DISCLAIMER: Some of you may hate me by the time I'm done with this and hate speech of any kind will result in a block. Private messages are welcomed as long as they are reasonable, fair and constructive. This is solely MyTake on the issues pulling apart diversity and acceptance of minorities in the United Sates.
It seems that everywhere you go, everyone you meet and no matter where you are in the United States, the farther they get from appreciating diversity and working toward equality, they pull themselves farther from it.
Every day you see things about this minority or that minority claiming they want more and more rights or entitlement to make up for what's been done wrong in the past to their previous generations. Before I go on, I need to make it clear that I am not justifying any current wrongdoings; just those that are in the past and being used as leverage (or so they feel) to make radical changes and they want immediate gratification for it. Additionally, I am part of more than one minority. I'm a gay woman as well as disabled (this gets overlooked tremendously.) Three very important minorities, but none of them outweigh the other. I am all three but I am not going to take what happened in the past to justify my need to maintain diversity and equality at the same time.
Let's look at the LGBTQ (add anymore letters and we might have the whole alphabet) movement of late. There are so many platforms that have started in recent years, what seemingly began to gain incredible strength recently since the Pulse Night Club shootings AND the following election of Donald Trump (which I'll come back to later.) Pulse was treated as an action against gay men, not as the act of terrorism that it was. No significant link was ever made regarding the shooter and the gay community, yet it was sensationalized for that reason rather than the horrific terror it was. The club could have been a mix of LGBT and straight people and it never would likely have gotten the same type of attention.
Even as recently as the 1960s, women were domestically expected to be required to do much of the home care as well often going to work, a dual burden. They worked harder and were compensated for less. It was unfair and still is. It's rightfully something to make noise about. However, I think that the claims for immediate compensation for way of life in all ways is absurd.
There are great examples of more reasonable ways to achieve equality and overcome the oppression of injustices of the past. Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Harriet Tubman; all of them pushed and strived within in the ways they had and best knew how and for whatever cause they represented. They worked hard, didn't give up and demanded equality. They didn't sensationalize the injustices and expect things to change overnight like extreme femisists do today. They make a lot of noise and get angry when they get nowhere.
I want to look at the black community. (why are they called black? they're not. we can't call them brown skinned, though, because that's categorized for Native Americans, I believe, but that may not be right.) I think the demands to take down (and taking down unlawfully) statues of people historically connected to our past, whether they've been slave owners or not. There are tremendous amounts of disasters that took place in their lives that affected the outcome and progress of the nation in dramatic fashion, despite their ill-doings as a private person. Those statues have the right to stay and roadways should not be renamed. They rightfully bear the names of those people that developed this nation.
History has struck hard to people that feel they are owed anything and to have immediate action to make up for what people today aren't responsible for. No one is owed anything. However, the recent spike in these uprisings and with these demands are spurred by people's issues with one person: President Donald Trump. It's been proven that he is bigoted and mysoginistic. He's hot headed. He's not the reason.
There's a bigger enemy. The whole reason why things are falling apart that no one even seems to want to talk about: the media.
Think about it. If the media didn't exist, if it wasn't so readily available, how would we ever determine what's going on in the world? What got press and what didn't? If it wasn't for the media, no one would be getting attention about anything. They have repeatedly harped on the necessity of immediate actions and displayed the poor, oppressed, the wronged; who would notice any group if no one could offer fodder to it? There's Black History Month in February, National Women's Month in March, Pride Month in June...all of these things have been around for some time, yet gone by relatively quietly until it was deemed necessary by the media. What does this all mean, though?
Money. It all comes down to money.
People love bleeding hearts and handouts, children always bring out the soft spots in people. Anyone they can pin hate to against or make stories from comes in as revenue. It's been proven that some newspapers draft two different cover pages and deliver them based on the political demographic. They know how to make money.
In the movie-musical "Newsies," put out by Disney, there's a monlogue by Robert Duval, who plays spectaculatrly as the antagonist, Joseph Pulitzer. He's the head of The World newspaper in New York City at the turn of the century. He says "...the power of the press is the greatest power of them all. I tell the city how to think; how to vote...."
Think about that.
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