A Girl is Sent Home From School on Diversity Day in the UK for Celebrating ... the UK

When I was at Ralph Talbot Elementary School in Weymouth, just at the tail end of the Bronze Age, Mrs. Reilly put our class of third graders on stage for a spectacular evening of songs. The theme of which was "It's a Small World After All." We were required to dress like people from far off lands. Think of the opening number of the Miss Universe Pageant where all the contestants put on cliched, stereotypical dresses representing some archetype native to their home country, only 0.001% as expensive and 0.01% as ridiculous. 

I went with Hawaii. Which while technically a part of our own homeland, still qualified as an exotic location, what with the legendary two-part Brady Bunch episode where Greg wipes out surfing and Vincent Price traps them in a cave still fresh in everyone's mind back then. Besides, that costume served as my gateway Aloha shirt, and was a precursor to the future Party Animal I would later become. The boy is father to the man, and all that. 

I remember kids dressed in parkas, lederhosen, karate gear, Russian hats. I remember we did songs about Esmikos, Kookaburras from Australia, kids from China, Spain and India. I'm a little hazy on a lot of them. But what I remember most is what didn't happen. No one was offended by any of it. Not one parent complained. No apologies had to be issued by the school. No one ran home and started workshopping the term "cultural appropriation" to knock 'em dead with at the next School Committee meeting. It was just adorable little 8-year-olds singing kids songs to a gymnasium filled with parents who'd rather have been home watching Columbo and wondering when they could take a smoking break. But no one considered an of it to be -ist or -phobic in any way. No wars broke out. No genocides ensued. 

But those days are long since past. We've now gotten to the point where the adults in charge in some countries can find ways to be offended by ... their own countries:

Daily Mail -  A schoolgirl was put into isolation for wearing a Union Jack dress to celebrate being British at her school's culture day.

'Straight A' student Courtney Wright, 12, wore the Spice Girls-esque dress and wrote a speech about history and traditions as part of the celebrations on Friday. 

But the Year 7 pupil was told the dress was 'unacceptable' before being hauled out of lessons and made to sit in reception until her father collected her.

Stuart Field, 47, said he was 'gobsmacked' to learn she had been segregated from her peers due to her choice of attire at Bilton School in Rugby, Warwickshire. 

He added that while other pupils with St George's and Welsh flags were also turned away, students were allowed in burkas, niqabs and traditional Nigerian clothing. 

Mr Field, who works in marine restoration, said: 'Courtney was so embarrassed and couldn't understand what she'd done wrong.

'She should not be made to feel embarrassed about being British.

'And she shouldn't be punished for celebrating British culture and history; nobody else I've spoken to can quite get their heads around it.' 

I'll raise my hand to not being able to get my head around it, either. Other than the obvious, simple answer that Western Civilization has entered it's Self-Loathing stage and has begun to circle the drain. It most certainly has with respect to Academia, which seems to be Ground Zero for this kind of agitprop. The testing lab for twisting the next generations' brains into balloon animals and making them hate the very place that provides this education in the first place. 

I mean, this dad works in Marine Restoration, and had to walk off the job site in the middle of the day to find his daughter had been sitting in isolation for hours waiting for him to show up. The sick part of that not only being that the girl was being treated worse than if she'd smacked her teacher in the face (which would've made me double her allowance), but that if one of these school workers ever needed to leave in an emergency like that, they wouldn't have been missed. Because they're totally expendable. There are probably two dozen government employees sitting around on a given day sending emails about Diversity Day to cover for them until they get back. But this dad had to wait until he was finished restoring his marine or whatever before he could go bail his little girl out of school lockup. It's a fucking outrage. And were it one of my kids, I don't think I would've left that building unless it was in police custody. 

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The other part of this is that her speech was going to be all about the reasons to celebrate British culture. Now, I happen to descend from a race of surly drunken bog-trotters who not only invented the art of hating the Brits; they invented it. I also am proud to be born in a land that was born out of a war with Britain. In fact, I was born in the city where that war started, all because the King expected us to help defray the costs of an earlier war he had paid for. And we told him to go royally piss up a rope. So you'd have reason to assume I think the UK is evil and this schoolgirl ought to be sent to a North Korean style Reeducation Camp. 

But I don't. Sure, Great Britain had an empire. One in which it was said, "The sun never sets" on it. Which by its nature means there was a lot of bloodshed. A lot of rebellions put down. A lot of goods shipped back to England on the cheap, if they were paid for at all. Welcome to the human race. The oldest civilization we're aware of is the Sumerians. No one knows exactly where they came from originally, just that they ended up in the Fertile Crescent and took over from whomever got their first. That's how civilization has always worked. The British just happened to have done the whole conquering thing extremely well. 

But at the same time, you've got to hand it to them. This tiny little island dominated a globe. Militarily. Economically. Culturally. "Britannia Rules the Seas." But they also ruled international trade. They spent their own blood and treasure stopping the Transatlantic slave trade for no reason that they decided it was morally wrong. They've ruled theater (Shakespeare), science (Newton), philosophy (Locke), literature (Tolkein), music (The Beatles), comedy (Monty Python), film (Nolan). They single handedly kept the Nazis at bay in the west while the US wanted no part of that European neighbor dispute. They've dominated all forms of human endeavor. While this is more of a me thing than a British schoolgirl thing,  any culture that gave us Elizabeth Hurley:

… needs to apologize for nothing. That's a nation that deserves the gratitude of all humankind. 

The UK is not perfect by any means. But the only perfect places are the ones ruled by kings wielding magic swords. But you've got to grade on the curve here. If you're power ranking countries according to how terrible they are, they're not cracking the Top 100. And I can promise you that Nos. 1-100 don't celebrate Diversity Day in their schools. In fact, they don't have schools as much as they have factories, mines and Reeducation Camps for their kids. 

So thanks to this girl and her dad for exposing the moral bankruptcy going on in their homeland. The more we become aware of this cultural poison, the quicker and more thoroughly we can draw it out and clean the wound.