A rant on the diversity angle.
Ah, yes -- DIVERSITY!
A decade ago I was working as an assistant building official in a small town that had seen its building inspection department suddenly grow from one person to four because of the workload created by a huge golf course condominium project being built in town by an out-of-state developer. I don't speak fluent Spanish, but my late wife was from Sudamerica so I was trying to learn, so I could converse with her family when we went there for visits. The boss kept complaining about the workers placing the reinforcing steel for the foundations, because they kept getting it wrong and they didn't speak English, so he couldn't get them to do it right.
So one morning, on the day before a foundation pour, the boss dragged me away from the plans I was reviewing and we went out to the site. Sure enough, the rebar was being set to close to the forms, so there wouldn't have been enough concrete to protect the rebar from water in the ground. And, just as the boss had said, when he tried to get it fixed, they just looked at him and gave him the "No hablo ingles" routine.
So the boss looked at me, and I looked at the workers, and I just said "Escuchame, muchachos, necesitan mas espacio entre el acero y la madura."
Oh, my! They just looked at each other ... and the look was clearly, "Oh, *expletive deleted*it -- he speaks Spanish. We're fooked."
The spacing got fixed, and the boss never had another problem. But "diversity" is a problem, because the "diverse" elements don't think like Americans. There used to be a saying that there were three ways to do anything: "the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way." Today that has become: "The right way, the wrong way, and the way we do it back home where we came from and you Anglos probably shouldn't ever set foot." Anyone who presumes to tell them that we do it
this way in the United States is racist.
