Affirmative Action is a necessary responsibility

Your position is becoming so ridiculous that I need only restate it in simple terms in order to show the contradictions. First of all is the assertion that our government, which has only been around for a couple hundred years, is somehow responsble for our thought processes. Now in the next round it is "government and society." Addressing racial (and other) prejudices would seem to require an understanding of the underlying situation. Your analysis of the history of inequality seems to lack that understanding, and therefore one can certainly be skeptical of any solution you propose. And sure enough, now you assert that the remedy for this problem is to let the government, which you believe caused the problem in the first place, to have the understanding and compassion to fix it by identifying all those who have been wronged by it and make up for it by passing it along to someone else, in this case our economic and educational systems, and telling them how to solve it as well, and making sure they do it that way, and punishing them quite severely if they do not. And this is supposed to make it all OK. And noting that your plan does nothing to actually address the problem of inequality. This proposal has so little actual thought behind it that it is obviously a prescription for more problems. It is worth noting that there are already equal opportunity measures in place which require applicants to be considered without regard to a bunch of irrelevant factors. Affirmative action is the granting of special "advantages" to those whom the government in its infinite wisdom designates as disadvantaged. Here is the first problem. How is the government to know who is disadvantaged and who is not? This would seem to require some sort of insight into the situation. What we want is equality. But our legal system works the way it does. "Affirmative Action," in its original form, is an attemt to legislate equality. This is not possible. Furthermore it does it in a way that is not workable. That way being our legal system. The situation has been improved, however, by contradicting the original notion of equality and replacing it with a system of inequality, but, in theory anyway, equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to what the government perceives to be the problem. This is so insane anyway but there's more. Added to this is the vengeance mentality that if you are not complying with this impossible insane scheme you are the cause of it all and deserve to be allowed to contribute vast sums of money and beg forgiveness for your sins. It is clear that, as Einstein put it, we cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking that created them. When you discover that you are in a hole the first thing you must do is stop digging. What is needed is an intelligent and informed attempt to address the problem. Well I'm no rocket scientist but it would seem to me that, like any problem caused by man, would require an understanding and insight that can only be gained by getting inside the head of those who are causing it. Yet our mentality demands from them only that they be punished. It is a compound error. Victims of child abuse should not receive preferential hiring or educational treatment to address that ridiculous example. Why not find out by studying the most prejudiced how to end prejudice, and from criminals how to end crime, and from perpetrators of violence how to end violence, and from abusers how to end abuse?