Well, shul is back in session, the gym was once more populated with educationalists this morning although they seemed rather subdued, which was a boon. I suppose they spent their spring break doing the same things they did in college?
The podcast this morning was an episode of CBC’s “Best of Ideas”, an interview with a Northern Irish poet named Muldoon (sp?) It was rather a failure. The poet himself was interesting enough, except when he read his poetry, which is a rather boring thing under almost all circumstances, but enhanced when the poetry isn’t to your taste. I fear mine is rather too dated to accommodate modern poetry, much less actually enjoy it. But what rather ruined the whole program was the program host conducting the interview. He is good at his job normally but interviewing is one of his weaknesses and it shone particularly brightly in this one.
As a result, I had a bit of attention span to spare and I noted on one of the audio-visual electromagnetic receivers silently glued to the walls that today is International Eradicate Radial Discrimination day.
My first two thought about this were that it is bogus and mayhap even evil. First of all, all of the blather that governments participate in about ‘race’ based on skin color, eyelid shape, hair texture, whatnot, are all false and whacked. Simply put, the only ‘race’ that makes sense is the human race or species since we arguably only have one species of genus homo around today. So in that context, dignifying the distinctions between people based on external physical characteristics (and a few minor internal) is the sort of stupid, incompetent thing that only organizations can perpetrate and propagate. (And bog organizations at that!)
If you pick up a decent anthropology text, that is, one not ruined by liberal social engineering correctness, there is either one race or twelve, and quite frankly twelve is too many. The bogs can’t keep up with that many and the nerds are too busy to make use of such a taxonomy unless it serves some purpose, which hasn’t been demonstrated. So can we get past this race thing?
The second whackedness is that humans are programmed to divide the rest of humanity in ‘us’ and ‘them’ and observables like skin tint and hair texture and eyelid shape are low hanging fruit to accomplish that. So having a day to do away with racial discrimination would be great but the best we can ever do is get rid of the racial part but we can’t dent the discrimination part without ceasing to be human. So grow up and get past the adolescent idealism.
Which is the bad thing. Most of the species, the alive part, is bogs and they aren’t really capable of handling this. You can tell the bogs this and one of two things happen. They either ignore you, because discrimination serves some perceived purpose in their lives, or they take it up as a religion and get frustrated when everyone else doesn’t do the same, ignoring for the nonce that religion is itself the sternest form of discrimination, except maybe for money.
Not that there aren’t geeks and nerds who can’t handle it either but more of them can understand it. And we’ll ignore for now that the folks who only left Africa in the last kilo-year or so lack any neandertal DNA. That’s a small difference but enough for those who enjoy discrimination to reinvent ‘race’. Or something equally nasty.
The only race I want to have is the one to keep the human species from going extinct.
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