OUSTING DIVERSITY

 

 

 

Tricia Smith Vaughan
December 21, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

“Before a great city can be built, its people must achieve unity.” Although it sounds as though it should be something that some ancient philosopher may have said, I could find no citation for this sentence. After driving back with my children from a showing of “The Polar Express” at the local library, I had seen this quote painted on a mural under a bridge in the North Hollywood section of Los Angeles. Ironically, I saw it close to the same street where a member of my former moms’ group lived, the moms’ group that kicked me out, not very subtly, only a few weeks ago.

A quote from an e-mail that I received from one of the members explains it better than I can:

“I no longer want to be your friend and i'm [sic] not the only one in the group that feels the same way. I can no longer tolerate your blogs of my childrens [sic] birthday party nor your so called friendship. Please don't invite my children to any of your birthday parties for you will not be invited to ours. I feel deceived by you for you never once had this opinion around our group of friends . . . I'm not the only one in the group who feels betrayed by you.”

I checked my live journal and found no record of either of her children’s birthday parties. What I had done to lose her supposed friendship and gain her ire was to state an opinion in writing. Even worse, I had dared to have an opinion that differed from hers. I have, as another member told me, “strong opinions.” And worse yet, I was told that I make “value judgements.”

This comment was e-mailed by another member of the moms’ group. Apparently my opinions were the problem in that most of them seemed to differ from theirs:

“In our [moms’ group] . . . more than half go to GOVERMENT [sic] schools, all except your children went to pre-school, all except yours have been immunized . . . Why did you join our mom's group?

I have yet to proclaim that I don’t want to be around people who attend or have attended government schools or that I don’t care to associate with people who are vaccinated. If I did indeed hold either opinion, I must admit that I’d be excluding myself in both cases. I have been vaccinated enough in my life and I am a graduate of government elementary and high schools, as well as of a public college.

So much for diversity and tolerance in California! I joined the moms’ group when my first child was a newborn. I mistakenly thought that the moms supported me in my comedy and writing. We mainly talked about momly stuff, but I told them about my Web site, where I regularly wrote information about my published articles. I assumed that if anyone cared to know what I thought about, say, homeschooling, he or she could check my site.

For the record, my children have received some vaccines; I have begun recently researching this issue, however, due to some things I’ve read and heard. The most compelling personal argument against vaccination is that I know no one with polio, but I know two children under six who have been diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. Should that interesting bit of information, and my subsequent questions about vaccinations, exclude me from activities with children who have dutifully received all their vaccinations without question?

I didn’t think so, but the other members did, one claimed that “it would make sense . . . that you would rather socialize with moms who held views more in line with your own, especially since you do feel so very strongly about your beliefs.” I love how that decision was made for me; I had thought that I gained strength from these women and that I learned from them because their decisions were different from my own. I was tolerant of them and they were tolerant of me, as long as they believed that I believed what they did.

I could go on and on about my disappointment; and my guess is that they were disappointed in me as well, for being different than they’d thought. Having been born and raised in the South, I try always to be polite. I guess some people think that if you’re polite, you can’t have strong opinions. But what I didn’t understand is why my writing made them so very angry. And I also wondered why they chose to oust me from their group without discussing the issues, rather than talking with me first.

I believe the answer lies in how well the mainstream media and the government schools are doing their job. I’ve noticed that though the subjects that I write about haven’t changed much since I moved to Los Angeles from North Carolina six years ago, the publishing of my essays and letters regarding those subjects by, say, the Los Angeles Times, has waned considerably. Because I’ve given birth since moving, my subjects have increased; now I write about homeschooling, for instance, and breastfeeding, in addition to writing about preserving natural families. But the quality of my writing has not decreased with each passing birth. Nevertheless, mainstream media ignore me much more than they did a mere six years ago.

The mainstream media, run by corporations so huge that we could almost call them a government in and of themselves, claim bewilderment at why their numbers are down. Some of them have started their own boring editorial blogs, written about their own boring issues; still, they exclude many great writers who don’t espouse the views that the public-private entities want them to have. Mainstream media miss many of the wonderful writers on this and other Internet-only sites because we often have opinions that are out of the mainstream closet, away from the Fabian socialist attire that most mainstream media wear with far too great regularity.

