Both Sides Not Against the Middle

Both Sides Not Against the Middle

About 700 words (approx. 2 pages)

                I try always to read both the pro and con op-ed columns when they’re lined up near each other in the newspaper.  Yes, I still read the printed newspaper, and I don’t know if they can pull off the liberal/conservative side-by-side layout as well in the digital version.  Since more and more people get their news electronically, this tells us that perhaps fewer and fewer people read both sides of the issue.  They don’t readily find both sides of the issue next to each other.  Take some time to read both sides;  visit the one side labelled “From the Left,” and then the other, “From the Right”. 

                In the Atlanta Sunday paper, it is frequently Leonard Pitts of Miami (in the left corner) vs. George Will of Washington, DC, (in the right corner).  If you don’t know about Leonard, he’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who writes mostly about racial grievances.  I can’t get on board with what he says, but dang he says it well and weaves a column that’s tight and mighty.  George, on the other hand, can’t craft a decent story line but man can he ante up the big words, and his old economics clearly make sense to me.  Thus, every Sunday I get to read an activist’s diatribe versus the sesquipedalian ramblings of a Washington insider. 

                During the weekday there is an even more intriguing lineup:  the Pulitzer-Prize winner from the left is Clarence Page from Chicago, and the academic from the right is Walter Williams from California.  These two fine gentlemen, both black, sometimes rock my world by railing on subjects near to me, and sometimes I agree wholeheartedly with them both.  Here’s an example.

                Clarence Page took on the last decade, the 2010’s:  “It was a media decade that began with the birth of Instagram and ended with me still trying to figure out what Instagram is good for.”  It appears to me that that whole phenomenon is just ephemeral distraction—touch it and it’s gone.  Poofery instead of poetry or prose.  When I was in Atlanta public schools in the 1960s, we had to memorize the 23^rd Psalm to pass fourth grade.  That’s right, public school.  The idea of memorizing, the idea of poetry, and the idea of something sacred are no longer acceptable ideas.  We have poofery instead.  Poofery soon turns to chicanery, but who can tell the difference?   I’m with you Clarence.

                And Walter’s column takes on the “diversocrats” in higher education.  “Diversity officials are a growing part of a college bureaucracy structure that outnumbers faculty by 2 to 2.5.”  He talks about grievance studies and each newly recognized problem leading to a call for more programs and staffing, of course.  A bureaucracy once spawned is like any organism, it seeks to thrive and expand for its own sake. 

                “One wonders just how far spineless college administrators will go when it comes to caving in to the demands of campus snowflakes who have been taught they must be protected against words, events and deeds that do not fully conform…”  You’ve seen the analogies:  modern day McCarthyism, Big Brother and so on.  Most of us probably agree that there’s a lot of non-sense going on, but what’s new and different is that there are now jobs and money depending on making the problems bigger.  Meanwhile the end result, education, is diminished in importance.  I don’t know if Walter would agree with me, but it seems analogous to valuing the diversity score of an NBA team over the team’s win-loss record. 

                As a trade association executive, I’m frequently on Capitol Hill to attend some committee or subcommittee hearing.  In case you are wondering, these are all scripted events.  Everyone knows exactly who is going to say what; it’s a play, and it would be more efficient to just publish what has been planned and skip the performance.  However, some things happen behind the scenes—those of us who read both sides make some compromises, we do some predictive math and the like, and I’m honored to be in the company of those like Clarence and Walter as we seek to figure things out—and then the theatre comes back on, ready for Instagram so those who don’t bother to read both sides have something to see.    

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