Department of Rainbows
In virtually every Company and University they have or are created a Department of Rainbows (Diversity). While I like the idea, the implementations seem to be falling far short. And much of their imagery and attitude is questionable at best. Look, I love my LGBT friends and family as much as my friends of all colors and races, but that doesn't mean all radical activists or their symbols are always good. Activists by nature aren't moderates. So while I can get behind them at the starts of their causes (while they are demanding freedom from oppression and equality of opportunity), once the activists take over and they devolve into marxist special interest proclaiming superiority, demanding special privileges, or demanding equality of outcomes? They lose me.
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 Baker borrowed from striped flag created for the World Peace Association's flag created in 1939, that was 5 striped colors of people of earth: red, white, brown, yellow and black. This was meant to symbolize the end or at least unity of racism and unite the people on a single flag. And Baker decided to use the rainbow to put our gender preference above our race. The community wants to remember this as hugely innovative (they need their idols too), and it might have been a case of parallel innovation and him being so provincial and unworldly that he didn't realize it was suggested by Revolution era Thomas Paine to be used for ships to signal neutrality in times of war, or that the peace movement used it since 1913, and it was being widely used by peace and no-nukes crowds since 1961 (just upside down). But he sewed some 8 striped versions for the gay pride parade with each color representing different things: hot pink for sexuality, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise blue for art, indigo for harmony, and the violet color for spirit. When he went to mass produce it, the hot pink was unavailable so they dropped it. Once Harvey Milk was assassinated the same year, the sales of the flag as a symbol against that (or for activism) took off. Then when the city of SF wanted to use the flag for various events they found that 6 colors was easier to produce (and an even number of stripes), so the modern simplified 6-striped version became the norm. Whether intentional or not, the rainbow was also a symbol of God's covenant between him and mankind, so was a powerful symbol in Judeo-Christian world. Whether it was intentional hijacking or accidental (I suspect the former), it was sort of an insult/dig to many Christians to use this for a purpose they consider antithetical to their beliefs. The Noahic covenant was never to proclaim than man was free from responsibility for his own actions. So intentional or not, it's sort of like if Asian clubs started wearing white hoods to symbolize their anonymity in western countries. Either way, I think it put the movement more at odds with traditional Christians than they would have been if they picked different symbols. While gay activists have a history of intentionally attacking Christians (as they see it as retaliation for oppression), I have no idea if that aspect of the symbolism was intentional or not. But I know that it does irk some people who take it as a dig. more... |
So the left warned they were going to take over Schools and Universities and miseducate our kids. Then they did it. Or as Orwell put it in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
The left has been destroying the past and replacing it with a fictionalized (or at least half truth) version that teaches victimhood and grievances, in place of successes and growth. Kids learn to hate everything America was, resent our founding fathers, they want to paint over the imagery and statuary of them, and need reparations for all past imagined wrongs like they're the American Taliban: and we know how well that usually works out. We replaced School with the School of resentment.
The left stunted growth to keep people perpetual children:
- Instead of a few years of work experience and application (apprenticeships), we give them 6 years of shallow theory, a piece of paper saying they've made it, and a mountain of student debt. They start entering the real world later in life, less prepared and with bigger burdens than what we had before. Then tell them they're victims for making bad choices.
- Instead of teaching nuances of the past and the balances of the leaders (how good leaders did bad things, and vice versa), it's black and white. Social justice or not: and since there can never be social justice, the past and present is always a failure -- and they think the key to everything is tearing down and remaking in the vision of a perfect and unattainable future. (Marxism 101).
- Schools teach grievance studies, so that these porto-adults leave school thinking the key to happiness is forcing change on others, instead of learning to accept society as it is (and that the key to happiness is within themselves). This is the road failure and unhappiness as humans resent and resist other humans telling them what to do: so the two sides only learn more animus.
- The leftists of today need safe space and to be protected from disagreement, conflict, and truths they can't handle... otherwise they might grow to value the strength of an argument over the emotional appeals of them. So they are stunted intellectually, and academically by being sheltered from opposing views. They are mentally soft and weak, and they have to cover it up by shouting the opposition down.
- They have to be sheltered from conservatism and ideological diversity (in the name of diversity), they can graduate college without hearing a Conservative speak a view (or at least without their side ridiculing or shouting down the points instead of considering them). They live as cultural provincials, isolated from people who aren't as ignorant and "woke" as they are. Yet their self image is out of whack as they think they are worldly, because many other Universities around the world regurgitate the same mind-numbing consensus drivel. (They think consensus is righteousness instead of actually being right).
