Fatal Distraction
Why the End of DEI Really Matters
There are people in this world that love meetings and committees.
Going to a meeting is like working, it happens at work, words are spoken, time is consumed (that’s why consultants really love them,) and all the rest but – except for the poor bastard who gets stuck with fulfilling the “task points” – no work occcurs, if work is defined by building something/creating something, doing anything that will further the cause of the product or effort or what have you.
It's like watching a mediocre sitcom on TV – time is killed, you feel you may have laughed – therefore benefited - from the experience, therefore it was time merely wasted. As G.K Chesterton opined:
“I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.”
But they do take time, they do take preparation, and you have to be there even though you know they are pointless – if you are not there you become the focus of the meeting, if you are not at the table you become dinner.
And this is how DEI wormed its way into government agencies, by being committee based – never forget is not that easy to stand up at any committee meeting and say whatever is being discussed is preposterous and it’s easy to hide horrible things in groupthink settings…”no one complained” turns into “everyone loved it” and the justification of any idea is complete.
DEI, social justice, critic, race theory, whatever you want to call it grew out academic/human resources committees of silence- if anyone said anything contradictory, they were declared either a -phobe or an -ist or worse.
The DEI concept steamrolled through public agencies based on that simple concept.
So why does it matter, how can spending an hour talking about “systemic bias” really change anything?
It’s because that when an official is distracted by the shiny object of moral perfectitude they stop looking at their basic job.
An ideological filter is like using call block on your phone.
For local officials, the problem was intensely acute.
That job involves a few basic things - Keep the schools good and talk about classrooms rather than bathrooms.
Keep the streets safe, the residents as prosperous as possible, and the government actually trying to balance its budget – that’s what local officials should spend their time on.
But with DEI initiatives, they lose focus – three hours talking about systemic white colonist evil is three hours that could be spent on potholes, a few million spent on DEI consultants could go to help make sure the parks aren’t drug-riddled deathtraps.
But at every level DEI has been a pointless distraction, somewhat akin to the Department of Commerce or the local public works department being told to figure out if cats can read or if the grey aliens have antennae or if life is fair.
It’s a pointless waste of time and energy and in the end does nothing to help the nation or community.
In fact, it does the exact opposite.
See Chicago, whose mayor has quintuple-downed on illegal immigration.
See Karen Bass, LA’s mayor, response to the worst fire event in the city in 45 years. See her leaving to go to Africa to do, well, who knows. See the fire chief spending time on a theoretical equity mission and effort when she had a massive chunk of her fire engines sitting in a maintenance yard waiting to be fixed (140 -ish trucks were deployed to the recent Palisades fire, another 100 were in the shop.)
Even before the fire, LA had six homeless people die on the streets every day despite the billions spent (because it had to spent in a particular way that did not end the problem or immediately and directly help people.)
See climate change – all around the Western world, the DEI/green flagellants (they really are the same people) are pushing people into poverty while making sure their meeting-based economy prospers.
See the forever wars, theoretically fought to do good but rarely achieving anything; from Afghanistan, where America spent nearly as much time on lesbian studies as it did on planning how to get people out of a war zone, to Ukraine, where continued support is based on fashion rather than reality (note – I support a strong independent Ukraine.)
Handling the small boring stuff is government’s job – streets safe, jobs available, decent schools, good physical infrastructure – that’s 90% of the job. Add in parks and libraries and other such stuff and a local elected or staffer – if everything else is going perfect – should have an hour or three each week to talk about absurdities like DEI.
But it is so easy to sit in a conference room, it is so easy to think you are working but not actually working, it is so easy to tell the press you are doing something politically popular rather than handling the basics.
The federal money spent on such silliness is not massive in the grand scheme of government things, that’s if one doesn’t realize that billions of dollars are massive in every scheme of everything else.
For example, the folks at the USAID sat through a DEI meeting and decided to send money to support queer Bengali puppet shows and the like when that money could have spent on food for refugees or a proper water well for a jungle community.
The numbers matter and people have suffered because of DEI decisions.
At the local, national, and international level, DEI priorities have literally killed people and that is an incontrovertible fact.
But when involved in such a system, people forget the idea of being an individual, being a moral and ethical person.
Eventually, the concept becomes an addiction, and obsession, in which it makes complete sense to boil the bunny to make your obsessive, you absolutely know best no matter what,point:
And that is what is happening/has happened to the people of LA, Chicago, the nation – they’ve been boiling the bunny for years.
Now, hopefully, the new administration can turn off the gas.