WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED This is the true memoir of one US Air Force navigator’s journey from the schoolhouses of Air Training Command to the nuclear alerts of the Cold War to combat in a 35-year-old anachronism called the B-52. It is a first-hand account of life during the last days of Strategic Air Command, the early days of Air Combat Command and the ensuing military drawdown of the 1990s. From peacetime training exercises across the globe to combat operations in Desert Storm, Jim Clonts takes the reader inside the cockpit where life and death are seconds apart. Often comical, sometimes heart-pounding, other times tragic, WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED takes you into the world of military aviation, a crucible where warriors learn the true nature of character, conscience and mortality.

Friends of Liberty VOL 15
by Jim Clonts, 2009

07/15/2009

Topic: Racism, Little Leauge and a Supreme Court Nominee

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in May when the Tigers held their first practice. The draft looks to be good to us this year, thought the manager. The ten and eleven year old boys were excited to be back on the field, back playing the game they loved. As it was the first practice of the year, the manager introduced himself and his coaches and made each boy say his name and what position they'd like to play. Two of the boys, Michael Townsend and Charley Smith, said they'd like to pitch.

"Boys, I appreciate your enthusiasm and I'm very glad to have you two on the team, but this year Pablo and Gabriel are going to be our pitchers. Everyone knows Hispanics make better pitchers than blacks and whites. Michael, basketball season is just around the corner, and, Charley, have you thought about hockey? I'm sure you're fine baseball players, but clearly we have to go with our strengths if we want to win."

If you were a parent and overheard this, what would you do? Confront the manager? Complain to the league? Pull your son from the team? If this is unacceptable behavior for a Little League baseball coach, why is it acceptable for a Supreme Court Justice?

When Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor said (repeatedly) that ?a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn?t lived that life? it was no different than that coach telling the young black kid he can't pitch because the Hispanic kids on the team are naturally better.

Her recent court ruling against the New Haven firefighters demonstrate how race plays a role in her legal opinions. When black firefighters failed a promotion test that several whites and Latinos did pass, the city of New Haven threw the test out, on the basis it must have been racist. The firefighters who passed the test were denied promotion. The firefighters sued the city and Judge Sotomayor's ruling upheld the City. She had no legal basis for this decision and the Supreme Court overruled her decision.

She may not be a racist in the traditional sense that she hates other races, but obviously racism plays a role in her decisions. The color of one?s skin is a factor in her vision of justice. There is a reason why every statue of Lady Justice depicts her holding the scales of justice and blindfolded. Justice is supposed to be blind. Judge Sotomayor believes in peeking under the blindfold to see the color of who stands before her.

As a child of 70's I was taught from an early age to judge someone according to what they say and do, not the color of their skin. I flew ten B-52 combat missions in Desert Storm on a crew of three blacks and three whites. My aircraft commander in Desert Storm was one of the most impressive men I've ever known, a man of great flying skill, sound judgment and unwavering convictions. My electronic warfare officer, also an African-American, was a former US Marine and eventually left the service to become an FBI agent. The color of these men had no bearing on my opinions of them. They would have been impressive had they been blue.

When I entered the civilian world, I was sent with a dozen other managers to something called diversity training. I suppose my company was trying to catch up with societal norms. The point of the training was to undo my early childhood education. No longer was I to be color-blind. I was taught to consider a person?s ethnicity and treat him or her accordingly. When dealing with a member of an ethnic minority, I am supposed to consider his culture, his background, his struggles and modify my words and actions as needed. This is called celebrating diversity.

While I found the class interesting and somewhat enlightening, I also felt I'd time warped back to 1955. This was nothing but soft bigotry, assigning ethnic stereotypes to individuals based on the color of their skin. Now we have a Supreme Court nominee that touts her "rich Latina heritage? as a qualifier to sit on the highest court in the land. How about her law degree? How about her grades? How about the cases she's won? How about the legal opinions she's written? No. She's a Latina. (Incidentally, her legal opinions have been overturned by the Supreme Court 60% of the time. I guess one way to fix that is to put her on the bench.) I find it sad that someone so accomplished denies her individualism in favor of group identity.

The Great American Melting Pot seems to be over. We are not Americans. We are hyphenated Americans, categorized by race. Webster?s Dictionary refers to the hyphen as a divider and John Wayne once said the hyphen has done more to divide this country than anything else.

I can't help but believe that Dr Martin Luther King's vision of a nation where a man "is judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character" is a dead dream, killed by the children of the generation that gave it birth.

JC

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