Hey, you, you may or may not want to MIND THE GAP! Ammo Grrrll writes:
My dear friend from teenage years on, who was married to a Brit for a considerable period of time, told me that British culture, while generally kind, polite, and tolerant, tends to be much more risk-averse than American culture. The Brits believe it is wholly good to protect their citizens from any and all behaviors which could cause them harm and sincerely try to regulate everything. She said that for every perceived problem you hear people clucking, “The government should step in!”
She told me that “Mind the Gap” is a phrase usually said (or in some places printed) on British trains because there is sometimes a bit of a space between the train and the station platform, a “gap” which people don’t always navigate that well. It is particularly tricky if the train is stopped at a spot on the platform that is curved so there could be an irregular space to step over when debarking. Heaven forfend!
Naturally this Nanny State behavior (perhaps driven by personal injury lawyers) has infected America as well. As someone who has waited for a friend to arrive at Sky Harbor, I was driven half-mad by the automatic warning every 10 seconds that “this escalator is coming to an end; please be careful when stepping off.” I was waiting in a coffee shop whose workers could not help but hear that message hundreds of times a day and wondered how they kept any employees who were not either mercifully hearing-impaired or already crazy when hired on.
I am hardly the first to point out that we Boomers biked without helmets, rode in yuge cars with metal dashboards without wearing seatbelts, rode in the back of pickup trucks or slept on the window ledge in the back seat of cars and cannot name a single person we knew who died because of these behaviors. In our small town we had a terrible tragedy in which an entire Native American family was wiped out by a stall on the railroad tracks. But no number of seatbelts or airbags would have changed that dreadful outcome.
Make no mistake – I am a fan of seatbelts and never back out of my driveway without mine on – which you would understand if you’ve ever watched me back out…But gaps of dead space between moving walkways or gaps of space between a platform and a trolley car are not the only gaps that are considered deadly.
As I have written about before, the very last gig I had in Minnesota before moving to Arizona was for a School District’s Teachers’ confab three days before they had to get back in the classroom. It was about 15 years ago. And almost all the sessions were about addressing the “gap” between academic achievements of various ethnic groups. With the distinct impression that any gap that existed was solely the fault of the racist teacher and racist white people in general and had nothing to do with any differences in culture, self-discipline, study habits or regular attendance in class which may have existed among the several groups.
As my little entertainment set – their reward for sitting through all the drivel – was last, I got to listen to many people with all the expertise of Dr. Jill Biden whining and caviling about this horrific gap, inexplicable by anything other than malignant deliberate racism. There was an irony so delicious you couldn’t have made it up in that the Hispanic expert speaker, working for some government agency of course, showed up more than an hour late for her racist boilerplate presentation.
When it was my turn, I offered a few quips sure to please: “Teachers feel about Memorial Day the way parents feel about Labor Day…” and so forth and then near the end I said, “I’ve heard a lot of concern today about how some students are not keeping up with others. Couldn’t you just solve this by asking the white kids to do WORSE?” Oh my. Dead silence for a few long seconds, and then raucous laughter and applause.
Today, of course, they would all cover their mouths in horror or drive me from the stage. Anyone who laughed would have to go to reeducation camp and reapply for her job. And the gap embarrassment has been mostly solved by forbidding testing at all. No test, no gap, no problem. You get into college now not by test scores anyway, but by skin color, so it’s all good.
In another part of the Gap Forest we have a cottage industry of people whose job it is to assure us that there is NO gap whatsoever in musculature, bone density, or any other physical difference that would matter between men and women. In fact, of course, they virtually deny that there is such a THING as male and female. But even though there’s no such thing, babies, we are told by one loon, know in the womb which they are. Works for me.
A few brave athletes and celebrities have said aloud what everybody with even half a brain knows – men pretending to be women (especially those retaining important male parts) will be the ruination of women’s sports. Decades of fighting for Title IX and “an arena of our own” will be wiped out.
If a swim team wins with ONE pretend woman, why not have ALL pretend women on the team? Same with boxing or wrestling or power lifting. Mediocre male athletes who could not compete against their own sex have invaded women’s sports to dominate in many of them. Frankly, it makes me sick, and we haven’t even mentioned men trolling their junk in the locker rooms.
If anyone knows of even ONE woman-to-man transitioner who has gone on to compete with MEN and emerged with the gold trophy, I am unaware of it. Maybe Ice Dancing? It COULD happen because almost everything that COULD happen eventually does, but it will be an extreme outlier compared to the number of men-to-women transitioners who stand proudly on the Medal Stands with their Gold and Silver while a dejected actual female struggles not to weep in third place.
It would seem that a very significant “gap” in evidence of late is the MORALITY GAP in our scientist/bureaucrat community. Just a few days ago, Mr. Billingsley mentioned the great scientists Salk and Sabin.
We Boomers got the first polio vaccine en masse in school. We all mustered in the school gymnasium with kids crying, screaming, dropping like cordwood and me trying to mensch up and take the shot like a “man,” or at least like one of the eight-year-old boys. And then just a year or two later – huzzah! We got a little oral thing in a sugar cube in a tiny paper cup. A whole lot less screaming and we were good to go.
Polio was a scourge – and it was over, just like that! God Bless those two Jews – Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin (whose birth name was Abram Saperstejn).
Some things never change, like discrimination against Jewish students, which has taken a giant uptick of late. Jonas Salk went to CCNY at the age of 15 at a time when there was also tremendous discrimination against Jews. The year Salk was admitted, 76 Jews applied, and five were accepted. (Neither “greedy Jew” even got a patent on his magnificent work. Estimates are that the Salk vaccine alone would have been worth $7 billion. You hear that, Mr. Science Fauci? Remind us what YOU carted off with your disastrous “gain of function” work. Well done, there, Little Garden Gnome!)
And, lastly, here’s a big beautiful gap that should encourage us all. Florida used to be a pretty reliable Southern Democrat state. Then it was famously a “tossup” and national scandal with the “hanging chads” and so forth in 2000. Today, there are ONE MILLION more registered Republicans than Democrats in Florida and I doubt if Biden will even campaign there.
Reality is tough to accept, but it comes for almost all of us eventually. May the time not be distant when that Republican to Democrat “gap” is true for every state in the union, with the possible exceptions of New York and California, which are utterly immune to Reality and choose instead at every juncture to double down on Rainbows and Unicorns.
