One is a statement and one is a question.
One comes from me to you, and one asks you to come to me, if you choose to.
One assumes that person needs something–they may not–and the other asks if they need something in order to help them help themselves, which assumes that even if they could use something today, they may not tomorrow.
One creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior, and the other a relationship of equality and at least potentially friendship.
The former fosters growth in neither. The person “giving” is not asking if what they are giving is needed, and the person getting it is either accepting it or refusing it. In neither case is a conversation happening, and the mutual learning it would enable.
The latter fosters growth in both. It encourages the person who is being offered help to ponder their own condition and ask themselves if they need to grow, and if so what might support it; and the person asking the question gets to learn something about the other person, possibly about themselves, and they get the pleasure, if they are a good person, of possibly seeing an increase in happiness and well being on the part of a fellow human.
The political parallels are obvious, but I will offer one concrete application: white leftists, if they were sincere about helping the poor and minorities, would ask: how can we help you help yourself? And the poor and minorities would think it over, and provide answers of different sorts. But they would speak in THEIR voice, about THEIR problems and concerns, and they would be listened to.
There is something fundamentally wrong that the most vocal–the most annoying, self righteous, and LOUD–supposed “protectors” of the poor and minorities in this country live in enormous mansions, attended Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Columbia, send their kids to private schools, and spend close to ZERO time trying to build the sorts of coalitions of ACTUAL community leaders with whom they might interface to get such questions answered. Instead, they talk with people like Al Sharpton, whose first consideration is ALWAYS WIIFM: what’s in it for me?
And they paper over their failures with distraction campaigns. What do you think the whole Trayvon Martin thing was? Should we not have been more concerned that he had no future? He was bound for jail, likely sooner than later. He was extremely angry, likely prone to fits of despair he reacted to with violence and drugs, and I doubt very much he truly felt anyone loved him. Both of his parents were likely self absorbed–victims of their own traumas–and emotionally unavailable. He was an accident waiting to happen.
So was Michael Brown, who more or less committed suicide. [in that regard, watch this video of a police shooting caught on camera. He fires 8-10 rounds, all of which may have been on target, and the guy he was shooting was much smaller than Michael Brown. They teach cops and soldiers, now, that where deadly force is required, to keep shooting until they stop moving. I assume too many people were getting second chances that they used effectively. And this also appears to have been a suicide by cop, because the “gun” he pulled was a BB gun, although of course the cop had no way of knowing that.]
Should we not have been more concerned that Michael Brown felt he had nothing to live for, than that he chose to use a cop to commit suicide?
Should we not feel compassion for the countless young men like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin who live lives of despair, hopelessness, and fear? Do we help the living by attacking the police for defending themselves and occasionally fucking up? (the Officer In Charge at the Eric Garner arrest in my view clearly should have been fired, but inconveniently she was black). Half the cops in the Baltimore case were black. If they were “racist” was it a case of self loathing? Of course not. The whole thing was bullshit. Cops in Baltimore now are afraid to do their jobs, and this is causing a massive increase in homicides. Perhaps 100 people a year will die now because of the AgitProp campaign launched to protest the death of 1. In common sense, using basic math, how is that an improvement? How is that sane? How can any person of genuine goodwill be other than appalled?
These propaganda narratives not only don’t help, in general they make things WORSE. If white and black leftists were honest they would realize their internal dialogue goes something like “But, you know, fuck black people. None of us know any without college degrees.” There is no concern. There is no respect. There is no empathy and compassion. Leftist react in a Pavlovian manner any time the bell is rung, and stop the moment the stimulus stops. There is no thinking. There is no reasoning.
Genuine respect and decency require sincere reflection, and sincere action which is oriented around visible results. If you are not trying to, for example, see more smiling faces in the ghetto, more 2 parent families, and more kids eager to do their school work, then you are an asshole. And you are not sincere.
And precisely because I am not a fucking hypocrite, I can’t say what the ghettos in particular need, but it does seem that a closer relationship with the police, and possibly even something like self policing–could we deputize men between the ages of 25 and 50?–might be beneficial. The ability to own a gun to protect yourself decreases crime everywhere, so returning them that right–which was also revoked by Jim Crow–would be good.
Actually, I like this idea: if you put the kids who would be the criminals in charge of keeping the peace, provide them training and self respect, and an INCOME; crime would go down sharply, I suspect. You could have a Harlem police force. The police union being what it is, they would have to be a part of the overall NYPD–union leaders in general being self absorbed, self aggrandizing assholes–but the concept is good, I think. You would exactly reverse the current motion.
School choice (vouchers and charter schools) would be wonderful, and is in fact in my understanding supported by substantially all members of the black community with whom the idea has been shared (that are not teachers, self evidently).
And the Left has never shied away from propaganda campaigns. They are great at getting the word out about all the programs they put in place to buy black votes (and ameliorate to an almost imperceptible degree their actual poverty), so why not a campaign to marry the mother of your child? Or better yet, a campaign to do the three things you need to do to get out and stay out of poverty: graduate high school and ideally college; not have a kid unless and until you are married; and work hard at your job.
Can you imagine “Work Hard” posters around the ghettos? They would be called racist. Why? I don’t think blacks are intrinsically lazy. Do you? Honestly, I think THEY do. It is the self image they have been taught implicitly to internalize. They are taught to wait for handouts from the earliest age, and the underlying assumption is that they aren’t able to fend for themselves. It is white propaganda which has created this situation. Working “like a nigger” used to mean you had three jobs. Black unemployment in the 1950’s was lower than white unemployment. Now people make racist jokes about work boots (in private, of course: actual racism is not diminished by being forced out of the open, but it is hidden).
Why? Why has all this happened? Because white leftists thought they knew what the poor and the blacks and everyone else needed. They took simplistic ideas, failed to think them through systemically, and are even now so fucking self absorbed, smug, arrogant and complacent that they refuse to learn. That, and of course there are de facto sociopaths like Hillary and Barack who literally don’t recognize the concept of “truth”, and who will say and do anything that furthers the elevation of their egos and personal interests. Hillary would climb a pyramid of black slave backs to get to the White House, and then proclaim her profound commitment to the cause of black freedom, without batting an eye, or losing a moment of sleep.