Mainstream media’s readers believe they live in a world of tolerant and diverse free speech, but they actually live in a world that is so intolerant of truly free speech that its readers have problems digesting opinions that are different from their own; they read what they want to read; and they are quite intolerant of people whose views are truly different. Any female who has passed through the eighth grade of a government school knows exactly what happens to dissenters from the clique: they are thrown out. And so my supposed friends in the moms’ group acted in the way that we have been trained. They did not ask questions, they did not discuss, they did not think rationally. They sent me nasty e-mails and I, hurt by people who I’d assumed were friends, responded in kind.

How well the government schools and mainstream media are succeeding!

Once I decreased my reading of mainstream newspapers, I was shocked at what all I began to see. The Southern Baptist in me makes me have a strong desire to tell people about new insights. This desire did not mesh with the consensus of the moms’ group, a place in which strong opinions, especially those that differ from the consensus, are not welcome.

As I write this, I realize the true education that I have received since I stopped viewing the nightly network news and began reading sites such as News with Views was something that I wanted to share with every mom I know. I feel more comfortable sharing myself through writing; I’m not a person who meets a person at a party and talks all night about me, me, me. I see writing as a way of educating other people, or at least of making them think and question their opinions. I love it when people question my own opinions, especially when they give me information that I have not thought of before.

My mistake was in assuming that everyone wants to be challenged to think outside their own suburban box. The moms’ group that I was a part of convicted me; there was no trial, not even an inquisition. After they read what I’d had the audacity to write, I was guilty. The punishment for daring to disagree with consensus? A sneaky ousting of me as the current leader of the group, without even bothering to tell me why I was being expelled, until the ousting had been completed.

Of course, no one bothered to thank me for enlightening them in one of the articles to the President’s New Freedom Commission, which promises to screen every American for what he or she is thinking. No one really cared that I’d informed them in another article of the travesty of government schools when I wrote about Rob Reiner’s pending ballot initiative that will fund pre-school for all California children, whether the parents want it or not. People seemed to think that my choice to homeschool my children somehow threatened their decision not to. And because of my questioning of the many learning disabilities diagnoses that teachers, psychologists, and others dote regularly on children and adults today, I was deemed “rude” and “insensitive.”

Funny how freedom is taken away: slowly and subtly. While writers on this site and others tell how the goals of the socialist United Nations are creeping into our schools and churches, members of a suburban moms’ group refuse to tolerate opinions that differ from theirs; instead, the differing opinions threaten them. Although I hope that this situation and group is an anomaly, my guess is that it’s not.

I understand now why suburban moms are way too busy to take ten minutes during the Teletubbies to call and tell their Congress Critters to save the freedom to choose our health supplements. It no longer behooves me that suburban moms are okay with sending their child to a government school that’s within 100 miles of a public school district that asked its first graders if they’d ever touched their private parts. We suburban moms are simply too busy reverting to eighth grade, ousting the dissenters instead of listening and learning. One kind reader wrote me recently and said, “I think most citizens will be shocked when the New World Order gang takes complete control of our lives.”

Maybe. Personally, I hope the whole New World Order thing is completely bogus and that we're wasting our time writing about it, but reading almost daily about our loss of freedoms and about the varying levels of police control across the United States makes me see the one-world government stuff as much more than some bizarre conspiracy theory.

After dealing with the supposedly tolerant moms’ group that ousted diversity, I’m placing my bet that most people won’t even know or care what hit them when the government overtly makes us willing sheep. After all, how many suburban moms protested when the Patriot Act was passed, either version I or II? How many moms know that the Patriot Act should soon be renewed for four more years, allowing the government to continue to snoop on the library books that we check out, without our knowledge? And what does this apathy teach our suburban children? When totalitarianism settles in more completely in the United States, my prediction is that we’ll blindly follow it and drive off into the sunset in our SUVs.

But there is a shiny silver lining: We’ll have built a “great city” from all our unity. The one-world government will be filled with people who are deeply tolerant of everything, everything except dissent.

References:

1, Deal on Patriot Act Stirs Opposition
2, Ninth Circuit Deals Blow to Parental Rights
3, Not Homeschooling? What's Your Excuse?
4, Will New Calif. Bill Stop Homeschooling?
5, Bush Handout to Pharmaceutical Companies

© 2005 Tricia S. Vaughan - All Rights Reserved