The results of that, is that our kids leave college in their mid 20's emotionally far younger than teens of yesteryear. They have more debt, less practical experience, less exposure to those that disagree with them, less capable to form or analyze real arguments, and they demand that the world conform to them (and their expectations) instead of understanding that the key to socialization is adapting to the society you belong to. The less Universities look like real life, the less prepared they are for life.
The solution is they go into the work place and demand it looks more like Universities: artificial reality. This was Google, Facebook and Twitters HR practices: to make it feel like a continuation of college dorm life, so they never had to grow up.
These kids demand a Department of Rainbows, just like the University had.
This is faux diversity, driven by quotas and false measure: where every special interest defines their victimhood, and thus gets special privilege to overcome their special hardships. Without any objective ranking of injustice. And we try to normalize it with special recognitions like:
- African American made-up Holidays like: Kwanza, Juneteenth, Black History Month, MLK (Philanders) Birthday, and so on: if you don't participate, well you must be a racist.
- Then we add Pride Month: not a day but a whole month, because a handful of gay bashings far outweighs the horrors of something like the Holocaust?
- The Jews shouldn't get a day, because they won't let themselves be wiped out by the Arabs/Palestinians.
- But we have 4/20 to celebrate stoner drop-outs: must reward failure.
- International Worker's Day, Labor Day, and so on: must celebrate the leftist causes. No capitalism or free-market day need apply: we must shun or punish success.
- They want to replace Christmas with "Happy Holiday", because the Judeo-Christian values this country was founded on, must be bad to no end all injustice.
- Replace Thanksgiving with Indigenous People's day: celebrate the victims who were also perpetrators of atrocities.
- They attack Independence Day (4th) as unworthy, especially when they don't like the President or some immigration policy that was fine when their side did it.
- And they write articles teaching kids how be disruptive during the other people's Holidays to politicize them and divide families along grievance boundaries: this would be a good time to bring up "Trump is a racist", and get outraged and leave if any family member is more informed on the nuances.
And the goals are ever shifting. If they aren't, people will see through the sham, or recognize the flaws. So the language, and cultural values must shift constantly to keep the weak minded believing the state/collective is always right, and not think for themselves.
Examples:
- In the 60s you need to be a feminist (believe in equality of opportunity). By the 70s and 80s, you needed to believe in quotas and equality of outcome. In the new millennium you need to deny that gender exists at all (and men in Women's sports is a preference).
- In the 70s "the man" government was untrustworthy. In the 2000s, you need government to tell us what to do or we'll destroy the environment.
- In the 80s green was about polluting less and no Nuclear power, in the 2000s it's about eliminate CO2 by going to environmentally distructive Solar and Wind power, and avoiding cleaner and less CO2 emitting Nuclear power.
- In 2008 Obama talked about the issues of illegal immigration -- so that we could afford better domestic social programs. A decade later, not allowing Open Borders is racist.
- Even the language is constantly being redefined. In a place where language is constant, then good ideas beat bad ideas. But if you control the language and torture it, people get distracted and have to fight semantics and the shifting landscape, and so bad ideas can beat good ideas. That's the only way the left can win. To the point where man and woman, he/she, and everything needs to be re-defined. You can't have babies any more, you need to have theybies -- because otherwise you're forcing a gender on your child and oppressing them.
Conclusion
It turns out if you teach victimhood, that means the kids will grow to be oppressed. Instead of growing up thinking what a wonderful world or nation this is, and to go out and take advantage of opportunities, they focus on suffering. And since you can't eliminate suffering (it's part of life), they are doomed to live their lives unhappy, and doomed to misery... until they grow out of it.
The left says suffering is wrong, and we have to tear apart our society in order to fix it. But everyone suffers. It is how you react to it that defines your ethics. The left reacts by demanding that we put special people in companies to try to control the ever shifting vogue minority interest. Yesterday it was gays, today it's transgender, tomorrow it'll be muslim oppression -- but they'll keep shifting around what companies need to do to show they care. And since they can't succeed at changing human nature on a dime, every time the whims of the far left changes, they'll be perpetually failing, and those that follow them will be unhappy rubes, looking for guidance on what to get upset over next.
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❝ Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. ❞
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