Raise good people, period

OPINION:

I am an 80-year-old White male Democrat who voted for Donald Trump twice.

Thus I must be a racist, right? I didn’t personally like the man, but he was the only one who wasn’t an already bought-and-paid-for politician.

I come from a family of educators. My father, mother, aunts and uncles all taught in one-room schoolhouses in the early 1900s. My mother’s contract even stated that hay was part of her salary.

There was no Department of Education back then, no teachers unions. These creations are just burdensome, biased and expensive bureaucracies dictating rules.

After serving in the military, I took a job with an international corporation in Maine. A fellow former public school student in Washington, who would become the godfather of my second son, worked with me there. He was Black, but no one was concerned about race. There was equal pay for people of all races.

Our big obstacle wasn’t White supremacy; it was and still is elitism. To me, that’s when you have a ruling class more impressed with credentials, degrees or appearance than ability.

A byproduct of this is when advocates giving testimony before Congress are elected primarily on their public appeal. Bring in a movie star, popular athlete, etc., for appearances on TV and social media. 

Our schools now stress critical race theory, which destroys Martin Luther King’s goal of equality. We teach that Black people are all oppressed, which is not a positive outlook to give to a Black child. We teach that there should be equity, not equality.

Stealing is no longer a crime punishable by law. You can take what you don’t have; that’s equity. 

We have never believed that our country is systemically racist, and we’re not racist, either.

A community doesn’t raise honest and respectful children; that’s the job of individual parents.

JIM HILL

Welcome, Maryland