Education Matters: Learning to adopt one another

Editor's Note: Numerous instances of plagiarism have been discovered in Dan Kimber’s “Education Matters” column, which ran in the News- Press from September 2003 to September 2011. In those columns where plagiarism has been found, a For the Record specifying the details will be appended to the piece.

I was going to write about oak trees and developers this week, but I’ll save it for next time. Something far more compelling, already aired out in this newspaper, could use a little more airing out.

Several of my former students e-mailed me about the Armenian Power bust that recently took place and the inevitable repercussions in the community. Some of our locals have seized on the incident to confirm, in their constricted minds, “That’s how they all are.”

My kids sent me messages that have shown up on blogs and Facebook, where local bigots are given free rein to spew their hatred, and they are hurt, deeply hurt, that they have been somehow implicated in the crimes of others because they share a common culture.

Allow me to quote just one of those messages that was passed along to me, and I ask all of you reading this to consider that there is a segment of our local population, a relatively small one I would hope, that is in agreement with the following:

“Glendale used to be called the jeweled city at time of the KKK. I say bring the KKK back so we can throw away all the dirty Mexicans, Armenians, blacks and Asians out of this town. This city used to be a better place before all these useless immigrants came here.”

Aside from reeking of ignorance, it’s a little scary that there are people like this in our midst. We can try to dismiss them as a lunatic fringe, but if we apply the same standard of “guilt by association,” they are part of our extended family, right here in America, whether we want to claim them or not.

They are part of a human cesspool that includes modern-day klansmen, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Aryan nation — the list goes on. Let’s go ahead and add Armenian Power to that list, but let’s understand that they are no more representative of the Armenian people than the malignancies mentioned above are representative of the great majority of the good people in this country.