Farmer's concern

Usage examples of parity.

Almost every well-intended and enlightened gesture designed to help immigrants in the last three decades - de facto open borders, bilingual education, new state welfare programs, the affirmation of a hyphenated identity, a sweeping revisionism in southwestern American history - has either failed to ensure economic parity or thwarted the processes of assimilation.

If only skin color can ensure entree into American society, how have Arabs, Koreans, Armenians and Japanese found parity with, and in many cases economic superiority over, the traditional white majority?

Islamic power - disasters that did not stop the Japanese, Chinese and Armenians from reaching per capita economic parity with the majority in California.

Nineteenth-century Italian families may have taken sixty or more years to achieve economic equity with WASPs, but America has now unleashed its creativity and enormous powers of production to attempt to reduce that race for absolute parity to a decade or two.

Surely it was not based on racial or genetic pseudoscience, for even racist Californians conceded that many Mexican immigrants, against great odds, soon found parity in every sense with native Californians.

The wages of this original sin are with us still - the idea that so-called Chicanos can find parity with whites only through government coercion, income redistribution and racial chauvinism, rather than by the very hard work of traditional education that once ensured that Mexican kids spoke perfect English, knew as much about math and science as members of any other ethnic group, and expected to find status and respect by becoming educated and prosperous.

Indeed, the two phenomena are inextricably connected: the more the Chicano student takes therapeutic classes, the more he senses his own failure to achieve parity with other Americans, and the more he falls back on ethnic pride to supply the confidence he cannot acquire through intellectual achievement - and finally, the more his teachers, who themselves either cannot or will not instruct, must push the elixir of ethnic identification.

In fact, it was probably too late for Parity, for all of the male cultists.

Then one day, I opened the newspaper and saw that God was sending Parity to Boston so I could initiate him.

All the candles in the master bedroom had drowned out while he had questioned Parity in the hall.

He dragged Parity now into the master bathroom and tied him up with a second set of silk drapery tiebacks.

Sooner or later, someone was going to notice Parity is missing from the hallway and find Ping tied up.

Or had the cultists found Ping and Parity, freed them and fled, setting off the bomb to cover their tracks.

Equality of men and women in the noosphereequal access to the public domain of the noosphere and equal rights in that domaindoes not mean that a rigid 50-50 parity must be maintained in all areas.

Nonetheless, whatever we decide about parity, these issues can be consciously and in good will debated, and in all cases that beats leaving the decision up to a hoe.