Resolutions

 

The picture I posted is an actual flyer that I pulled from a bulletin board at UIC aa couple of years ago that sent a shock through me as if I had jumped into Lake Michigan in January.  It should shock you.  But this is what is at stake now, and their movement is on a fast track.   And it demands that our adjustments need to be on a fast track as well.  This is truly evil stuff we’re facing, as evil as Nazism and Stalinism.  And that’s not hyperbole.  It’s real.   To my Jewish friends that have bought into the Socialist/Woke movement, please start paying close attention.  This is where it’s headed and it is deadly serious stuff.

The turn of the calendar is traditionally the time we take a look back on the events of the past year, and look forward to a fresh start with new goals and new commitments.  There is something deeply embedded in our nature to do this.  It is so vital to our being that Catholicism makes it a sacrament.  Confession allows an individual to expunge his or her shortfalls, and liberated from them, to start afresh.

Now that the Socialist/Woke coup is nearly complete, I’ll need to adjust how I approach them.  And going into 2021, the adjustment requires even more thought and consideration.   Typically, I do not share my goals with anyone—they are very private matters.  But this year, I’m going to break with precedent and make part of my 2021 resolutions public.   Some aspects of them are not really new resolutions—I just thought about them in a more coherent and organized way.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, like one of those last Japanese holdouts on an island after WWII had ended, you know that something fundamental is happening to our society.  In later posts, I will try to provide my take as to what is really going on to try to bring some clarity (it is all meant to be confusing).  But at the root of some of this chaos and discord is Critical Theory, a pernicious, racist, Neo-Marxist philosophical movement that is fundamentally anti-Western, anti-individual and anti-liberty.  It is threatening to dismantle and neuter Western Civilization and has already commandeered large swaths of our society.   It anesthetizes you with benign sounding words and phrases:  “Black Lives Matter,” “Gender Neutral,” “Build Back Better,” “Reimagine”  and, of course, the very soothing and virtuous sounding words, “Social Justice” and “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” Who can argue against black lives mattering, or inclusiveness?    But it is every bit as harsh, brutal and unforgiving as the Marxist/Leninist regime that our grandparents faced, only much more sophisticated and technologically enabled.  We do not yet have a gulag, although that may be coming.  The Critical Theorists may have figured out that they don’t need to do such things.   They would actually prefer coerce compliance in more subtle ways.  But they will when they learn that this isn't working.

And it’s not in some far off outpost.  It’s here, coursing through the veins of our institutions—our large corporations, banks, law firms, and especially our cultural and educational institutions.   It is designed to kill the soul of the individual and subsume you into the collective.   Like the xenomorph in the franchise film Alien, it has adapted its defenses.

 I am a dissenter.  I will not be checking my imagined privilege.   I will not be embracing diversity, equity and inclusiveness.  And I will risk being labeled, marginalized, shunned, and even imprisoned.  So here are some of the resolutions I am committing to this year.

-Disconnecting

I will completely disconnect from institutions and people that espouse or promote Critical Theory/Wokeism (which includes BLM).  This process is already underway.   I turned off the N.F.L., terminated my subscription to the New York Times and to The American Scholar when it featured a cover article “The Problem With Whiteness.”   I stopped my membership at the American Writers Museum when it featured a program with Kathy Griffin and stopped my support of The Newberry Library when it ran Drag Queen Story Hour, aimed at 5-8 year olds.  When the Newberry Library wrote an impassioned piece about changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day, I suggested that the institution step up and deed the land on which the library sits back to the tribe from which it was “stolen.”  I received no reply.

Perhaps the most difficult severing is my relationship with The University of Chicago, my alma mater.  I have always felt blessed to have received two degrees from that institution.  But I began to see signs that the university was slipping into Wokeness a couple of years ago and it astounded me how quickly it sank into the morass.   Earlier this year, economics professor Harald Uhlig was targeted for merely suggesting that BLM not make defunding the police a part of their platform, which created a firestorm.  The university responded by  vowing to review all of his social media posts for signs of racism.   Then there was the English Department’s decision to only admit graduate students that were interested in Black Studies, which I wrote about.  Finally, there was the attack on science professor Dorian Abbot.   Abbot raised issues with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies of the university, expressed his view that the university should hire the best, no matter what color, and was promptly mobbed.   Colleagues and students issued a series of demands on the university, stating that if he just wanted to hire the most talented, then “you are part of the problem.”   The university, to its credit, reaffirmed its Chicago Principles of free speech but at the end of its statement reaffirmed its commitment Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, not realizing that free speech and DEI are incompatible and eventually free speech will have to go, and Chicago Principles will eventually lose out. 

