What "DEI" really means and what you can do about it

Isn't DEI the (genitive singular) Latin word for God? Yeah, because nothing is subtle anymore.

Adaline, the girl in the football shirt, pretty much already knows the score.

WE’RE A SMALL FAMILY and we just got smaller. Not because of anyone passing away—you can stop holding your breath—but because some of us put on big fat crosses and began a mass crucifixion.

Here’s the back story, as brief as I can make it.

In 1989, my cousin Tad—who lives in Angels Camp, in Calaveras County, California¹, and has for so long that his family holds ancestral P.O. Box #s 1, 2, and 3—called me in New York'; he was sobbing. He was 45 then; he’d married a few years earlier for the first time, and now, his wife had just had the much longed-for baby. Except that the baby was born with no peritoneum, the sac that holds our internal organs in place; i.e., keeps our intestines out of our throat. The survival rate for that birth defect—at least in 1989—was 1%.

The hospital in Stockton didn’t have the staff or the equipment for such an emergency. When Tad called me, the baby—Amanda—was enroute via medivac helicopter to Berkeley.

There, the doctors told Tad and Cheri the grim modds for Amanda’s survival, and warned that even if she survived, she was likely to have serious birth defects, and they could not predict what those might be or to what extent.

Amanda not only survived. She effing killed it. With one birth defect— an 85% hearing loss. Amanda is deaf.

Which is how she got famous—because she was the first deaf woman to ever be elected mayor of an American city.² And then, she was the first deaf woman to be elected a County Supervisor (Calaveras County)—a position she holds today.

Along the way, years ago, she married T.J. And then, because Amanda has never believed anything was impossible (I forgot to mention that she also runs a beef ranch and sells grass-fed beef)—she decided that despite her high-risk classification, she’d try for a baby.

Bingo, see above.

Okay, that’s the back story.

Here’s the message I received yesterday on Amanda’s Instagram:

And just to nail it home, I’ll add a big snark: some of those people “who think this is okay” are family members who seriously need those airline belt extenders.

There’s Nothing I Can Do About It Department: Yes, there is. Forward this story to everyone you know and tell them to do the same. As every writer and every reporter and every editor in the world knows: One personal story is worth 100,000 lawn signs.

1. Angels Camp, California is the setting for Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” an economic boon to that region for 160 years.

2. And set the model for the nation. In 2023, Ukiah, California upped the ante by installing Councilwoman Josefina Duenas, a deaf, female, Latina as mayor.