Is a Lack of Diversity Equivalent to Racism?

If you listen to Liberals and Conservatives you get a strikingly different characterization of our country.  Liberals want you to think that the country has never been more divided and that a divisive narrative is playing out in this country that threatens to doom our democracy; whereas Conservatives will have you think that the Liberal narrative is little more than sour grapes over the fact that Hillary Clinton lost the

2016 presidential election.

I have a theory which is different from the message that we hear from the President, from the Republican leadreship or from the Democratic leadership.  Let's take a look at the makeup of the leadership of the two parties.

Democrats have been preaching diversity for over 40 years.  The topmost leadership of the Democratic party are people who primarily come from New York and California, Michigan and Illinois.  These are states  where every day you are confronted with  diverse people and diverse mindsets, especially within the most populous cities in those states.  In Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago and Detroit, you are exposed to people of all races on a daily basis.  You are literally surrounded by every color of the Rainbow Coalition constantly.  Acceptance of diversity is not a question, it is an imperative.  You either accept diversity or you are out of step with  your community in a most profound manner.  However, even for liberals in Middle America, the daily exposure to a diverse population is less common. you may hold old fashioned attitudes and not be out of step with your community.

Democrats and liberals, in genera,l would have you believe that failure to accept every modality of diversity including every category within the LGBTQO+ continuum is racist and intolerant.  Perhaps this is true and perhaps the liberal leadership is correct, but is it not equally intolerant to call out everyone in the country who is not awake to the LGBTQO+ continuum as racists. Is it evil to be unenlightened?  I think not!  Rather, I think that it is wrong to label middle Americans as racists and anti-diversity solely because they have not been exposed to diversity.  This would be akin to labeling all sea life as alien simply because we cannot survive in a salt water ecosystem!  A fish is no more evil simply because it is a fish.  No more is a farmer in Iowa or a rancher in Wyoming a racist simply because they do not have the same concept of diversity as someone from San Francisco or Chicago.  They may not be tolerant or enlightened, but they are also not racists.

Liberals do not accept that there is a difference between lack of tolerance or lack of accepting diversity.  All are lumped into the efficient catchphrase "racist". It seems to me a rather intolerant perspective to classify everyone who doesn't think the way you do as intolerant, opposed to diversity and racist.  Clearly not all who do not think the same as the liberal establishment are not intolerant racists.  Moreover, isn't it hypocritical to label people who don't think the way that you do? Isn't that a lack of diversity itself?

An unexpected encounter with Bharpinder

Was a cow harmed in the manufacture of your safety equipment? 

Do you use environmentally friendly hair gel in the morning? 

And finally, “Why is it that you appear to live at TNGT’s headquarters? – Oh! That’s right, you really don’t make enough money to pay your student loan payments and live in the most expensive region of the Country.  

Instead of rocketing to the top of the organization, you find yourself toiling for 10 to 14 hours daily, including weekends just so that Bharpinder Nagasalamandanam doesn’t out-toil you with his own effort, which is underscored by mounting a goal of 18 hours per day plus weekends, and you quickly are reassigned to a team of under-performers who are tasked with reverse engineering a 20 year old application that was converted from Microsoft Visual C++ to Java using an automated code conversion utility.  Your initial assessment of this new assignment is flawless:

• The code needs to be rewritten from scratch. There is nothing that can be salvaged.  You have read this code and clearly it was code-generated by another program and though you do not have access to the original source code you recognize the entire asset is complete and utter garbage.

• You’ve looked around for any accurate and credible documentation of this module, but you have been given 3 answers when you ask:

• We have a cryptic, hard-copy document provided by the vendor of the original C++-developed solution, but it’s in JoAnne Stevenson’s desk, and she will not share it with anyone.

• There is an equally cryptic appendix that describes more business rules that are referenced in a document maintained by a 3^rd-party company, but their version reflects thousands of changes to the specification that have been implemented in the ensuing 15 years after the original software was written.

