The Equal Opportunity Employment Act Revisited

An apt description of the Equal Opportunity Employment Act would be “a policy or program providing 'advantages' for people of a minority group with the aim of creating a racially equal society through preferential access to employment, education, health care, welfare” and etc. The EOE was the birth of this thing called “proportional hiring” which mandated that 25 percent of a business’s employees must be of a minority where applicable. I really can’t see the “equalness” in the EOE.

Now, here’s where the United States started changing to allow such legislation.

We had a great up-period following the Second World War, up until about 1964. The first half of the Baby Boomers were coming of age. (Those of you born betwixt 1946 and 1965.)

Here’s what the Boomer teenagers had to “munch” on during their informative years. United States President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Martin Luther King had a dream, Gloria Steinhem burned her figurative bra, psychologist Timothy Leary, working under the Harvard Psillocybin Project conducted experiments on the then legal drug, LSD.

The Vietnam conflict was an unpopular confrontation with the folks “back in the world.” Mostly the young folks. The early boomers can recall the popular war was WWII with their fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, grandmothers and aunts and uncles fighting evil foes on two fronts and winning.

The feminist revolution, the farm workers revolution, the sexual revolution and the American Indian Movement. And who can forget the Alabama school integration and the bravery of bus rider Rosa Parks?

Now on to my point.

Since Columbus and Gore invented us, the United States has always been a white male dominated society. If you wanted work and were a white male you got work. Ninety-nine percent of all corporate executives were white males. Police forces across the country were white males. The military was run by white males with black males on deck swabbing and potato peeling.

The military in WWII had women in uniform usually in clerical or nursing jobs. Navajo Indians were used as code talkers, Filipinos were kitchen workers. If you weren’t a white male your chances of advancement were small.

Then along came the sixties which rung the death knell for the White Male American.

Boomer women began wanting a career which then enabled them to have their own “screw you money” as Ayn Rand called it in Atlas Shrugged (or was it James Michener in Tai Pan?). The divorce rate in the United States in 1971 was quadruple the rate in 1961. This was attributed to two things: the sexual revolution and the advent of the pill.

The EOE was the knock-out punch for the White Males in the work place. (Reread paragraph one above.)

Now, as the Boomers approach their “Golden Years” (the worst of misnomers) they have to deal with abortion, women in combat, female corporate executives, black-dominated work places in Washington D.C., gay and lesbian issues, same-sex marriages, hip and knee replacements, the technology revolution, smart phones, Viagra, loss of hair and teeth, bladder control, Obamacare, Made in China, crooked politicians and corporate executives, school shootings, political correctness and myriad other things.

And, for the most part, these are the folks who are running for the Presidency of the United States.

Yikes!!

That’s it for now, folks. Thanks for listening.