C is for Con Job

What Cecily Harsch-Kinnane and other progressive do-gooders want to sell you is the idea that diversity, by itself, is always a virtue, and that you cannot possibly get too much of it.

What you are actually buying is an agreement to allow children from bad neighborhoods to come into your neighborhood and use the public school you paid for (and have tirelessly supported) until it is overcrowded and/or underachieving.

Artificially introducing diversity in Atlanta is like living in an orange grove and taking vitamin C supplements. You get enough already; you don't need to buy more from the pill salesman. I have 20 interactions in Atlanta a day with people not like me. There's a hugely diverse population here, and it is most decidely NOT self-segregating. You see people of color at Kroger. At the ball game. At Atlantic Station. Every place you go. I get about 3,000 percent of the minimum daily requirement of diversity every day. I don't need any supplements.

If our neighborhood schools had 2X the capacity they have, would I be in favor of allowing more students from unfortunate household situations largely brought about by the selfishness of adults and terribly destructive govenrment entitlement programs --

--(I'm sorry, I meant to say, would I allow more "diverse" students)--

--to enroll here, and thereby flee their own underachieving neighborhood schools?

Absolutely.

But that is not the question in front of us.

The task we have right now is summoning the will to say no to holier-than-thou progressives who want to use guilt and race to bait us into taking a bad deal on redistricting. And if you don't see that deal coalescing in front of you right now (all the official statements to the contrary notwithstanding) then you'd better start paying attention. A bad deal is coming, and diversity is the Trojan horse they're going to use to wheel it into Midtown.

Now, nobody wants to turn their back on the many Atlanta children unfortunate enough to be born to parents who can't or won't get involved in their kids' schools.

Is this our problem? Technically, no. We can't fix those parents. But should we take on part of the job of fighting for those kids in an organized way, anyway? Is it a moral imperative? I think it is.

Can we help those kids while simultaneously excluding them from enrollment in our overcrowded neighborhood schools? Sure we can. Is it hypocritical to do so? No, it is highly moral to do so.

So how do we do that?

We should volunteer to adopt a school in another part of Atlanta and help improve its facilities and raise money for it.

We should also put heavy pressure on underachieving parents and underachieving politicians to do more for their own neighborhoods. There are ways to do that. Is it meddling? Yes, let's call it meddling. I'm pro-meddling. We should fight for those kids --kids who are mostly the victims of their own no-account parents. We should fight for them because their own parents won't.

I'm all for doing that. But I am not going to be forced to drive our daughter to a school in Buckhead or up to NAHS someday because somebody sold my kid out on the basis of their feel-good idea of "diversity."

No way, no how.