The Strength of United Diversity

Imagine a world in which every supporting character on The Andy Griffith Show were a replica of Andy himself. Each episode would open with Andy sitting behind his desk in the Mayberry Sheriff’s Office reading the news and drinking a cup of coffee. Occasionally, he would glance over the top of this paper at the other Andy in the room, or take a phone call about cat stuck in a tree.  At the end of the day, the two Andys would smile, nod toward one another, announce “Good night, Ange,” and stroll out of the sheriff’s office and down the street to their front porch swings where they would play bluegrass music on their guitars while waiting for their dinners to be served. Only their dinners would never be served because, in this imagined world, Aunt Bee is yet another Andy, and Andy doesn’t cook. He doesn’t wash clothes either, so he’s not looking like his dapper-self these days. Most importantly, in this imagined world, Andy finds no opportunity to take gentle, subtle, and thoroughly entertaining jabs at his partner-in-paradise, because Andy-too would not widened his eyes and shake all over as a bumbling jumble of zeal and paranoia ready to take on the world’s evils single-handedly with a gun in his holster and a single bullet in his pocket.

This imagined alternate world proves that diversity is an undeniable strength that does not remotely threated unity. The partnership of Andy and Barney worked so well because they were Andy and Barney, not Andy and Andy. Remember the later season of the show that took place after Don Knots moved out of Mayberry and into the world of Disney movies? You likely continued to watch The Andy Griffith Show because thirty minutes spent with Andy is undeniably worth a week spent in therapy, but watching Sheriff Taylor without his sidekick Deputy Fife in those later years probably hurt your heart a little bit.

If you want to relive the good old days when a photo of the first woman to bake a cake wouldn’t be taken down from the cake history site if the woman only three fingers on her left hand , clearly confirming that she was an unqualified baker who got the job as a DEI hire, stick to watching the early seasons of The Andy Griffith Show where you can get a side of Barney with your daily dose of Andy.  That is, if The Andy Griffith Show makes the DEI Cultural Cullers Cut once someone on their team notices that the writers showed forbearance toward a diverse group of fringe Mayberry frequents including incurable alcoholics, law-defying hillbillies, drifting foreign butlers, and college-educated women who held down fulltime jobs and somehow survived without husbands. Just imagine!