• The appendix has an even more cryptic reference to another document that hasn’t been in circulation for over 10 years, and another not-so-cryptic reference to a web site that contains additional code/value pairs that you will need to evaluate within your module, but notably many of the code/value references are completely missing from the industry standards organization’s website, or any other legitimate reference.

Your team is practicing a combination of eXtreme Programming, Scrum and Kanban, but no one has a name for this Agile potpourri, and it’s not clear which practices of the Company’s agile variant that you are using is responsible for governing which activities in this "agile" method, but Bharpinder seems comfortable and seems to know what needs to be done. 

In fact, he’s willing to help you, but it seems that part of the agreement will be that you will apprentice under him for 6 months, and only if you figure out the secret to deciphering the agile ceremony du jour will you be allowed to actually work on Bharpinder’s team going forward. 

In a matter of 4 days, the team concludes that you are rather dense, and you are re-assigned to build unit tests for a module that was developed based on User Stories that were written by a Stanford Undergraduate Software Engineering Student who has dropped out of College and is no longer involved in the internship program with TNGT. 

From software engineer you quickly descend the corporate ladder to settle comfortably as a Test Developer reporting to the QA Team with an after-hours role as Bharpinder’s gopher.  

After three weeks, you realize a necessity to pronounce that you not, in fact, gay, and that everyone has misinterpreted your status on the LGBTQO+ continuum. For this violation of inclusivity, you have been written up by Human Resources, in which they cite your failure to uphold TNGT’s commitment to diversity and inclusion which is a core tenet of the new Employee Guidelines.

You are placed on a 2 week probationary term with no pay, though you will be allowed to purchase food from TNGT’s world-famous cafeteria which offers cuisines from all over the world, but sadly, there is nothing on the menu that you would eat back home in Austin, TX. 

By the start of your third week, you gladly deliver your letter of resignation to HR admitting that you are simply not a very good Software Engineer, and that you’ve taken a new job at Yahoo at double the pay as a writer for Yahoo Sports.  

Finally you are able to enjoy your two favorite things in life: Computing and College sports!  Not to worry about Bharpinder; he’s found a politically correct apprentice to work under him.

Working for nothing

It is the year 2030.  Inflation as measured by the US government remains at an all-time low of 0.65%. Unemployment is remains low at just 3% nationally. Interest rates remain below 3.5% for 12 years running, following a second recession and another round of quantitative easing by the FED. People of every race, creed, color, gender(all 15 of them) and national origin now work for large corporations for free -- just for the sake of needing healthcare insurance.  

At this time, Amalgamated Healthcare Corporation is the largest corporation on the planet with over 500 Trillion USD in cash reserves -- enough to pay off the US National debt (currently sitting at $100 Trillion. 5 times over.  Amalgamated (AHC for Short) is now diversified into government consulting projects, and literally runs the US Government.  No one doubts the power of AHC.  They have both sustained and torpedoed 3 presidential administrations, including Trump (2 terms) Michelle Obama (2 terms) and in a surprising twist, Hillary Clinton won the 2028 election at the age of 80! After only one year in office, AHC lead a successful campaign to have her impeached, alleging Corporate Fraud within the Clinton Foundation, Colluding with Russia in the fixing of the 2028 elections, and Money laundering.

The Sweet Life

It is the year 2085, and statistics prove that there are more dead people on Facebook than living. That's partly because hardly anyone joins Facebook anymore, now that AT&T provides unlimited Social Vid for only $800 per month with purchase of an iPhone Mark 90.  The last movie theater closed about 5 years ago.  

Pa took me to a movie show once. We saw Planet of the Apes 3000.  I still can't understand why anyone went to movie shows --  $75 per ticket, $60 for a soda and 3 years in prison if you were caught sneaking in candy from outside the theater.  Besides, you can see all of the latest movies in VR on YouTube courtesy of AT&T on the stunning Perfect Definition (tm) display of the iPhone Mark 90 with Retina-Vision (tm). Besides, there hasn't been a great movie in decades according to Pa, and I think he's right.  

