@College

Here we are at the tip of a new semester. For us here at Central Michigan University, we are entering Spring semester 2010. Lucky us. This is my sixteenth semester as a student. I evidently spent the the majority of the first decade of the twenty-first century in college learning how to be an obedient middle-class consumer. The joke is on them, however, since I went above and beyond the requirements of the BS program, got my Master's degree and am now bound for a Doctorate degree. My inner elitist is beaming because I feel as though I slipped through the proverbial cracks in the system to a more elucidated understanding of reality as it actually exists. It's like I've awoken from the Matrix. But I know this is a feeling that even freshmen feel after their first semester of any humanities class that is firmly rooted in socialist/Marxist thought.

I have to feign interest in this class I am currently enrolled in called Cultural Pluralism in Literature for Children and Young Adults. There are four men in the class, and about thirty women, including a professor who looks like she could be a fourth grade teacher or elementary school librarian. I guess that is the point. Most people have this misconception that Literature for children is a field for women and elementary school educators. This mentality is correlated to another that subverts the euro-masculine epistemology for another epistemology that preaches equality but instead has its own built in marginalization and discrimination. They call this "multiculturalism." The contradiction is that multiculturalism has built into a hierarchy of cultures, and places "Western culture" at the bottom while saying that all "Other" cultures marginalized by Western culture deserve the spotlight or at least the kind of attention that Westerners gave themselves over the course of their history.

Of course it is complicated because of the reclamation process that is undergoing by every marginalized culture at once. Because this uprising consists of several cultures at once, attacking a multifaceted dominant culture, a dichotomy is created out of the abstracted opposing cultures. There are several problematic implications here, namely that the specificity and uniqueness of particular cultures is lost on both sides of the dichotomy. This makes the task of those promoting "cultural sensitivity" tedious to the point of futile. With this realized, the only reason to maintain such a position is for the sake of vanity. It is my hope that those bleeding heart idealists don't realize the contradiction in being completely reactionary from traditional Western values. Remember: not all progress is regress.

The next step is to determine what is so plural about cultural plurality. My hypothesis is that it is a fluid, dynamic of domination and repression between different alliances of people brought together by various factors such as family, need, etc. The key is to control what matters most to each particular alliance of people in order to control the choices each alliance, or society, will make.