Ed Campbell says:

This reflects a discussion I’ve been involved with, privately and publicly, for forty-five years, now. With both conservative and liberal folk, individualism seems to be a question separate from the Right to be an individual. I can understand part of that. The discussion started with a dear friend in 1959 when we both were reading “Advertisements for Myself” by Norman Mailer.

I have an ex-wife in Kiev who’s part of the problem, too. Like many folks born of Eastern European families that collaborated with the Nazis as part of their “expression” of nationalism, she always identified with the most radical positions advanced as “separate, but, equal” by folks whose rhetoric was grounded in the overcompensation of superiority. Stokely Carmichael, Robert Mugabe, Menachem Begin, Slobodan Milosevic, Reyes Tijerina, all offer something of value — to her politics.

The position recurs that the alternative is assimilation. That’s a straw man. I believe that being assured the capability of functioning within a society — allows the best possible chance to go where you want with your life in that society. My friends on the Left think that lacks “understanding”. My friends on the Right would rather just kick the foreigners out. I guess I should make it clear I differentiate between legal and illegal immigration. That’s not PC in my neighborhood, either.

But, I think that a standards-based school system [and society] can and should be funded in this manner because, after all, it’s for the benefit of us all.