Recently a high school class in a North Carolina school was given a vocabulary assignment by their teacher that included the word “alien.” One male student seeking clarification made the foolish mistake of asking her if she meant a space alien or perhaps an illegal alien.

A gasp must have issued from the lips of his fellow students as he spoke those hateful words branded as such by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, Greg Casar, and Summer Lee who because of their own confused and frankly ignorant idea of what it means to be an American only want Jews, of all the people of the world, to suffer.

Another boy in the class, who must have missed breakfast that morning, threatened to fight the boy who had asked the question. At this point the teacher summoned an assistant principal to adjudicate the matter. The assistant principal, who must have had a fight with their spouse that morning, arrived and utilizing their vast experience in human relations defused the matter by doing nothing to the student who threatened physical violence but gave the other student a three-day suspension. That student’s only crime was to ask a question before considering the anger management problem of his fellow student and the ignorance of his teacher and the assistant principal.

The suspended student who is obviously smarter than the others who were involved explained that he was not directing the question at any one or group and that the term illegal alien can be heard on the news and found in the dictionary. Wanting to investigate the meaning of illegal alien I consulted the Merriam Webster Dictionary and found it was indeed included in that dictionary and means “a foreign person who is living in a country without having official permission to live there.”

The suspended student has asked to have the suspension removed from his record, but the school so far has remained silent.

The story just recounted is one of the most shocking I have heard in a long time but it and others like it are sadly indicative of our times. Guided by the questionable theories of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) the players in it only made a minor situation far worse and offended many people.

When will society stop punishing people for innocently asking the wrong question or using the wrong pronoun? And speaking of stupid stories, I have it on good authority that an employee at a school district was called on the carpet for not using a student’s preferred pronoun who self-identified as a hot dog or maybe they self-identified as Italian or polish sausage, I really don’t remember. Anyway, the employee was a victim and so was the student who was the victim of one of the absurdities of our education system.

The whole idea of preferred pronouns is absurd. However, many DEI activists in corporations, government, and in education have labeled not using a person’s preferred

pronouns to be offensive, discriminatory, and harmful and have adopted policies requiring their use with the threat of firing or suspension that could mean the loss of a career. This is a violation of a person’s free speech rights and likely violates their core values.

According to the Alliance for Defending Freedom, an organization that has successfully defended many educators accused of not using preferred pronouns, is basic and long held facts about sex, and gender are being denied. DEI activists want us to believe that gender is no longer determined by body and biology but by “gender identity,” which the World Health Organization defines as “a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.” What that means is that gender ends up being whatever the person claims. That is absurd.

DEI activists are attempting to use coercion, fear, disassembled and confusing language to alter the way we think about not only gender, but also the proper roles of parents and schools in our children’s lives and even the role of the family. That is frightening

An interesting note is that DEI programs have been financed by billionaire George Soros, a so-called Hungarian philanthropist, and socialist activist who has also been connected to the anti-Israeli, pro Hamas protests occurring on many college and university campuses. Here the goal, as with the enforced use of preferred pronouns, is to change the way we think about the Hamas and Israeli conflict so that Americans will force our government to stop all aid to Israel, in effect disavowing our relationship with our best ally in the region.

In the end, the long term goal of Soros and DEI activists is to convince Americans that we are a systemically racist nation and that the only way to solve the problem is to create a new society where I suspect that few of us would enjoy living.

Thomas Kirkpatrick Sr. is a Silver Creek resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com