When we moved to Milpitas more than 30 years ago, one of the many things that attracted us to this city (along with many parks, excellent police and fire protection and good schools) was its proud history of being a place where many different races and ethnicities lived in relative harmony. We wanted our four sons to learn to judge a person "not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character" and Milpitas seemed a pretty good place to do that. It was.

As they progressed through school and Little League and the other youthful activities available to them, they learned that whether a person was a hero or a scoundrel was not determinable by the way they looked... or the language spoken at home... or even their level of intelligence. They learned that a person's worth was pretty well dependent on their honesty, integrity and how they treated others in school, on the ball field and in other mundane social interactions.

They also learned some bitter lessons in Milpitas. In middle school, one of them experienced school authorities organizing an assembly to "celebrate diversity" which turned out to be an occasion where the various ethnic groups performing on stage were allowed to make overtly insulting remarks about whites. When it became apparent that anti-white sentiment was coming to a boil and violence was soon to erupt, the white kids and their (often ethnically diverse) group of friends had to high-tail it to the security of home.

In high school

one of our sons learned that certain ethnic groups were allowed to participate in gang activity (complete with organized and orchestrated violence) while others had to assume the role of victim under the not-so-watchful eye of school administrators. Another learned that due to the preferences of the school principal at the time, the music of one particular small ethnic group was going to be played at lunchtime most of the year and everyone else had to suck it up.

As three of them went on to the local community college (the fourth went to a small private college that did not discriminate based on race), they found that the last group to be offered their choice of classes was white male non-athletes, which pretty well described my sons. Due to discrimination by the community colleges, for them registering for needed basic classes was impossible as was achieving a degree in the normal time period. This little piece of government-sponsored racial, ethnic and sexual discrimination has been partially remedied by the heroic efforts of Ward Connerly and the passage by California voters of Proposition 209 in 1995.

These experiences of discrimination against my children angered me at the time they were occurring. But with the passage of time I have realized that overcoming hurdles in life, including blatant unfairness, teaches a valuable lesson. Life isn't fair. It never was. It never will be. Deal with it and move on. My sons are all stronger as a result of the unfairness they faced and the adversity they had to overcome.

Milpitas was (and I'm sure still is) a great place to raise kids. There is something educational and wonderful about exposure to many different races, ethnicities and cultures and our hometown certainly continues to be home to a wide variety of those. Don't expect it to be perfect. Don't expect it to be fair. Enjoy it like it is. And, allow your children to learn from their experiences, both good and bad, that flow from it.

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Ed Riffle owns and operates a small business and is the

writer for and co-publisher

of a "dot-com-ic" strip, www.OurLittleCornfield.com.