Pot Calls Kettle Black
The following is as funny as it is pathetic. Confirming that they are in need of an education, last month members of the Claremont, California, Pitzer College Student Senate voted to deny instating a yacht club at the school.
Their reasoning was sophomoric at best: “The majority of Senators found the name ‘yacht club’ to have a particularly offensive association with yacht clubs and a recreation known for being exclusive,” said Taylor Novice-Finder, a Pitzer College senator.
Perhaps Mr. Novice-Finder, who likely can’t spell ‘hypocrite’, would like to explain how he can justify attending Pitzer, the $64,000 annual tuition of which surely qualifies it as being ’exclusive’. For the record, it costs a mere $60,000 a year to attend Harvard, the gold standard of exclusivity. And once Novice-Finder finds himself unable to justify his attendance at such an exclusive school, we expect he’ll announce the date that he’ll drop out of Pitzer in order to enroll at a two-year community college.
One of the lessons that could be learned here is that the ‘senators’ ought to get their facts right before passing judgment on questions before them. True, by not doing so they are following the lead of the members of the United States Senate, but that’s no justification.
The first truth the Pitzer senators need to avail themselves of is that only a small percentage of people who sail belong to yacht clubs. If we had to guess, we’d put the number at a mere 15 to 20% — and think it could be much less than that. It’s simply flat-out false that sailing is an ‘exclusive’ recreation because nobody is denied or discouraged from engaging in it. The truth is that most people simply don’t want to sail. For many it’s too hard or dangerous, and the rewards are too ethereal.
Second, the notion that the typical yacht club is ‘exclusive’ is one of the biggest societal misconceptions going. As we recall there are something like 50 yacht clubs in Northern California, of which only two have a sheen of exclusivity. The rest not only welcome all potential new members, most will darn near beg people to join.
The St. Francis and the San Francisco YCs are the only two clubs that anybody might think of as being ‘exclusive’. But it’s hardly a charge that would stick, as countless sailors — many who aren’t members of any yacht club — use the facilities of those two clubs each year, and at no charge. And both of those clubs have low-cost learn-to-sail summer programs for kids interested in sailing. Any kids.
Perhaps the whole tempest could have being avoided if the organizers had wanted to start a ‘sailing club’ as opposed to a ‘yacht club’, in deference to the delicate, politically correct sensibilities of some of the senators. Whatever. One would only hope that the Pitzer senators will read some of the work by socialist/anarchist George Orwell before they graduate. The author of the brilliant Down and Out in London and Paris, which is much better than Animal Farm, was not only a brilliant social critic, he wasn’t afraid to call out his own side for its stupidity, as in the haunting quote, “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” He was referring specifically to you, senators.