and more kids leaving college without a degree as they have been “helped” into a school too competitive for their abilities. Many of us have seen DEI in the workplace, where incompetents become your manager, making work life much more difficult.
The Left knows that most people do not like the unfairness of arbitrary quotas. For anyone striving to be excellent, it is a slap in the face. It’s also sexist and racist. The assumption the Left makes is that all people who claim “victim” status are less than the rest of us and need a helping hand. The idea is that, then, by so identifying, everyone needs to give them a lot of slack, if they can’t achieve what is expected of others.
The racism and sexism come in the results. If you know that minorities or women only got into med school only because of DEI and not merit, won’t you be a little more hesitant to go to that doctor? You have no way of knowing they are actually as good as a Caucasian man. You don’t know if that attorney who went to Yale actually achieved the same level of competency because they were “helped” along the way with lack of standards and social promotion. This is so unfair because it implies that the people the Left sees as victims are so much less than the rest that they need that help. I believe that they don’t need that help, nor should the grandiosity of the scheme ever be considered rational.
I doubt Simone Biles got any advantages because she is Black and very short. She’s talented and worked herself harder than most of us will ever be able to imagine. She’s earned her success and we all really cherish this. Excellence must be rewarded. Otherwise, you not only tell a large group of people that they can never be excellent, but we’ll pretend you are, thus depriving them of the thrill of achieving what they can through their best efforts and talent.
