Then and now 10/23

I was recently handed a letterhead copy ofa letter, dated Sept. 10, from a certain railroad company to its employees, telling them that they might be disciplined, or even dismissed, if they exercised their would-be Constitutional right of free speech. "It looks like I could be fired on account of the Confederate flag on my pickup," said the angry fellow who passed the letter along. Typically it's all too frizzy to be able to tell for sure whether the company really proposes to police its employees' private lives, or just the "work environment." Doubtless this term could be stretched to take in all the 24 hours of the employee's day. The letter begins with the predictable boiler-plate boasting of an undefined "diversity" of the workforce ("one of our great strengths") and the company's commitment to brainwashing its employees to make sure there's no real "diversity" on the premises. "A new EEO training video will be distributed this fall, and a new internet EEO training program is being created" to try and insure that all the railroad's employees think alike. Or rather, don't think at all. "At our company, it is imperative that all employees feel comfortable and safe at work." With the exception, of course, of groups who do not enjoy "protected status such as race, gender or national origin," particularly those silent millions who see the Confederate flag as the symbol of a proud heritage, not of "harassment and discrimination," as do a "protected" few. This flag, according to the letter, is a "prohibited symbol" (prohibited by whom?) as well as "illegal" (under what law?), just like "nooses, swastikas, and the initials 'KKK.'" Know it or not, the company has taken sides in the "culture war," taken the side of those with "protected status," and against all the rest of us, who lack it. Recently I noted that, these days, the health-care industry goes in terror of lawsuits. The statement should be expanded to include all industry, all business. While the health-care people bankrupt themselves trying to insure against run-amuck malpractice lawsuits, industry in general fritters its time and energy on efforts, such as those listed in this letter, to fend off lawsuits under the whole arsenal of foggy Federal laws against "discrimination." The letter inspires disgust. But it's disgust not with this company in particular, only with the social climate that's given birth to such laws, and such pathetic contortions by businesses to try and comply, and fend off the legalized blackmail of "discrimination" lawsuits. This railroad and its likes are to be pitied, not blamed. It's not their fault. All this codswallop is a kingsize distraction from the purpose for which they exist. It's a hell of a way to run a railroad, or any other business, and they know it, and undoubtedly resent it. To the degree, that is, to which they haven't been taken in by their own propaganda. It's hard to din it into the peasants over the long term without risking swallowing it oneself. Modern business takes pride in how it's shaken off the old "paternalism" of the shameful and benighted past, when bosses had the habit of running their employees' whole lives for them, telling them how to live and what to think, off the job as on. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody that the "anti-discrimination" or "diversity" hoopla is paternalism redux, actually more paternalistic, more outrageous, than anything in the past. For, businessmen in the old days more nearly "minded their own business." If they butted into their employees' private lives, it was likely to be for defensibly business reasons. And these didn't include seconding fuzzy-minded government-run social-tinkering programs: Business has been dragooned and coerced into furthering the ends of the "nanny state." Those things the company condemns, and devotes itself to policing and stamping out, are personal relations, relations among individuals, and till very recent times were taken for granted as such. I can just imagine my great-uncle's reaction if one of his employees had come and complained that another had called him a bad name! It would have been gaping incredulity, followed by an explosion. Folks were made of sterner stuff in those days, it seems. They knew that sticks and stones might break their bones, etc. And they knew that neither the deeds nor the words of a co-worker had anything to do with the boss, and one didn't run crybabying to him. It's all part of the modem liberalist itch to "do good." Our self-appointed cultural leaders have convinced themselves, and are out to convince the rest of us, that it's desirable and possible to get rid of such ill-defined but ingrained failings of human nature as "discrimination." And drat the consequences, they're going to do it "though the world be lost, and the heavens fall." Like all such projects, it's self-contradictory and, I can't help thinking, self-defeating. The man who passed on the letter was simply infuriated. I don't think he minded the slur against the Confederate flag half so much as he minded being treated like a two-year-old. In its own eyes, the company hadn't just hired him; it had "taken him in to raise." People, above all Americans, don't like being told what to do, what to think, even if what they're being told to do and think is "good." A heavy-handed campaign to coerce them to do and think "good" (somebody else's idea of "good") is apt to backfire. So long as humans are humans, not robots, they'll itch to do just the opposite of what they're told to do, good or bad. It takes a starry-eyed optimist to believe human nature can be changed by such superficial means. It was tried, in a big way, by the Communists in the late-lamented U.S.S.R. and its satellites. Communism was a movement to force a universalist ideal on fractious and contrary human beings, to "force people to be good." Liberalism, which has spawned the "diversity" movement in the West, differs only in trying to soft-pedal the "force" part. When Communism failed, people went right back to merrily beating up on each other on grounds of race, ethnicity, and all suchlikes, that had been repressed for 70 years and supposedly were dead. But as any psychologist will tell you, what's repressed doesn't die. Rather it gathers strength, and once the lid's blown off overflows in all-new violence. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurrit, as Horace pointed out long ago: You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she'll soon find a way back. This company's wielding the pitchfork, and it's a hell of a way to run a railroad.