Trying To Stop the DEI Cancer

THE STORY was on NPR,and I don't know whether it was anywhere else. Its a scenario which one might think has been and is being played out many times all across America's fruited plain in these strange days indeed. A teacher had a big banner in her classroom which basically promoted diversity, equality, and inclusion. the message in big letters said something like "everyone is welcome here", and the canvas was covered with images of hands and smiling faces of every conceivable color, depicting any and all ethnicities. The students had evidently worked together to create the artistic project. She got the usual call to the principals office, and was told that the poster would have to come down, that it was not compatible with president Trump's new federal policies regarding such matters. The fuhrer does not approve. It may be that the teacher refused to take the poster down, and was either fired or resigned, but I honestly don't recall. As I recall, it didn't end well. The important thing is that she was told to take it down, and the reason why. And, as always, its not only about Trump, and his crazy extreme right wing hatreds and biases and anger. The important thing is that the United States has become a country in which these things have a substantial popular base, and that Trump and Trumpism are in power. How have we become a society in which diversity, equality, and inclusion are considered dangerous and harmful, and are not celebrated and held in high esteem as fundamental virtues? Put another way; what have we come to? In this country a black man was president for eight years. Gay and transgender people are and have been for awhile stepping out into public and demanding equal rights, tretment, and respect. All over America, signs are posted in both English and Spanish. Current conservatism, and the Trump phenomenon may be seen as a reaction, a backlash, to all that progress. For black, brown, gay, and transgender people to gain equality of any sort in the United States is indeed progress, progressive, the opposite of conservative. It seems a bit of a stretch to equate government promotion of diversity, equality, and inclusion as big government, over-reaching, oppressive, as conservatives claim it is. It is an even bigger stretch to see DEI as anything other than desirable, as being in any way harmful or undesirable. As has been said of the mythical equal rights amendment to teh constitution: "what harm would it do?". Well, it goes against traditional American values and conservatism, that's what harm it does. It strikes a blow at white, Christian, patriarchal, WASP America. In our great ongoing American cultural war, DEI directly opposes conservatism and promotes progressivism, formerly known as "liberalism". And that is what the G.O.P.and MAGA is all about; eliminating progressive values and returning America to a previous social order, which is there definition of making it great, again.It will never, can never be again what it once was. White patriarchal Christian America is dead and gone, and the tragedy is that an entire political movement powerful enough to come to power refuses to accept this reality, and to deal with it intelligently. People will never stop advocating and fighting for acceptaance of everyone, and for reasonable social equality of citizenship and condition. It is those who resist this progress who are doomed to failure.