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by Fred Reed

Explain it to me, diversity. I don't get it. Everyone in the feddle gummint and all the news weasels and the academia nuts and assorted distasteful do-gooders with goiterous self-admiration are always honking and blowing about how we need diversity. Why? What is it good for?

I think we need homogeneity. Probably the greatest desire of humanity other than getting sex is avoiding diversity. Mostly, people can't stand each other. I respect their judgement.

Diversity causes nothing but trouble. Think about it. Do old people want to hang around young people? No. Do young people want to hang around old people? Generally they would rather take poison. Do liberals and conservatives want to get within rifle range of each other? No. Except conservatives, because they have rifles. Southerners and damyanks cordially detest each other, except after a few beers, when they stop being cordial. Urban folk and country folk loathe each other. Management and labor, Marine boneheads and army pukes, dogs and cats, on and on, don't nobody much like nobody.

So why do we spend so much sweat and money trying to force people to do what they don't want to do? It's all bass-ackwards. What if we tried…well…freedom? What if the gummint just left people the hell alone?

Naahhhh.

Especially nobody wants racial togetherness. Shoving races together just makes them mad at each other. If they had any desire to be together, you wouldn't have to shove them, would you?

In any city I've been in, blacks and whites work together because they have to by law, and then they go home and complain about each other. Blacks live in black neighborhoods because they want to, and whites do the same if allowed. As soon as black kids get to college, they want black dorms. The whites already have white dorms, and they think that's just fine. Night clubs in Washington aren't racially opposed to either race, but you find very few of one in the clubs of the other.

What happens when a gang of Chinese come to America? They go live in Chinatown because they want to be among their own. They don't hate everybody else and everybody else doesn't hate them. They just aren't comfortable mixing. The second generation moves out, but that's because they aren't really Chinese but Chinese-shaped Americans, eat Big Macs and listen to wretched music. By the third generation they'll be counting on their fingers like whites, maybe.

Fact is, men and women don't want to be together more than some. Men think that women are slightly nuts and they're certainly explosive and you always have to be careful not to set them off and they get ornery if you talk dirty around them, although they do it with each other. God knows what women think about men. Probably that we're crude and watch football and aren't in touch with our inner slug and don't care about feelings. It's all true.

When I was a kid in the South, at dinner parties everybody would eat together. Then the women went into the living room to talk, and the men stood in the kitchen and drank bourbon and told off-color jokes. It seemed to work. It was nice being around the women because they were more civilized than we were, or at least acted it. But there's such a thing as too much civilization.

Now, if you look around the world, nearly all the trouble we have is because of diversity getting stuck together with other kinds of diversity. It just isn't a good idea. In Gay Pair-Eee, (which in fact is probably less than half gay) the North Africans burn everything the French own. The French Canadians hate the rest of the country. The Hutsis and Tutus in Burundi or wherever butcher each other with abandon and machetes. Moslems and Hindus go at it in Kashmir. It isn't even a good idea to let Redskins fans and Cowboys fans get too close together if ethylated.

What do you think would happen in the United States if all the stuff 'em-together laws were dropped? I'll tell you. In about ten minutes the races would resegregate like whiskey and diesel oil. I'll bet offices and companies would get to be mostly women or mostly men before long because most of each flavor don't know how to get along with the other real well. It's more of an effort than with just one or the other.

In at least three ways, what diversity does besides irritate everybody is to Sovietize the country. One way is that the gummint has to make hundreds, nay thousands of stupid laws to intrude where it's got no business because if it doesn't, people will find a way not to mix. You got to watch them like a hawk. If you say they've got to hire twenty percent minorities, they'll hire the minorities best at whatever their business is. The others won't get hired. So the gummint has to make detailed laws and make everybody fill out brainless forms and be watched by bureaucrats, probably affirmative-action hires themselves, who bungle everything because that's what government does.

The second way compulsory mixing Russifies things is that it makes everybody worry about being informed on. Since different groups don't much like each other, at least lots of the time, the gummint, or management, has to make saying so a crime punishable by firing. Otherwise folks would get mad and say what they thought of each other. You'd have the equivalent of bar-room brawls every whichawhere. So people are very careful who they talk to at the water cooler. The OGPU is listening.

Finally, mandatory diversity gelds the press. When by law or policy a newspaper has to hire homosexuals, women, blacks, browns and what have you, it loses the ability to offend any of them. In effect this is censorship. It doesn't have to be imposed. Practically speaking, you can't point out very pointedly that eighty-five percent of some sordid behavior is committed by people like your boss. Or even the next reporter over. You have to live with them. So you write correct pabulum.

Sez me, we'd be better off if we had newspapers peopled exclusively by everything from loon commies singing the Internationale to bomb-everybody conservatives to race-based papers edited by Al Sharpton and David Duke. They could all fight with each other and keep each other straight. Fact is, with a diverse staff you don't get diverse published opinion. Homogeneous staffs would give you diverse newspapers. Then maybe readers wouldn't jump to the internet, the only diverse press we have.

December 14, 2005

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.

Copyright © 2005 Fred Reed

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