...you're just a head case
Ah, the victim mentality. Too often, when reading a victim's dramatic tale of woe, you feel as though it's not just the facts being manipulated; you, the reader, are being manipulated as well. You may wonder - does the author really believe it, or is it simply a means to achieve an end? Manipulation seems to be the key for pawning culprit as victim, and the experienced manipulative mind is fertile ground for such a victim mentality.
For these "victims", concepts like reality and history are mere functions of ego, which these mental gymnasatics are ultimately designed to prop up and protect. And although ignoring one's role in problems is far easier than, say, accepting your share of responsibility for a given situation, such exercises in cognitive dissonance must be remarkably exhausting.
I simply had to post this excerpt from a recent column by Pat Buchanan, perennial conservative talkmeister and also-ran. It likely foreshadows an election season issue that will no doubt find traction in the right-wing talk circuit.
"With more than 50 percent of the population projected to be people of color in less than a generation," says UNITY President Karen Lincoln Michel, "the nation's news organizations continue to generate dismal diversity numbers year after year. ... 'Ten by 2010' is a significant step in the right direction."
What is Ten by 2010?
UNITY is demanding that 10 major U.S. news organizations, by mid-2010, elevate to a senior management position in the newsroom at least one journalist of color and provide "customized training to help prepare them." The journalist may be Asian, African-American, Native American or Hispanic, which rules out journalists of Irish, English, Polish, Italian, German or Jewish ancestry, since they are white.
Is this what we have come to 50 years after the triumph of the civil rights movement? Flat-out demands, by American journalists, for the hiring and promotion of colleagues based on race and color?
Is there any evidence major news organizations in this country have engaged in systematic discrimination to keep out men or women of color this last half century? The reverse seems true. They have bent over backward to advance minority journalists.
And if journalists have been hired and promoted based on ability and merit, why in the 21st century should these criteria be thrown out as the standards for advancement — in favor of race and color?
Isn't this what they did in the days of Jim Crow — hire and promote based on race? What UNITY is calling for is a return to the old rules but with new beneficiaries — blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans — and new victims, all of whom will be white.
