Hold On! There’s More!
Is Spink kidding? (12/11 letter) Before 2021 when United Airlines opened the cockpit (ha, ha) to more women pilots, did he really even give it a moment's thought when he heard a woman's voice over the intercom: "This is your captain speaking"? Why? Case closed. Almost. DEI is in fact a red herring here. Biden said he'd pick a woman on March 15, 2020? So what. Politicians lie all the time. He looked around, and settled on the most qualified candidate around, male or female, white or black. This is a long-winded way of saying to deny the condescension towards Harris with its implications of lesser ability as a DEI choice is disingenuous or simply naive. SHE WAS NOT A DEI CANDIDATE. There was no such program in effect.
Worry not. She’s out. The very real misogyny of a distrustful electorate didn't let her get near the controls. Convenient labels discredited her, like DEI. Using it, even thinking of it, said more than any counter-argument about its aptness. The idea that Biden hung an “albatross” around Harris’ neck by preferring a woman VP earlier is beyond ridiculous. It was an excuse for those INCLINED to slight her to rationalize their BIGOTRY against her. All this is to say I stand by my letter, with its incredulity over Spink’s facile summary of Harris as a merit-compromised, DEI pick. I trust the good citizens of Castro Valley to see through all subterfuge in this exchange and make up their own minds whether I'm unfair or not in my calling attention to the pulling of the painful, insulting, inaccurate DEI card (11/20 letter). For the record, I'm not a leftist or a rightist. I’m a stinkin’ American, with all kinds of rotten baggage, like the rest of us.
–Stephen Gutierrez, Castro Valley
