Diversity


Danneskjold

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First off, I am not here to rail on diversity. I'm here to rail on certain types of diversity.

The diversity that I detest is the type promoted by the people who tell their sob stories to us in order to squeeze a tear from our eyes and get us to accept them because of their faults instead of for their strengths. Today I was forced to sit as fourteen people paraded behind a white screen so that we could see only their silhouttes, and talked about how we oppress them.

First came the shy girl. The girl who is unwilling to take action to be friendly towards people but wants us to do so to her. Her first words were meant to demonize us in our own minds. I refused.

Up next came the misunderstood jock. He is the clean guy, never drinks, never smokes, never does drugs, and never has sex. This is a choice that he made of his own free will. So he walks up onto the stage, hiding his face behind a backlit screen, and tells us how we victimize him. Now, this one I have a personally quarrel against because I am in his same position. I do abstain from all that he does. I have realized that what I do is my choice, and that people will think of me how they will. So, as I sat watching him tell me how I victimize him with my ridiculing looks, I ridiculed him further.

Later on comes the girl who had sex at a young age. She did not specify what. She begged our tears telling the story of how her mother and her have been farther apart ever since her mom found out that not only had she had sex, but that she had had sex and lied about it. According to her she had been taught from a very young age that sex was wrong and proceeded anyway. Did she not expect the consequences?

Then comes the lesbian. I have no problem whatsoever with lesbians, however as this girl talked of how we victimized her by not going out of our way to accomodate her special needs, I realized something about her character. She hates homophobics, and for good reason. They are worthy of hatred. However, she projects the image of a homophobe on every straight human being in our school thinking we are all out to victimize her. This is commiting the same crime of generalizing different people that is the reason that she hates homophobes.

I have to go to class, but I will continue later. There were people that I did genuinly respect that went up onto that stage, but I got lost in my rant and I don't have time to write on them. I'll get back to that after school.

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Those were the worst of the worst.

The slightly below average-decently good:

Guy with a speech impediment

Girl whose parents beat each other (I assume most went father to mother)

a bunch of other stuff that was on the lower end.

Standing alone at the level of exceptional was actually a personal friend of mine. She is possibly one of the nicest people in the school. A leader, an inspiration, and somebody who is trustworthy. Up until now I had always noticed strange preferences and habits of hers. She rarely dated, she didn't like certain types of touch (usually tickling), and had stronger reactions to some things than what I have always percieved as normal.

Today I found out why. She got up behind the silhoutte screen. I recognized her by voice only. Through her sobs she told the story of how her step father had raped her when she was eleven. How he had offered her a massage, and it just accelerated from there. She did not go into detail about the events for obvious reasons, but described her mental state. The confusion she felt at such a young age. She capped off the story by telling how her step-dad was convicted of rape in 2002, and how he got out of prison, of all days, today. It was by far the most emotional story I have ever heard told, and by a friend too.

But, I would not praise her as much as I do if this story stood alone. What I praise is who she is today. She refused to let this be a driving factor in her life. She overcame it, she was stronger. Now she helps because of all that came before. She does all she can because she wants too.

Also, unlike every other person that gave their testimony, she did not blame us. She merely stated the facts, placing blame where blame was due. She neither chastized us for not seeing through her outer barrier, nor blamed us for not comforting her. She knew that what happened was not her fault, but that nobody knew about it was her choice that she had decided of her own free will.

That is why I respect her so much.

I feel sorry for the girl that followed her. Well, not really. A girl who told a not very compelling story of a slightly messy divorce and custody battle. She says that that is why she is how she is today. She did everything that my friend didn't. It was truly a shame. In the end, a motivational speaker talked about how diversity would help us accept these people. He was dead wrong. Diversity is taking the differences in people and accepting them, this is just not judging people at face value, or if you do judge people at face value acknowledge the amount of information you are judging them with.

Nearly every person that was paraded over that stage today was a hypocrite, and a human being who was being manipulative for no reason but to be earn standing. They are who Ayn Rand referred to as the "looters who claim your product by tears". The motivational speaker was a complete fraud, talking about being a salad instead of a melting pot as means to accept other cultures, how to maintain individuality, then at the end pulling an about-face to advocate complete unity, the exact thing he was speaking against at the beginning. He told us how "music with lyrics tells you what to think, music without lyrics let you think for yourself" all the while telling us what to think of what he was placing in front of us.

