USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010829.1256 (On Screen via motion detectors): It's always important to remember that every author has a bias, whether intentional or not, and that everything you read is an imperfect representation of reality. One way to try to get a fairly even view of some situation is to read two descriptions of it from radically different points of view; it's sort of like looking at an object from two sides. So after reading The New Republic you seek out The National Review and find out what they think. But sometimes that isn't possible. So I use alarm bells; things to spot which suggest just what the author's bias is.

So there I was, reading this article about the failure of "Zero Tolerance" in the schools. The specific horror stories were horrible, the statistics were scary, and then one of my alarm bells went off: "students of color". Ooops. That's Jesse-Jackson-speak; political correctness; knee-jerk bleeding-heart liberalism. It means that the problem maybe isn't as serious as the article suggests. This was only confirmed when I reached the end and found the credit for the author: "Johanna Wald is a freelance writer and staff member of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University." Hoo-boy. It don't come any more leftist than that.

Maybe there is a problem. Maybe it's even as bad as she says it is. Surely there have been preposterous abuses of "Zero Tolerance", some of which have made national news (like the kid in Nevada who was jailed simply because someone he went to school with whispered something about him to the faculty). But in a nation as large as the US, there are always such cases; it's not so much whether they happen as how often.

I happen to think that "Zero Tolerance" is a stupid policy; it's not only wrong-headed, but it probably also violates at least three constitutional principles: equal protection, due process and cruel and unusual punishment. But when someone is trying to write an article to motivate political action (as is clearly the case here) it behooves them to not discredit themselves by how they phrase things. Extremists will be unable to avoid phrasing which gives away their extremist viewpoints. This author was no more able to avoid saying "students of color" (instead of the more usual "minority students") than would certain conservatives be able to avoid using the phrase "family values" (another one of my alarm bells). To them these phrases are right; to say it any other way would cause them to be discredited with their peers. It would be like an LA gang member wearing the wrong color clothing. But if you really want to manipulate those of us in the center, you need to stop speaking like the ghetto (either left ghetto or right ghetto). Otherwise you're only going to be preaching to the choir. (discuss)