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I would not call it a national conversation about race, because the nation is engaged in a great national drama around the George
Zimmerman acquittal.
Unfortunately, the sound and the fury has obscured a very
large and serious problem.
After 4 ½ years of the Obama administration, the
unemployment rate among Trayvon Martin’s peers hovers at around 45%. Consider this graph:
Shocking? You bet. Scandalous? Absolutely. A national
disgrace? Of course.
If one were of a cynical bent one might imagine that this
hue and cry over a Florida trial is a way to obscure the fact that minority
youth have been left out of the Obama “recovery.”
Those who believed that an Age of Obama would be good for
African Americans have been proved wrong. They would rather not think about it,
however.
Nothing about the great national drama over the Zimmerman
verdict will change those facts. Nothing about it will change the prospects for
the young African Americans whose career prospects are dimming by the day.
The administration and its enablers are scapegoating George
Zimmerman for its own failure to address an intractable problem and to redirect the
disappointment in the African-American community.
The administration would honor the memory of Trayvon Martin by
provoking a national conversation about the job prospects of African American
young people.
It might start by calling for a rollback of minimum wage
laws. It might even pressure the Washington, D. C. City Council to roll back
its new “living wage” rules, rules that have already cost the district nearly 2,000
jobs. Who do you think would have been receiving those jobs?
17 comments:
I'm afraid that when Obama + his policy advisors look at that very same graph, all they see is "good news." To them, massive black youth unemployment means (a) more black anger and alienation towards the existing political-legal-economic system, (b) more black dependency on the federal government, (c) louder demands for implementation of the Obama agenda (basically, the transition to a massive welfare state and capitalist "in name only" centrally-planned economy), and (d) generations of higher black voter turnout to support that agenda.
Whereas intelligent and compassionate people are horrified at this graph, Obama & Co. are *all* smiles.
If one remembers one of the first actions Obama took was to do away with charter schools in DC. Black parents were flocking to these schools because their children were getting a good education.
Any of us who spent time in the military learned and know that Blacks, minorities, et al are just as capable as others. There does seem to be a desire by those in power to keep people as uneducated as possible, To that end they need to replace those minorities that do flee from the "Liberal Plantation" and start to succeed. So we get the need to replace them with poor uneducated Hispanics who have no idea that they are being used and will suffer the same faith that Black families have suffered.
The real problem for Blacks, and for any minority that thinks that certain elements, who are guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations, are going to help them, is explained rather nicely here:
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=517&load=8664
The people who care the most for you are the ones who expect the most out of you because they believe that you have the wherewithal to do it.
African-American political "leaders" are completely in the bag for socialism... hook, line and sinker... the whole smash. Everything is about victimhood. There are precious few suggestions to assimilate with mainstream American culture. We see immigrant groups assimilating in one or two generations, while the African-American cultural assimilation regressed over the last 50 years. Children who perform in school receive pejoratives about "being white." Black kids who hang out with whites are called "Oreos." Bill Cosby speaks out about cultural malaise, and is ostracized. The NAACP shuns conservative blacks. There's little discussion about private sector upward mobility. "Community leaders" like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are incredibly wealthy, and appear at every racially-charged event proclaiming the endemic racism of white America. They offer no vision for the future, save platitudes. It's relentless shaming and guilt. Follow the money.
What made Martin Luther King, Jr. so successful and important in the crucible of the civil rights movement is that he held up a mirror to white America, using the common ideals of Christianity and the American Founding, and asked if they liked what they saw. They did not, and legislation and attitudes moved. He appealed to the American conscience. He protested peacefully throughout, from love. He was the right man with an undeniable message, and that is why he continues to be so admired. Where are those leaders today?
Of course George Zimmerman is a scapegoat. Saying which side you are on in this case is like a mass catharsis about race. It's very sad. Are there hateful white people? Yes. Are there hateful black people? Yes. And there's no excuse for either. It's counter-productive and cowardly.
The U.S. media, particularly television, is not about reporting hard news anymore. Watching the news today is like watching SportsCenter. This is political theater, preying on (and validating) our worst fears about each other. It's all about creating conflict and division to draw eyes. Basic research on the Zimmerman case will tell you the prosecution was on thin ice from the start. There was no case from the beginning, and there is no case going forward. And now we learn that a Rochester, NY black man, Roderick Scott, shot a white teenager in almost identical circumstances back in 2009, and was also acquitted. Ever heard of Mr. Scott?
