RACIAL QUOTAS: REVOLUTIONARY PERVERSION OF AMERICAN IDEAL

A letter I received this week in my capacity as state senator hit me like a blow to the solar plexus. I believe it's of sufficient importance to share with readers, and with my colleagues in the General Assembly.

Dear Mr. Kinder:

I am writing ... to bring some important facts to your attention. The information I am telling you about concerns my son, Captain Dale Goldsberry. Dale graduated from Fredericktown High School in December, 1976 and immediately enlisted in the U.S. Army. This was a long-time dream of my son's because his father was a career Army officer.

As an enlisted man, Dale went to school at Fort Sam Houston and became a lab tech. Because he wanted to better his career, in 1982 he went to Officer Candidate School (OCS) and became a Second Lieutenant. He was ranked 10th out of 180 men. He then went on to artillery school, taking all five top honors. This was the first time in over 40 years that this has happened.

Because his father had been a helicopter pilot, Dale decided to follow in his footsteps and was finally accepted into school. Again, he became a distinguished honor graduate. His father pinned the same silver wings on his son that I had pinned on my husband in 1957.

All during this period, Dale was told that if he wanted to receive his promotions, he would need a college education. So by going to school at night and on weekends, he received his Masters Degree.

Dale has attended instrument school, instructor pilot school, safety school, war college and the list goes on and on. In other words, the U.S. government has spent a considerable amount of money on this young man.

In 1991, Dale was sent to Saudi Arabia as an Army medic evac helicopter pilot. In December 1992, he was sent to Africa, returning home in May, 1993.

While he was in Saudi, Dale was passed over for Major because he was told there was a quota of minorities that had to be filled for promotions. Some of these men did not have their degrees, but were promoted based on race. This same situation occurred again this year while he was stationed in Africa. Again, a quota of minorities had to be filled.

This is a situation where a young man has fulfilled all of the requirements listed by the military, but no one told him that being white would be detrimental to his advancement. ... He gave up time away from his family to obtain his degree and ranked high in all of his endeavors, only to be told, after 17 years, that because he is not a minority, he should give up his goal.

How can our government encourage young men and women to join the military as a career and then tell them, "We have to promote all the minorities first." Shouldn't these young people be told of this procedure before they invest their life for their government?

It is sad to know that my son is not the only one this has happened to. My son is a man who obviously has much to offer his country but is being told to give up his career because he is not a minority. ...

Respectfully, But ... Disappointed

Mrs. Peggy Goldsberry

Marquand, Missouri

As it happened, the morning I received Mrs. Goldsberry's letter, I was enjoying breakfast with a young black friend, a fellow who helped in my campaign last year. My friend is a masters program student and an officer candidate in ROTC at Southeast Missouri State. I shared the letter with him. He was horrified, and observed that such quotas stigmatize and degrade the accomplishments of true achievers who happen to be of minority status, such as himself.

For a generation, race quotas, camoflauged by the Orwellian phrase "affirmative action", have been the lit stick of dyanamite in American life. In repeated displays of their innate sense of justice and fair play, American voters have overwhelmingly rejected quotas whenever they're given the chance. Yet so powerful is the national media's capacity for stigmatizing critics of such quotas that almost no public figure will speak out against them as the fundamental corruption of American ideals that they are.

Recall that the revolutionary American idea was that for the first time in world history, as Americans, we aspired to an ideal that said that for achievement in this country, it doesn't matter who your father is. These quotas are a revolutionary overturning nothing less than a perversion of that ideal.

Race, gender, ethnic and other quotas point us away from harmony and towards the riven society, sad to say, toward the horrors of open conflict as in Lebanon, India, Bosnia. From the traditional American ideal of E pluribus unum ("Out of many, one"), race and gender quotas tear us apart, substituting division into aggrieved victim sub-groups, all pressing permanent claims against a guilty "society."

It's worth reminding ourselves: That way lies Beirut, and Sarajevo.