Guess I didn’t get the memo. Recently read where there are up to 63 genders? Last Wednesday my niece had a baby. She birthed a 10 pound, 5 ounce child — not her husband, my nephew. “We were not pregnant, but know I sure was!” she firmly announced after the little person arrived. Ironically the newbie is a “boy,” not one of the 62 other options. My niece and nephew checked: 10 fingers, 10 toes and one… thingy, yep, it’s a boy! Had he entered the world in Canada the parents could place an “X” in the sex area of the birth certificate for later determination. Spare me.

Seems I didn’t get the tribal memo either. A recent Courier-Herald column on tribalism insinuated that our present Pandora’s Box of social ills originated when the white elite gained their hoarded wealth on the backs of the downtrodden. The liberal need to codify people, groups, races, genders, et. al., smacks of tribalism as well. The progressive policing and categorizing the nuances of cultures, people, or movements serves only to exacerbate divisions in our national social structure. To equate all whites as being “privileged” stretches credulity and serves to engender fractionalization and inflames unreasoned radical action. If I’d known I was a privileged white person six decades ago, I wouldn’t have worked 2-3 jobs annually to make ends meet. Just perhaps, yes, perhaps some introspection by all parties should be the order of the day.

The ceaseless blame game serves no useful purpose and creates so much deja-poo—the feeling that one has heard this crap before. As Rodney King stated, “Can’t we all just get along?”

George Terhaar

Enumclaw