Get Over Yourself Month

At work, we observe all of the standard heritage months. African American, Hispanic, Women's, etc. We honor those races and sexes who have been oppressed. We don't mention who was doing the oppressing, but it's pretty obvious. After all, there can't be an us without a them. The result is growing division and discord.

Since we started using blogs as communication tools, resentful comments over these ethnic months has grown considerably. We now have to watch the comment threads, delete political and nasty remarks and sometimes even shut down the threads completely.

Talking to my daughter this morning, she mentioned that at her high school, you can tell ethnic jokes about whites all day long, but if you tell one about anyone else, someone takes offense. This is pretty funny because when it comes to having a disadvantaged background, she's so far ahead of everyone that she's about to lap them. As a Russian orphan, she's only behind sub-Saharan Africans and Tijuana dump residents when it comes to escaping hellholes.

25 years ago in the US, we had grants and set asides and affirmative action and heritage months. 25 years ago in Russia, affirmative action was a bullet in the back of the head or a one-way box car trip to a Siberian death camp.

With that in mind, I'd like to propose "Get Over Yourself Month." It would be a month of shutting up and doing your freaking job. You'd concentrate on how you were a productive member of society. There would be celebrations highlighting just how much we all needed to produce in order to not be a burden on the rest of us. We'd all wear red, white and blue ribbons.

It would be just like being a real country instead of a assorted collection of ethnic cantons.

It will never work.