I am glad my friend gave her testimony. It was the only thing that salvaged any of the entire assembly.

I do know what sort of people they are. They go to my school, I know the majority of them personally. I am talking about what I dislike not because they are scum or because they don't agree with me or because they made bad choices. I am expressing my opinion because they decided that the choices that they made were not ones that they should be held responsible for. They are the people who made mistakes by their own free will and want compensation for it. With the exception of few, their speeches were based on a need for empathy. Empathy alone is not a basis for empathy. They were asking to be loved for their weaknesses, not their strengths. That is why I railed on who I did, that is why I gave respect to who I did.

Edited by Jeff Kremer
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Jeff,

There is a small mental trap here and complete clarity in thinking is demanded in order not to fall into it. The exercise you described had some points that could be valuable to a rational person, and others like you correctly identified, that are horrible.

The trap consists of thinking that good manners and correctly identifying the context of a person you are interacting with are signs of weakness or caving in to altruism (or guilt or whatever). Here is an example.

If you tell a joke about a person who stutters (something like "I don't know who called, he used up the quarter in the payphone before I found out his name...") to a group of people at a party where tasteless jokes are told, it is appropriate and even funny. If you tell it to the guy who stutters in front of a bunch of people in an everyday setting, it is a horribly insensitive act. That would probably be motivated by an attempt to humiliate him, but it can be made by simple error (you think the joke is so funny you don't even think about who you are talking to).

Thus in the sense of raising your awareness to the differences in people, differences you might not otherwise notice, so you can make better choices in how to interact with them, this exercise was a good thing.

In the sense of encouraging anyone to make a claim on you (other than for normal good manners), or worse, getting you to accept that claim, because they have a "special circumstance" and are using their handicap to induce guilt, thus draw goodies or obedience out of you, the exercise was crap. It was worse than crap. It was indoctrination. It was evil.

But identifying this kind of crap does not mean that blatant rudeness and complete insensitivity to the handicaps of others are the good. They are not. They rob you of much value in life and cause emotional mayhem. That is the trap.

That is why clarity of thinking in something like this is critical. You could choose to become a rip-roaring asshole because you think that it is good to be rude and insensitive ("nobody is going to hold some unearned claim over me!") and that you are maintaining some kind of rational standard by doing so. But all you are really doing is belittling good manners as a social value and alienating many people who could become high values in your life.

There is nothing wrong with condemning the crap, though, and firmly refusing to accept unearned guilt. My suggestion is to be very precise in analyzing this.

Michael

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I hope that I have been. I gave an excellent review of those who did exceptionally well. The fact is that these people are teenagers, so there was only one who did exceptionally well. One of the people who went up that I didn't like the speech of was a friend of mine. I will not hold it against her, I just don't like the way she put it out there as if it is our fault that we think something of her that isn't true when almost every thing she does will be very good evidence that she is how we think of her. Her choices gave us that disposition towards her. Now, as I said before, it is our fault if we judge somebody and concretize the judgement off of inadequate evidence. We do need to take into account how little or much we know about someone.

I do not let people hang anything over my head that wasn't my fault, but I don't go out of my way to be mean either. I'm an honest person, if somebody asks my opinion, I give it. What you get will be my opinion, and chances are I won't sugarcoat everything. As is shown by the girl who had sex and lied to her mom about it, being dishonest in order to salvage somethng usually just ends up wrecking it worse later on.

What is expressed on this thread are the ideas that I hate and love that were examplified by the kids in my school that chose to walk onto that stage. I gave credit where credit was due, but I also refused to give credit where it wasn't.

Also, it occurred to me that these people's problems may be more rooted in self-esteem than in what happened to them (this is concentrating solely on the people who tried to sluff of the blame for the choices that they made). I wouldn't put money on this because this is in no way concrete, but I think that they might be looking for people to condone their actions that they regret as a way to rationalize them to themselves. That and to get enough of a group to back them rather than to be faced with looking at themselves and reflecting upon their own choices and taking responsibility. Once again, I'm theorizing.