Perhaps the worst sign that the university has fallen to the CRT mob has been the Booth School of Business, which instituted “white privilege” questions in its leadership course survey and committed to unconscious bias training.  A school that purports to be at the forefront of quantifiable management techniques and empiricism decides to adopt training to cure a problem that the UK recently decided is utterly ineffective.

Of course, there was the decision to admit ONLY students that are interested in Black Studies next year, a topic that I previously blogged about (Common Sense: A Letter to My First Professor (commonsense-mark.blogspot.com).   Again, with great irony its justification for doing so was written in the most incomprehensible, gummy prose.  So much for Dickens and Chaucer. 

The University that I loved and is so much a part of my identity simply does not exist anymore.  And I will no longer support it or engage with it.  I have a reunion coming up that I will take a pass on and will not participate in the class gift.   I have great memories and great reverence for what the university is and what it did for me and it pains me greatly to watch the CRT barbarians breach the walls and begin to overrun the place. 

-Speaking and Acting Truth and Refuse to See Race.

I will speak truth in my life and in my blog.  I will call out DEI for what it is—a form of reverse apartheid.  I will call out BLM for what it is—a Marxist organization committed to undermining Western Civilization.  

I will not participate in unconscious bias training, ever.   My biases are pretty conscious.   If you have a good attitude and perform, I like you and will want you as part of my team.  If you have a poor attitude and do not perform, I do want to exclude you.  Period.  Your skin color matters not a whit to me.   I will not respect any  artificial boundaries of inclusion.   Indeed, excellence REQUIRES exclusion and it has nothing whatsoever to do with skin pigmentation.  To suggest that it does is rationalizing blather. 

I will continue to live by the creed of MLK and judge people for what they are, not by the color of their skin.  My credo will be Refuse to See Race.  Absolutely and without exception.  I will only see race as a descriptive term if there is criminal activity involved--- the carjacker was Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic, African American, etc.  Otherwise, race doesn’t figure into my consideration at all.   I judge you by your words and behavior---nothing else.  Hence the sleight of hand of Black Lives Matter.  Yes, black lives do, indeed, matter, but so does black behavior.  I will not hesitate to call out bad behavior, no matter what your skin pigmentation.  So all this stuff about being sensitive to other cultures is nonsense.  Yes, I’m good with cuisine, art, literature and music (except violent misogynist rap music).  But if your culture involves honor killings, female genital mutilation, burkas, having 5 kids from 5 different fathers I have to support, carjackings and such, I will not hold back my contempt for those aspects of someone’s culture.  And I’m not going to walk on eggshells talking about it.

Networking

I will distance myself from individuals that are hawking, supporting or expressing sympathy with Critical Theory   CRT has begun to encroach in my personal relationships as well.   When one of my old classmates sent me an email with “To My White Friends” in the subject line, I responded on my blog and deleted him from my contact list.  Next time he is in town and contacts me for a get together, I’m sure to be tied up and unavailable.  As I would with a proselytizing religious fanatic, I have better things to do.  This isn’t an intellectual game anymore to be played in the campus coffee shop.  These zealots are putting their racial and economic views into action.  And I know where this leads.  

Likewise, I automatically disconnect from anyone on LinkedIn that (i) uses preferred pronouns in his or her profile, (ii) wears a mask in his or her profile picture, or (iii) posts political preferences.  Several people posted congratulatory messages on LinkedIn regarding Kamala Harris.   Beep.  Gone.  No one would dare post anything suggesting support for Donald Trump, or any other Republican for that matter. 

Finally, Facebook is no longer part of my life.  After seeing the misguided posts regarding the Covington incident and Nick Sandmann (as well as Facebook’s blatant attempt to control speech), I decided that I am simply not going to participate in that circus.   I still maintain a Twitter account, but given the purge, Twitter may be gone soon as well.

This is only the beginning.  As the Woke Left ratchets up its suppression, I will ratchet up my resistance accordingly. 

Game on.