Enshrined within the human mind is an Edenic archetype. (Of Paradise. The Promised Land. The Good Old Days. The Golden Age.) But real life’s more complex than that, a spastic seesaw of competing likes/dislikes and urgencies. It’s nice to hope and work for peace, but don’t let that convince you that the mess and stress of the real world is just some temporary fluke. Such struggle is the very stuff—the gist—of nature’s law. Our Eden’s red in fang and claw.
Recently, the Supreme Court canceled Affirmative Action, that much-loved, much-reviled policy conceived during the Civil Rights Era that allowed college admissions officials to favor kids from disadvantaged minorities, to help promote racial equality, instead of leaving those beleaguered groups to rot down at the bottom of the heap. Recognizing education as the key to social advancement, liberals did what they could to promote it.
A whole bunch of people cried “Foul!” way back then; even now. A lot of those opposed were simply racists, as you’d guess. But there were lots of decent folks, the parents of students with respectable transcripts who might be denied admission in favor of kids with lower grades and darker skins. “Of course those ghetto kids score lower,” said the well-intentioned Left. “There’s never been a level playing field! Descendants of the slaves or immigrants, grown up in ghettos where they’ve never met a college grad, cannot compete scholastically with kids from fancy suburbs where the rich pay higher taxes and are given better schools. Considering the poor milieu, a ghetto average of, say, C, might indicate a better brain than a suburban B.”
Others, though, resentfully maintained that college admission should be based solely on documented competitive merit, and that even while society-at-large may need to cure its grievous ills, my kid has only this one chance—right now—to get into the college of her choice. She should not be denied a place in favor of someone less qualified, no matter how humane you wanna be. Things never get more heated than when two large groups of humans who, each feeling like the voice of logic and morality, collide head-on.
It pays to note what happens when a group within society has neither hope nor opportunity. In France, a couple of months ago, they had the mother of all riots. (The French enjoy a riot, now and then. But this time it was off the charts.) A teenage Muslim kid had been shot dead by careless cops, and La Belle France went up in flames. Just to give you a sense of the scale of the thing, more than 2,000 autos were torched. The pundits almost all agreed that, grievous as the boy’s death was, it wasn’t only that which struck the spark.
France has been swamped with immigrants for more than 60 years, mostly Muslims from the Middle East and central Africa. (Not counting all the ones who drowned.) They hadn’t come to seek a new, more modern way of life, they came to flee starvation, war, and violence back home. A lot of them have little use for secular society (in which females and gays are seen as just as good as men.) Most of the immigrants end up in shabby suburbs (Fr: “banlieues”) where neither assimilation nor social advancement occurs, and youth unemployment tops 40 percent. Voila: the perfect tinderbox for radical dissent and violence. Some tiny meaningless event will spark the next eruption(s) till this puzzle is resolved. When might that be?
If you allow a whole large group within society to live without prospects or dignity, there is a time bomb ticking in your midst. A splinter in your toe may not seem like that big a deal, but if it festers and infects until it’s larger than your leg, you’ve got a thorny problem on your hands. Until something–if not humane, then at least sensible–is done to pave the way for those who live sans opportunity, the problem will not go away, and will increasingly evoke brutal authority. “Well, hell,” you say, resentfully, “Nobody here invited them! The nasty little buggers just showed up.”
Okay. And yet, in fact, they’re here.
Now what?
Martin Levowitz can be contacted at brightoaf@msn.com