'Inclusion' efforts lead to exclusion

Dear Editor:

Re: new school board inclusion policy. What I find disturbing about this change in policy of inclusion is that all lists of inclusion are exclusive; we don't mean to, but invariably someone or some group is always excluded. 

Could our efforts not bear better fruit if we focused our efforts at making it safer for everyone who enters our families, homes, schools, workplaces, churches or places of governance?

It seems to me that we have lost sight of the fact that we are all persons and as such we have much more in common than what differentiates us; and we seem to have made it 'OK' to pick on any person who is different than ourselves or our group.

Labels abound. 

Individually we are often rather impatient when the change we need, desire or that simply suits us is slow in coming; and we ramp up the rhetoric. 

Two cases in point. One is the length of time it took for the government to extend to couples that co-habitated the same rights and privileges that were extended to those couples that married. Or the second point is the tension between the government funding abortions while at the same time not funding the costs incurred by couples who are experiencing infertility and who take the route of seeking help from fertility clinics in their desire to have a family.

I don't know who, but someone has said that it is easier and faster to act your way into a new way of thinking than you can think your way into a new way of acting.

I know a new policy with 'more teeth' looks good and makes us think we have done something, and often can be a good start, but it seems to me that policy is so limited in accomplishing the attitudinal change that is needed. 

Is it possible that there is another way available to us that has yet to be explored?  Who will be brave enough to lead us?

George Goertzen, New Westminster