Here’s the sad sequel to the story I wrote about several weeks ago.
A librarian in upstate New York believes she was fired over comments she made in support of a student who dominated a reading competition for five consecutive years, The Post Star reported.
In August, Lita Casey, who worked at the Hudson Falls Free Library for 28 years, called the library’s plan to change the rules of “Dig Into Reading” to hurt 9-year-old Tyler Weaver’s chances of winning next year’s prize “ridiculous,” the report said.
The library director at the time, who no longer works there, appeared to criticize the boy and said he “hogs” the contest and ought to “step aside.”
“Other kids quit [the reading contest] because they can’t keep it up,” she told the paper in August.
Casey, for her part, called the rule change “ridiculous.”
“My feeling is you work, you get it. That’s just the way it is in anything. My granddaughter started working on track in grade school and ended up being a national champ. Should she have backed off and said, ‘No, somebody else should win?’ I told her (the director), but she said it’s not a contest, it’s the reading club and everybody should get a chance,” Casey said at the time, according to the paper.
Casey told the Post Star that she couldn’t believe she was fired and asked a library board member why she was fired, and was told the board would not give a reason.
‘I worked there for 28 years without a complaint,’ she said. ‘I have to believe it was related to the whole reading controversy.’
[Source: FoxNews.com 9-19-13]
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand what’s going on here.
The amazing thing about political correctness is that it poses as ‘reasonable,’ intellectual and sophisticated. Yet reasons are never given.
You’re supposed to just ‘know’ and to ‘get it.’ If you challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, the unchallenged assumptions nobody dares name aloud, then—you’re out.
Some years ago, I wrote about a sound engineering teacher I knew who was politically incorrect at a university in Washington DC, where he taught for 20 years. The university presented him with a deaf student—to learn sound engineering! You read that right. When this teacher challenged the wisdom of trying to teach sound recording to a totally deaf person, no reasons were given—but he was asked not to return the next year.
I suspect this kind of thing happens every day. It’s amazing. Our society is as litigious and self-conscious as can be. You’re never supposed to offend anybody, nor risk even being perceived as offending somebody. Unless, of course, you ask a reasonable or obvious question.
We’re told by our supposedly intellectual superiors that there’s supposed to be no winning or losing. The implication is that it’s not ‘nice’ to win.
But there’s a deeper issue than merely winning. It’s doing well. It’s excelling.
Winning—or being superior to someone else—is merely a byproduct of excellence. In fact, most highly capable people are not even motivated by winning. They’re motivated by doing really well. Others may be a reference point, but it’s their own toughest and highest standards that those who excel are always trying to meet—or surpass.
The unwise sophisticates who dominate our government and university institutions would have us evade all this. They want us to think that everyone is equal, and even if that isn’t true, we should at least pretend it’s true. Hence the lack of any reason given, when this librarian in upstate New York was fired.
These same unwise sophisticates would have us believe that it’s mean to win. It’s somehow better for ‘the common good’ if we get rid of winners or losers, or perhaps eliminate all rational distinctions altogether.
In reality, society hurts most of all, if we get rid of excellence. All of the advances in technology, medicine, and human civilization to date have come from those who dared to be superior. Even if superiority wasn’t their motive, accomplishment and achievement were.
What’s wrong with accomplishment and achievement? And what has gone so deeply wrong in the thinking of those who claim otherwise?
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