Re: get a grip/"to catch a thief"

Dewey Dykstra, Jr. (dykstrad who-is-at bsumail.idbsu.edu)
Tue, 7 Oct 1997 19:30:20 -0600

Pedro portes writes:

>Dewey, I could not agree more.

Gracias, Pedro.

>I guess we should all resist at times institutional efforts to divide us,
>like crossing out the options offered in gov. forms and endorsing
>membership in the "human race"....like my Colombian brother in law does
>when he visits here.

I was just at a conference on bilingual ed/ESL for teachers who work in
this area. (What's a physicist doing in such a meeting? That's another
story.) They were wrestling with the pressures applied to them and their
students by their colleagues and administrators. (Being required not to
speak any other language in the teachers' lounge when there were any
english-only teachers present, for example.) As I sat listening to the
discussion at this meeting I realized that the problem it seems to me is
not which culture, which race, which language, but the intolerance of
difference. The labels, the classifications, the segregations and
indiscriminate rules applied to homogenize based on these labels are the
problem.

Unfortunately, it seems much easier to try to 'fix' the wrongs by solutions
based on the same labels. In the spirit of Jay's attempt to get in touch
with his 'conservative self'.... The conservative program is fundamentally
repulsive to me, but I have to admit that it may just be that the current
backlash to affirmative action is a kind of message suggesting that
ulitmately a better solution is to work against and dissolve the
intolerance of difference. 'Label' driven solutions are a kind of
perpetuation or or tolerance of the continuing intolerance of difference.

Dewey

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Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr. Phone: (208)385-3105
Professor of Physics Dept: (208)385-3775
Department of Physics/MCF421/418 Fax: (208)385-4330
Boise State University dykstrad who-is-at bsumail.idbsu.edu
1910 University Drive Boise Highlanders
Boise, ID 83725-1570 novice piper

"Physical concepts are the free creations of the human mind and
are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external
world."--A. Einstein in The Evolution of Physics with L. Infeld,
1938
"Don't mistake your watermelon for the universe." --K. Amdahl in
There Are No Electrons, 1991.
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