Affirmative Action Anecdotes

I think affirmative action is wrong. Period.

I think any discrimination which goes against choices made on individual merit are also wrong. If two contractors submit similar bids, then the county should choose the one with the established track record, lowest cost, and ability to complete the project quickest. That the chosen contractor happens to be black should not matter.

In education, I think that if you are qualified, you will get in somewhere. If you are trulymotivated, you can trade up your academic success to another school. I started at a community college, I graduated from the oldest public land grant university in the nation.

Three anecdotal notes.

1. Major repaving contract came up for bidding in our county. Three companies bid. The lowest bid, by $63,000.00 was owned by a white man. The highest by $132,000.00 was owned by a black woman <>. The black owned company was granted the bid due to it being a preferential treatment towards both engaging a black minority business and a female owned business.

2. My college career was seriously derailed by an inability to qualify for any federal Pell orPerkins formula aid. This was due to the income level enjoyed by my mother due to her alimony and child support payments. After being told I would have to wait 3 years and make sure she did not claim me as a dependant on her taxes <> I was then told off the record that if I were a minority I would not be paying for my education at all, because college students who were Dean's List and happen to be a minority would have tons of non federal and state aid packages custom tailored to keep them in college. As it was I took 3 years off, went into massive debt, and walked out with 2 degrees. It took me 5.75 academic years, but 10 calender years to complete my college career not because I lacked academic merit but because I lacked financial ability & I was not a minority.

3. As to academic preparedness. I would say in any of the classes I took as a freshman and sophomore, almost all students were equally prepared. However, the ones who I was aware of poor performance tended to be from either rural or poor environments. If you were white and poor you tended to do as bad as a person who was poor and black. Also rural students tended to do poorly because their "worldliness" was very deficient in comparison to metro and suburban students.

In my Junior, Senior, and seminar courses however, I noticed something else. The people who made it to this level had already survived the weed-out process. They belonged where they were. However the black students that I had classes with who were from America were always among the worst performers in classes. They earned hard "C" averages. Additionally whites from Rural south origins, often did not survive these classes and often dropped out with in completes. The object I learned was that the Black American students took the attitude of succeed at all costs. The rural students tended to collect their things and go home. I think that the real problem with AA is that it does not recognize economic impediment as being the true source of disparate success at the college level.

I think AA is inherently flawed, creates more problems than solutions, and simply needs to be removed as legal governmental policy. The government should simply enforce laws when someone is denied an honest chance simply because of a minority status of any type.

Leia Mais…

The Largest Anti-War Movement Ever

 My comment is aimed at the so called 20 million. So called because I don't think the numbers approach 20 million, The protest in London, Paris and Berlin along with San Fransisco and New York IE the biggest.. don't even add up to 5 million people.

Saddam said publicly that he thanked all of you.

Saddam, in case you forgot is the man who has had over 1,000,000 of his countrymen purged and liquidated for political reasons over the last 30 years. For those who have a problem with purge as a euphemism, he murdered them.

Saddam, in case you forgot is the man who has had over a million deaths caused in warfare against Iran. Lord knows how many Iranians died.

Saddam is the person responsible for more death and suffering than the United States has cause over the same time period. Yet we, for some unknown reason are called into question?

I agree that war sucks. It should be avoided, but not at all costs. Sometimes you have to do hard things because they are better to have been done than avoided. Would the 2,000,000 say thank you to the 20,000,000 protesters? I don't think they would.

Leia Mais…