DIVERSITY
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
DIVERSITY
by Adam Carroll Draper
America seems like a diverse country, particularly from a historical perspective. I have read some studies of diversity, however, which make me realize that my opinion in this regard is untutored. Apparently, we don’t hold a candle to Papua New Guinea’s diversity. Check out this study by the Pew Research Center:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/18/the-most-and-least-culturally-diverse-countries-in-the-world/
Of course, my ignorance on any subject has never kept me from opining before, so why should I start now? I am willing to take the barbs for initiating a discussion, even if I end up being proven totally wrong. Anyone who ever went to school with me can tell you that I have always been this way. Didn’t Kierkegaard say that boredom is the root of all evil?
My accountant friends joke that if you ask one to tell you what numbers mean, he (or she – in my best Monty Python) will ask you what you want them to mean. This is the sense I get out of the Pew study. If you parse things out enough, you end up missing the forest for the trees. Let’s take Papua New Guinea for instance, since it is at the top of Pew’s diversity list. It is listed as such because of the priority those conducting the study gave for the number of languages spoken as well as the numbers of different religions and ethnicities there. They wanted to know if you pulled a series of people at random from a subject country, how likely the people pulled would speak different languages and be from different ethnicities and religions. Given that criteria, Papua New Guinea won the coveted Most Diverse Country in the World award. OK, cool. But let’s step back from this a second. If you asked anyone remotely familiar with Papua New Guinea to describe it for you, would diversity likely be one of the things listed? Let me put this another way: pull any picture of the people of Papua New Guinea and scan it for Asians, Caucasians, Arabs or Latinos. How many Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews or Christians are likely in that picture? All I am saying is that you can lose the perspective you are allegedly seeking by how your frame your question. There is a similar issue in poling (but I will leave that rabbit to chase itself for right now).
I am sticking with my statement that America is a diverse country, which should make the average person say, “Duh, and why am I reading this?” The reason I dragged you through all this tripe is to belabor the point that we can’t seem discuss anything anymore without having some dork pause actual discourse for a frolic and detour into the land of mental excrement – not that I mind dorks, since I am one, sort of. The problem with most of these obligatory dork interjections, however, is that they tend to be the spawn of programmed responses from Maoist thinktanks of higher groupthink, otherwise known as universities. It’s BS, packaged and taught in order to produce confusion and disruption. Why? It’s what communists do! OK, there, I said it.
Incoming!
Have you seen footage from Seattle lately? In the name of protest over a white cop murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis, a crowd of zealous, white people have taken over the Capitol Hill area of the city (including the city hall and a police precinct), which was abandoned for them by the police at the bidding of Seattle’s mayor. Look at the pictures:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-protests-live-updates-for-tuesday-june-9/
OK, stop – I must say this right here to avoid another groupthink spasm – protest is as American as the Whiskey Rebellion. BUT when SOME protestors start destroying things, beating people and killing the police, that is a riot. When you seize a city or part of it, put up barricades and claim dominion over it, that is insurrection. My point is that there is more to this than protesting over the murder of George Floyd. Maoists throw fire upon legitimate issues to foment unrest and use that to get changes in societal structure, particularly by requiring the state to regain control by force, which tends to demoralize the people. It is called “pressure from above and pressure from below.” The radical left is attempting to coopt the country’s legitimate outrage for their own purpose. The danger is not a sudden revolution that overthrows the country, it is the sinister stifling of debate, which is a Maoist tactic in which alternate viewpoints are shouted down because it is “unsafe” to allow them to be heard. Consider this piece from an anonymous professor at Berkley, who felt that he (or she) would lose his (or her) job if it was not published anonymously:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1271219776606687233.html
America is a diverse country by design. We will make it through our current growing pains and be better from the struggle because that is what we have always done when freedom has required it. We cherish freedom, and we want all people to be free to pursue happiness. Our country was designed to let everyone here live in freedom in a way that the world had never tried before. We have not remotely lived up to that high calling, nor relied on what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature,” but we are still here. America has not ended in a violent death, as Madison feared in The Federalist. We have persevered to make freedom work against all odds. Freedom is an anomaly, but we have survived precisely because we realize that freedom is precious and rare.
Human history is stained with the blood of slaves. Until now, there has never been a time without slavery or a people who did not have slaves. What happened to that? America and Great Britain happened to it. Slavery was perpetuated horrifically here. We must never overlook or forget that, but slavery ended here – not just here, we ended it everywhere (well, except in Libya now, after we fomented the Arab Spring). American and British Christians ended slavery worldwide.
There has never been a place like America or a people like Americans, the free and the brave, upon whom God shed his grace. There is a bright future waiting for us, urging us to finish what we started – a bright City on a Hill. We can do this, America, but we need take a deep breath and deal honestly with each other, so that our wounds can heal. That requires patience and humility. It also requires us to remain resolute in the face of collectivist lies and to fight against the future suffering Maoists offer, lest we descend into cringing servitude and killing fields. America’s grand experiment in freedom remains shining in the terrible darkness of human history, a history of the powerful few subjugating the many to grunt and sweat under their tyranny. Although America has not been perfect by any means, we remain exceptional in freedom. America is God’s response to the tyranny of evil men. God will lead us through this present darkness in which we will continue to address our ills, but we must also defy the collectivism currently allowed to camp in Seattle in the name of a tolerance they do not themselves employ.
America is diverse because we love freedom. We are free because those who have gone before us have resolved to live free or die. We cannot be cowed into denying the honor and the dignity of our nation as demanded by those whining Maoists in Seattle and their despicable, marauding lot, currently allowed to burn and deface our cities. We, those who carry the torch of freedom, must live as those who carried it before us, fervent in our resolve that “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth.” Addressing what can be corrected must not include surrendering to what is abominable.