In any case, I refuse to have unearned guilt held over my head, but once again that doesn't mean that I am going to go out of my way to victimize people and earn my guilt either.

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Up until now I had always noticed strange preferences and habits of hers. She rarely dated, she didn't like certain types of touch (usually tickling), and had stronger reactions to some things than what I have always percieved as normal.

What's so strange about this? Some guys take it a bit too far with the touching, tickling and horseplay. I don't know if you do this, but I've seen multiple guys keep tickling and poking a girl even after she says, "STOP IT!" I've had it happen to me as well. It's not strange to not want to be touched by people you don't know well or do not have a romantic interest in. I personally don't date and I HATE being touched by most people. I must be a weirdo.

Anyway, this assembly sounds like the normal boring assembly. I think that each district requires that there must be at least one assembly per year that is intended to pull on the heartstrings. They want to give the appearance that they care.

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What was the stated purpose of the assembly? Was this in front of the entire school? What was the instigator preaching? Why was it considred necessary or appropriate for a bunch of youths to bare their souls to a bunch of strangers?

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Kori, she would have a violent reaction to it and it doesn't matter anyways, something was up.

Shayne,

Diversity, yes entire school, a bunch of stuff like diversity, to give others insight into their lives.

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Jeff; On your friend who said she was raped in my quick reading of the post. You should try to convince to go to the police. This should not be treated lightly!

Edited by Chris Grieb
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Kori, I do not care to explain the exact nature of her violent reaction because it is insignificant. It was significantly different than that which I had seen displayed in any number of girls who did not enjoy being tickled. It tipped off to me that there was a past. I was right. Do you care to continue nitpicking at my presumptions trying to prove them false when I have already proven them beyond a doubt to be true?

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Jeff; Seven years seems like a very short time for child rape. The growing opinion is that such a person will reoffend. I hope you can be a friend and supporter of your friend respecting her boundries. As you may have got the impression that I have a lot of respect and admiration for you. I would consider you a very smart and wise person even through you are quite young. You make me feel much better about the future.

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In defense of some (not all) of the 14 "Diversity" assembly participants, there was a time crunch. This may seem irrevelant to making a concise statement, but it actually is very important.

Case in point: Jeff states that the lesbian girl who spoke "projects the image of a homophobe on every straight human being in our school thinking we are all out to victimize her". Now, this may be because I know the girl personally and thus why I'm defending this testimony in paticular (I recognized her by silhouette, voice, and the fact that she told me she was part of the assembly the class period prior), but I also know that the short speech that she gave was not clear in it's meaning. By saying that she "went through each day afraid of what you could do to me", she gave the image that she did in fact do what Jeff said. What she was attempting to say (and I know because I talked to her about this after the assembly) was that she comes to school every day with a fear that people will turn their back on her, nasty comments will be slid her way, or that she'll even be beaten by another student because of what she expresses freely. She is a lesbian. It is hard to differientate the two sentiments without giving an explaination that requires a nice amount of time, something that she didn't have. In addition, making the explaination sound pretty is even harder.

General comments when attempting to cover a broad topic are often misunderstood/misheard as victimizing or straight hypocrisy. Some of the speakers, given their short time and a broad topic which to cover, did not choose their words carefully and thus caused much confusion and prevented the assembly from being as good as it could have been.

I do agree with Jeff that several, if not the majority of the topics, were not the strongest in the world. The abstinate jock, the new girl who did not reach out to others, the girl who does not talk to her mother anymore because of a bad choice were a few of them. I can't remember them all. But the speakers behind that screen that had a story, that had something important to say, made the assembly worth going to. A girl who was sexually abused at eleven but managed to overcome it and become the light in many of her peers' lives, even those who don't know her personally. A girl who thanked her father, a father who had a pornography addiction and who was never home, for showing her exactly who she did not want to be, and growing into a commendable young woman.

