Hey NPR, the White Left has
done a marvelous job “managing” the destinies of black folks over the
last half century, hasn’t it? You claimed in the mid-60’s to care about
racial inequalities. America agreed with you. We spent about $16
TRILLION in the War on Poverty–much more by a long shot than any other
war we have fought in our history–and not only are rates of poverty
about the same, but the nuclear family has been utterly decimated, and
millions of people have been taught that the way to get ahead is through
working the system, and not through hard work, which is and always has
been an integral part of the American Dream.
You own Detroit. You own the crime, devastation, and children growing up in hell.
And can I not call you out on the more or less blatant racism
implicit in your assumption that persons of color cannot afford what
CrossFit is charging, but that white people can? That black people are
lacking in resourcefulness? Helpless without you?
With friends like you, black people don’t need enemies. They don’t
need racists. And in point of fact, virtually NONE of their many and
quite real problems stem from racism, which is all but extinct.
Their enemies are pretending to be their friends, and feeling quite self righteous about it. Their enemies are you.
I would like to further this thought. One periodically sees stories of people who weigh 600, 700, 800 pounds. People confined to their beds, and the walls of whose homes have to be breached to remove their bodies when they die. People always confine their attention to that person, wondering who would choose to live a life like that.
But for my part, I have always wondered “who would ALLOW that person to live their life like that?” Someone has to bring the food. Someone has to bathe them. Someone has to empty the bed pan, if they can’t get out of bed. Put simply: someone BENEFITS from that arrangement, which is implied in the simple fact that they allow it to continue. In most cases, it is likely a mentally ill mother, who has an emotional need to make their child helpless, so that the mother never feels unneeded, and thus, in a perverse way, unloved.
It is a sick, sick thing, though, is it not, to make someone else ill so that you can feel important, so that you can express what you describe to yourself as love, but which is really a terrible emptiness inside that you use others to assuage?
Can we not say with finality, with absolute certainty, that the social experiments based on the hypothesis that simply handing money out to people who lack it will benefit them in the long term has not only failed, but failed disastrously? Can we not say with finality that assuming black Americans are incapable of feeding and clothing themselves without hand outs is not all that different than NEEDING someone confined to bed so that you can be the care-giver, so that you can satisfy some sick need to be needed?
Note: I am ignoring the people who benefit directly, financially, politically, from the status quo, people like Barack Obama, and Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. Rather, I am thinking of the Alan Aldas of the world, the Sean Penns, the Ed Asners.
Such people see the same world I do. They have lived long enough to know that self respect is a valuable thing, and that if someone is tying your shoes for you and packing your lunch your entire life, that opportunities to earn it are few and far between.
I reiterate: the black “community” (to the extent such a thing exists outside of a reflexive need to stand with black criminals regardless of their crime) has no worse enemies than those claiming to be its friends.