I’m sure lots of cancer patients will agree that the treatment is harder than the disease. In the eight months since my diagnosis, I’ve had 3 surgeries, more painful urethral catheters than I can keep track of, multiple rounds of immunotherapy, and enough anesthesia to put a rhino to sleep. The result has been a range of debilitating complications that have made “normal” life a distant memory. It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just forego further treatment, enjoy life for as long as I can, and then turn to California’s Death with Dignity law for the final release.
This problem of the cure being worse than the disease is weirdly similar to wokeness and the bizarre range of applications it advocates to “cure” our alleged structural racism. When the cure turns out to be worse than the disease, what can you do?
Probably the proponents of DEI are sincere. (Well, I’m not 100% sure. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.) Yes, they might concede, it is drastic, and probably unconstitutional, for government to favor one racial group over another. But, the DEI crowd argues, drastic solutions are required for drastic problems. And the problem of structural racism, or white supremacy, is so vast that only a major intervention can work. Hence we get DEI programs, affirmative action, the unequal and biased disbursement of tax dollars by City Councils, and other irrational examples of ideology-based government overreach.
The aim of such fevered activity, of course, is to achieve equal outcomes in all measurable areas of social behavior. But, since such an achievement is manifestly impossible, there will never arise an opportunity to end such government actions. DEI, affirmative action and its various progeny thus become permanent features of government.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We all know the evil outcomes of these programs. They lead to racial and ethnic disharmony among the affected population. They prolong the disfigurations in certain demographic groups that contribute to their lack of success. They lead, in some cases, to death. They erode the public’s faith in the impartiality of government, and cause ill-qualified people to be elevated to public office—people motivated not by the Constitution or by any sense of obligation to the true public good, but by their own discredited, neurotic ideologies. We thus have a situation in which—as with my cancer—the cure is worse than the disease.
Wokes will argue, “Hey, if you don’t treat your cancer, you’ll die.” That may be true. But my individual healthcare decisions are mine to make. They impact no one but me. On the other hand, these government-imposed racial programs impact us all. They’re society killers, and there’s not a shred of evidence that they have any positive impact at all. Quite the opposite. Oakland has become a dysfunctional city that leapfrogs from one crisis to another precisely because we have allowed extremists like Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas to thrust their hands onto the wheels of power. They have an agenda that, they claim, will cure us of our ailments. But in fact that agenda has brutalized Oakland. They have made our beautiful city much more degraded than it ever had to be. They should be held accountable one of these days before a jury.
Steve Heimoff