The reason why I did not espicially like the assembly itself was because of the poor wording (which can be chalked up to writing abilities of those involved) and the chain of weaknesses in each. The only absolutely solid one, the one I can find no fault with, was mine and Jeff's friend who spoke about being sexually abused. She is a superwoman in her own right. Overall, I'm glad the assembly happened. Not nessicarily because it was a good assembly (it wasn't), but because it forced me to confront some bad memories of mine that I had tried hard to forget.

The assembly was not strong, but it forced me to be. And for that, and that alone, I am grateful.

Edited by Achaya
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Your friend still grouped us all together. Not to mention that as long as she has been at this school there has not been a single reported case of discrimination against her. Sideways glances in the halls aside she has no reason to believe that someone would take violent action against her. Also, if you refuse to cast sideways glances aside, everybody deals with sideways glances. It's high school, she should live with it. She is still projecting the image on every person she meets.

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Diversity, yes entire school, a bunch of stuff like diversity, to give others insight into their lives.

Things have definitely gotten worse since I was in school. It's brainwashing plain and simple. They're trying to inculcate the twofold lie: that we need strangers to understand and respect us no matter what; and that we should be tolerant of everything.

Ever seen Disney's "The Wild"? If not, don't. It's horrible. But it was at least culturally interesting. The poor little cub lion had a complex because he couldn't roar. Nevermind the fact that he was too young and there was nothing volitional about it and that he would roar fine when he grew up. Nevermind the fact that his desire was irrational. He was pouty and touchy and sensitive because he couldn't, and everyone around him had to tip-toe around his irrational sensitivity. What he really needed was a good dose of reality, not coddling. It was the coddling that had gotten him so touchy about it in the first place.

The most disgusting, evil thing about your story though is that it puts a girl being raped against a touchy jock as if these are the same kind of thing. The jock is a self-indulgent whiner. And he's being put on stage as equal to this poor girl. The other disgusting thing is the notion that it's somehow helpful for the girl to tell to the whole world about her private horror. The screen was a dishonest gag. Enough people knew who she was so that the rest of the school would now know. And in spite of this "sensitivity" training, kids will stigmatize. This is was not a good thing for that poor girl. She's now been raped twice--physically by an evil man, and psychologically by evil public school administrators.

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Actually she's All-Student-Body activities director. She organized the assembly (just because her speech had integrity doesn't mean that she doesn't buy into this stuff sometimes). She chose to go up there, and in her case I kind of get the feeling that she couldn't have told the story without the screen. To say that when you know all those people are out there is one thing, to say it when you are staring at a sea of faces...I just think that there aren't many people who could do that at my age with a story of that kind.

In the other cases, however, the screen made me hate the people who were blaming me for these things. To do that while standing behind a screen is just ridiculous.

Other than that I agree completely.

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. . . again my instinct for self-inflicted punishment rises again. . .

My mom brought up an interesting point last night about the assembly- how is it a diversity assembly? It was about adversity, not diversity. Overcoming problems is not diversity. Although it was definitely better than the option they chose previously (Interpretive dance), it completely deviated from the idea of diversity. It was about forcing into people the idea of overcoming problems in your life. But wait a second- that's ADVERSITY. Regardless of who was speaking up there, that's what it was about. The only difference was the level to which they were overcoming it. Some of them can't do anything about it- take the guy with a speech impediment. He won't ever be able to overcome that, but he can try to make it better. But then there's the molested girl who overcame the problems but retains the scars. The worst ones were the ones who demanded pity.

Here's my question: Did Andrew Carnegie become rich by asking for help? I think not.

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What you think that was about overcoming adversity? Seeing as we can all agree that the vast majority of people that went onto that stage not only weren't talking about overcoming adversity, but were taking steps in the exact opposite direction of overcoming it (in order to overcome adversity you have to take responsibility for your actions). Not only did they make bad choices that got them into adversity, the majority of them were trying to tell us that we should be the ones to pull them out by feeling guilty for something that was in no way our fault. If they wanted to overcome the adversity they sure did it in a weird way.

If we are coming up with things that this assembly was REALLY about, with the exception of Kaitlyn's, I would say that this assembly was about inherent guilt. Inherent guilt is a just plain stupid concept. A large portion of them were trying to make us feel guilty for their bad decisions. Thats why I say that this was about inherent guilt.

Edited by Jeff Kremer
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