There are three areas of human endeavor where the left allows itself shortcuts that are upending American society.
When I was in college, I had a big “Murphy’s Laws” poster. It had the standard stuff about anything that can go wrong will go wrong and buttered bread always lands with the butter facing the floor. One of the “laws” that it had read as follows: “A shortcut is the longest distance between two points.” There are three areas of endeavor in which shortcuts are upending American society for the worse.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
The basic premise of DEI is that a person up for a college spot, professorial position, or a job in general is not really qualified for the position at hand. For a student, it may be low SAT scores or poor grades, while for any professional, the skills presented do not rise to the expectations of the future potential employer. And then, magically, skin color, last name, place of origin or other factor not related at all to actual ability is factored in and the candidate gets the nod. This used to be called affirmative action; today DEI is the overarching term for such stacking of the deck.
The classic example of DEI failure is Harvard’s ex-president Claudine Gay. By any academic or professional metric, she was lacking. She had written no book. She had only a handful of papers. There were questions as to her lifting ideas from other academics in those papers. But she was a woman and she was black. Professing a woke view of how Harvard needed to be transmuted from a top-tier college into a DEI showroom, she found herself president of Harvard University. The events after the 10/7 Hamas pogrom showed her inability to lead and within a few months of the attack, she was out of the presidential office.
One question is why the DEI candidate is not qualified to get a desired position on his or her merit alone. There can be many reasons, some interconnected. A lack of ability, a lack of effort, a lack of family or school support growing up. Whatever the reason, a DEI candidate is by all objective measure unqualified for an academic position or job. The shortcut is to give him or her the job and simply paper over the failures of the past. If one wants more black students at Harvard, then he would need to go back to black families that have over 50% of their children out of wedlock and also back to predominantly black schools which generally do worse than their white equivalents. The hard work needs to be done way back in the neighborhoods where DEI candidates do not blossom into deserving candidates for future positions. But that’s too much to ask; the easier path is simply to give a free pass to the DEI candidate and let him or her fail later when the lack of skills is exposed. Ask yourself if you would want an unqualified doctor to do a difficult surgery on you.
The Border Crisis
The border also represents another shortcut that is destroying America. Most of those coming over the southern border are doing so for economic reasons. Sure, they know the fire-drill: claim asylum so as not to be kicked out, but the real reason is for a better life. Their presence in the US is a burden to communities that cannot withstand the financial, social, and personal costs of having large numbers of people showing up and needing housing, food, medical services, schools and more. The largest city in the US, New York, threw up its hands with only ten thousand illegal aliens gifted by Texas; think how much towns and cities closer to the border suffer with the Biden/Harris approved arrival of people who have no legal claim to being in the United States.
The entry of millions of illegal aliens, many of them working-age men, is a shortcut to fixing the countries from which they came. You don’t see a lot of Scandinavians in the crowds crossing the Rio Grande. The ones who are coming en masse, often with the encouragement of their home governments, come from economically and politically failed states for the most part. Rather than helping to fix those countries so that their citizens would have no need to leave, the Democrats see it easier to simply let the masses in and lower wages, raise rents, and cause much social friction. This is not a real solution. Like in the case with DEI, the real solution would take years and lots of work. And it might still fail, as countries like Mexico have no obligation to improve. Those in Washington have no patience for addressing the root problems and simply allow millions of unvetted people to cross the border and set up shop in the US. What effort we did not have to expend to get my wife a Green Card. But if you’re from the right lousy country, no paperwork is required. Illegal aliens send over $5 billion in remittances a month back home. None of it is taxed.
Transgenderism
The Penn swimmer who one year was a mediocre male and the next year an NCAA women’s champ is a microcosm of the shortcut to womanhood. No man can become a woman, no matter how many drugs taken or surgeries performed. No effort and no amount of time can give a man insights into the life of a woman. But no worry, we will simply take the guy’s word that he’s a woman, maybe ask him to tamp down his testosterone, and off he...er, she goes. This is another failed shortcut, this time from a male life to a faux women’s existence. Nothing the fake trans folks can do can truly change their sex. Dylan Mulvaney tried desperately to act as he imagined a woman would behave and he came off as a fool. He probably even tried to fail at parallel parking. It makes no difference. He is not a woman. Nor is the Penn swimmer or the two Olympic boxers pummeling women on a daily basis. The shortcut is a cruel joke for all of the women who will suffer from male swimmers, boxers, runners and others who will take their place on a medal podium or in jobs because of the lie that is accepted and propagated by the left.
The left is into hocus-pocus. It thinks that it can make an undeserving student a Harvard freshman or a poor, illiterate illegal alien a proud American citizen or a guy with personal issues a woman. They can’t, and it is the American people who suffer from these falsehoods. Murphy was on the money: there is no greater distance between truth and lies than a devious shortcut.