Cool kids don't watch movies or play video games like Pa did when he was my age.  The Cool kids spend their summers on the Coast of Spain and drive around in their Chevy Camaro Hovercrafts.  I've been there every summer since I was 9.  It will be six years in a row this summer, and I'm still not clear why my school advisor insists that I need 3 years of foreign language classes to get into college. Heck I'm fluent in Espanol.

Mom and Dad don't spend much time at home now that they each have their own personal time machines  They're always going back in time to play the stock market with Grandpa and Grammy. We've inherited billions and there's more rolling in every day.  Yeah, it's a pretty sweet life, but someone's gotta do it and it may as well be me.

Commentary on President Trump's address to Congress

There was a time in our country that it didn't matter what the president spoke about, those in the party that opposed the president conducted themselves with dignity and demonstrated respect for the President.  The democratic party is terribly disappointing.

Personally, I have a problem when the Democratic congress-people are giving the thumbs-down to the president on national TV and feel that they are somehow justified in doing so, when the president clearly articulated that he was seeking unity and cooperation and reaching across the aisle.

Watching Elizabeth Warren poo-pooing the president is utterly disgusting. Shameful even.  It's also rude and unacceptable for the democrats to rush out of the building so quickly after the speech.  The democrats are clearly taking a hard-line position, based solely on allegation that the President is a meglomaniac, a tyrant, a dictator and a racist.  The democrats are claiming that they are worried about the country, because such a man as Donald Trump is in a position of so much power -- Get over it.  The democrats lost the election just as they did in 2000! Life goes on -- lose with dignity!

The democrats claim that they are the guardians of democracy and that they are inclusive and forward-looking, even non-partisan.  They claim to be the party of looking forward, not back.  How so? The democratic response claims simply that the President's cabinet is just a group of billionaires who don't care about the common folk.  From that they defend that social defiance is acceptable, because it somehow makes the president is horrible.  Ha!  As Ronald Reagan always said, "There you go again."  I hated Reagan with a passion. I still feel that he was a horrible president and not my president, but the Democrats are committed to doing everything within their power to oppose the President without a tangible platform of their own.  The claim is that he is a dangerous man who has declared war on immigrants.

What I hear is partisan bickering by the Democrats -- baseless claims that President Trump is eroding the credibility of our nation.  I have seen fear-mongering and divisiveness the likes of which I never imagined that I would see in the USA. The Democratic response is that our representatives are out of control, because they (The Republicans) fail to understand that they work for us (the people).  I don't feel that the nay-saying response by the Democrats has any solid ground.  The speech was a positive speech and the President clearly reached across the aisle.  The Democrats refuse to offer any specific policy proposals, but then they have the audacity to claim that the President's proposals are empty.

The bad behavior and stonewalling by liberals throughout the country is simply not acceptable. History may prove me wrong, but from my perspective the Democratic party is utterly out of touch with Americans and is inciting riots an division among people all across the country.  I have observed friends and family members severing ties over politics and it saddens me.  More troubling is that the Democratic party is the party inciting this divisiveness with rhetoric and propaganda beyond belief.

The actions of liberals, specifically the deliberate action to stoke the fires of fear is unacceptable.  I was a registered Democrat for more than 25 years.  I campaigned for Bill Clinton in 1992 and again in 1996, but the Democratic party has been so firmly planted in gridlock for so many years it's difficult to take the Democrats seriously.

I'm not hear to tout the virtues of the president.  I simply would encourage people to give the man and his policies a chance.  The Democrats have rejected President Trump out-of-pocket.  I listened to the President's address objectively and I heard a man who was preaching inclusion and I hear liberals preaching only divisiveness. Shameful!  Let's hear your comments on Thought-Rising.