As an Olympic gold medalist, Gabby Douglas has become a
national heroine, and is now doing the lecture and talk show circuit. Such activities no doubt redound to the benefit
of what should be her bank account, and I hope that the dollars are still there
when she reaches her age of legal majority so that she herself can have access
to every dollar thus posted, and not have her money squandered by profligate
guardians (as happened to child actor Jackie Coogan) or swindlers.
Gabby's
remarks on
Oprah Winfrey's show have now caused a public stir.
I will presume that the misadventures
publicly related by Gabby happened substantially as stated.
This is not so much a straw man argument or an
allocation of the burden of proof so much as it is a reflection of my own
experiences as a minority group member who has had occasion to endure analogous bias.
From this presumption (which, again, I
believe to be well founded), it follows that:
A. The biased and
bigoted remarks uttered by Gabby's training mates are not to be condoned. Period!
B. The biased and
bigoted remarks uttered by Gabby's training mates were every bit as detrimental
to Gabby as claimed.
C.
As detrimental as
Gabby's experiences (and, for that matter, mine) were, other successful people
have endured far, far worse.
An example
that immediately comes to mind is that of the late Admiral Hyman Rickover, whose
page in the yearbook from his Naval Academy class (as well as the page of the
other Jewish class member)
was
perforated so that it might be torn out by classmates who preferred to not
have Jews as their equals.
[Yes, I know that Rickover did have some very serious
personal issues in dealing with his own Jewish identity.
He nevertheless did more than his part, after advancing to the higher
Navy echelons, to combat Naval institutional prejudice against Jews, Blacks and
other minorities, contributing in no small measure to bringing the U.S.
military closer to the ideal of a true meritocracy.].
With her Olympic medals, Gabby Douglas has had placed into
her hand a retribution of the highest order against her former training mates and
coaches at the Excalibur Gym. Any future
medals can amplify that retribution all the more. Similarly, Admiral Rickover's successful
career in the Navy was a sharp slap in the face to all of his Annapolis
classmates who ripped Rickover's page out of their yearbooks. For that matter, I do not doubt that many of those
who assailed me (verbally and otherwise) in my youth have cringed upon reading
of my own personal and professional achievements.
Those on the left side of the political spectrum seem to have
a need to be victims, and those liberals of privilege who relish their personal
creature comforts often satisfy that victimhood requirement with proxy victims
for whom their hearts can bleed. Many
such victims-by-proxy go to great lengths to develop and train their proxies.
Gabby Douglas can now step beyond victimhood if she is not
co-opted as a victim by the leftist political agenda. Immediately prior to her appearance on Oprah,
she had the esteem of virtually all of America, irrespective of political
orientation. But if Gabby allows herself
to be so co-opted (not unlikely, given that her mother seems to be in the tank
for Oprah Winfrey, Jesse Jackson, Barack Hussein Obama, ad nauseam), then those
at the Excalibur Gym who taunted Gabby will no longer feel chastened by her
success, but rather, will view Gabby's fixation with victimhood as a vindication
of their attitudes.
Labels: Discrimination, Gabby Douglas, limousine liberals
