“Diversity” Top Down or diversity Bottom up?

Spring Fundraiser 2012, Day Three
Despite the wear and tear, I love our Fundraiser weeks. It’s a bit like a holiday, or Old Home Week. For one thing, donors often send an accompanying email message in addition to their note at the bottom of the Pay Pal form. Also, it forces me to do a post every other day, even on the days I’m sure I “can’t”. I’ll admit that if the every-other-day schedule went on for an extended time, you’d be reading some wacky essays here.

This fundraising business has its own learning curve, at least the way we do it. The Baron, as usual, does the heavy lifting while I write half the posts and all the acknowledgements. It works!

Sticking to our chosen subject can be a problem some days, as can remembering the point of all this: to raise money for the coming quarter so that we can keep Gates of Vienna open. So far so good: even though it does seem magical at times.

For this particular bleg I’m hoping to hear from some of our lurking Anonymouses who stepped out of the silence to make their point that the demographics fabricated by those Lefties in Norway regarding our audience were just that: convenient fictions. The personal prosperity many of you described gave me great hope for this particular bleg.

To those of you who wrote to put the lie to the ugly prevarication coming out of Norway, I ask that you step up again, this time with financial help. If your anonymity is a concern, send cash. Several of our donors have done just that for years and their money has never gone astray — they let us know when they mail it and we let them know as soon as it arrives in our post office box. And before the unfriendlies fire off an obvious salvo, let me save them some time: yes indeed, we do indeed pay taxes on our donations.

Norway — just to pick any old totalitarian democracy — is a good example of faux “diversity”. Diversity by government decree would be funny if it weren’t so crippling to the people who are forced to live within that framework.

Fjordman catches flack from the government-supported jornolists when he does fund-raising to take care of his own expenses. Those hacks are oblivious to the deep irony that their jobs are paid for out of the taxes gathered from Fjordman and others like him. These government workers are so deeply ignorant of life outside their sheep pen they can’t comprehend the reality for others, for people with real jobs, for people who are unemployed or underemployed or living with a disability. They “celebrate” diversity yet they move in the limited circles of their government-run environment which ensures they’ll never have to actually experience anything close to what they preach. Even if someone left the cage door open, do you think they’d leave? It’s a scary world out there with the grown-ups.

Norway isn’t diverse but its elites are dedicated to talking the talk. The pretentious airy-fairy grand consensus may end up with a few broken eggs, but hey: it’s a tasty omelet for those invited to the table. As for those cast into oblivion, shunned to death, well, too bad for them.

I believe in the principles of diversity, but not the ideology of this simplistic top-down pee cee “Diversity”. Genuine diversity is a bottom-up phenomenon; people have the freedom to sort themselves as they see fit. Here in America, the genuine article has been badly damaged by the ideologues and the opportunists who see the possibilities in grabbing a piece of the governmental Diversity Pie.

These snake oil salesmen — union leaders (not the rank-and-file), corrupt diploma mills, mass media hacks, the legislative lobbyists’ guild, ethically-challenged legislators and Pentagon pimps — it’s a veritable…umm, circus. No, make that a continuous kabuki performance. A stylized ritual where everyone in the audience knows what is going to happen next and is too out-numbered to mount an effective opposition.

There is hope to be had at the margins. The Tea Party is one example. Its activists will probably defeat the union leaders and the Democrat machine in Wisconsin in their attempt to remove a competent governor who has put his state on a more solid financial footing than it’s seen in a long time. Michelle Malkin has some of the details.

There have been gallons of mud slung in this ugly fight, and the left-leaning Washington Post predictably sings the Democrats’ tune in this one. Under the ‘reasonable’ tone is an ugly accusation, one that is far removed from reality. Given that the Democrat machine owns every major city in the U.S., and given that most of those cities are in ruins, WaPo stretches the truth mighty thin here. “Gaming the system”?? The Democrats wrote the book on that one.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Milwaukee paper has endorsed the governor and condemned the recall attempt.

The Tea Party functions well because it is decentralized. Agreed, it’s not perfect. But is sure is more diverse than either of the political parties. If we could ever get the Republican National Committee to do anything that smart — i.e. decentralize — we’d never have to live with another bloated, poverty-making government machine again. But hey — they’d lose the power perks that devolve to the also-rans…once you breathe in those “inside the Beltway fumes” there goes…diversity.

By the way, the Tea Party only exists because it was a genuine response to a spontaneous cri de coeur. People watched that video and stood up to respond as one: “Basta!” was the general sentiment. Our first local Tax Day Pushback was well-attended, even in the rain.

As de Tocqueville noted, America is a generous place. People are “naturally” generous here, whether it’s volunteering at the library, running the Emergency Squad, or putting time in at the Volunteer Fire Department. One of the best of the private groups is Habitat for Humanity. Their rules are firm and fair and the results of all that work make profound differences for individual families.

Gates of Vienna survives because of that very human impulse to support the good. Our European donors are an equal part of our diverse resources. Our volunteer essayists and translators and news-finders are part of this project that has grown far beyond the boundaries of a blog run by two people. All of our people know that their work counts, that their money is well-spent.

The Left wants to shove their statist version of Diversity down our throats. The more powerful ones are hell-bent on becoming the next Greece and failing their citizens. So far so good. The resistance continues to be robust and diversified. It is the privilege of all who make Gates of Vienna a viable, robust endeavor to know full well what they are doing for the future.

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Yesterday’s donations came in from:

Stateside: California, N. Carolina, New York, and Texas

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, British Virgin Islands, Denmark, Slovenia, and the UK

Let’s keep on keeping on.


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