Who is really forgotten in all this? The African-American young who are betrayed by their leaders, forgotten by society, preyed upon by consumer marketing, left to fend for themselves. There are no jobs, and the public education system spends more time re-hashing historical grievances and "celebrating diversity" than preparing them for the competitive global economy. 45% unemployment is truly a disgrace. The chaotic violence in Chicago is horrible. Detroit reported 386 murders in a population of less than 700,000 people, and the city is now in receivership. Wal-Mart wants to open 5 stores in D.C., and they're stopped because the political class wants to pander to the unions. In 2003, a man wanted to give $200 million of his own money to set up charter schools in Detroit... he was denied by the mayor and the governor because of teachers union pressure. It's absurd. Yet the Democrats continue to pander to the racial divide with impunity, and are rewarded with 97% lock-step voting in return. Madness!
Victimhood is the most terrible, corrosive disease ever foisted on the human mind. It ruins lives, destroys hope, commands conformity, and empowers demagogues. It demands dependency from without, while resenting it within. Empowerment doesn't come from a handout, it comes from opportunity. It starts with discipline, pride and contribution. That's what you get from a job. Too bad there aren't many. The most damning thing we do to African-Americans is pity them. Pity feeds dependence, and dependence institutionalizes poverty. It's disgusting.
Tip
I can just hear Obama's next speech,
"If I had a son...he'd look just like these unemployed young men".
It is bizarre to this Canadian how "racially" driven so much of the U.S. culture is. Someone profits from this misery or else I figure the ingenuity of the American people would have solved this long ago.
Alogon 7/18/13 @10:09:
Oh, there's lots of profit available from this misery. If you'd like some riveting reading on the subject, I recommend Kenneth Timmerman's "Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson" available in paperback from Amazon. It shows how the whole mechanism works. The REVEREND Jackson has it down to an art and a science.
And this may not be outside the Canadian purview for too much longer, as the REVEREND Jackson has appealed to the United Nations for assistance with investigating America's racial hatred:
http://rainbowpush.org/commentaries/single/investigate_the_racial_context_behind_martins_death
Tip
To echo Tip, it is madness that Black people look to government for salvation; the same government that supported slavery and hunted them down when they ran, the same government that impossed Jim Crow on them, the same government that now segragates them in city ghettos impossed by welfare, the same government that is replacing Blacks with Hispanics via immigration. It is time for America to throw of it's political domination by the DNC and the RNC and have many political parties thay truely represent their members.
Yes Zimmerman was a scapegoat. For your edification: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/judson-phillips-cold-hard-truth/2013/jul/15/myth-st-trayvon/
James Taranto agrees that he is a scapegoat in his Best of the Web column on the Wall Street Journal site today.
Yes, he does, Stuart. And what's with that quote Taranto has from Eric Liu? Whiteness is an "unearned set of privileges"? Huh? In English, please. I re-read the Liu excerpt at least ten times, and I still don't know what he's trying to say in that tortured prose!
Privilege is reserved to white people with all their whiteness??? What is affirmative action but an "unearned set of privileges?" It's not based on socio-economic status! Some rich, preppy black kid in Bryn Mawr gets the same benefits from affirmative action as a poor black kid deep down the road in urban Philadelphia wearing a hoodie. Who does EARN "privileges" in this new American society? People who go to Ivy League schools? So let me see... you did well regurgitating stuff in high school, did well on a standardized test and spent 4 years in college for the privilege of being able to condescend to me from some ivory tower? Pure, unmitigated nonsense.
I sincerely do not understand people like Eric Liu, looking down his nose at the rest of us. Has he ever spent a day in a white man's shoes? How does he know? I've never heard of this guy. He's first-generation American, went to Yale undergrad and Harvard Law School, wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, and is some "spokesman for Generation X." Sounds really hardscrabble, huh?
What in the world is going on in this country? We're all a bunch of Balkanized hyphenated victims constantly judging whose ancestor pulled the low number in the deli line. Everything is unfair. For all our vaunted belief in fairness and rule of law, I'd say the Left is making a mockery of the criminal justice system. People sit around assembling their resumes for how much they've gotten screwed by a system that their political philosophy helped create and sustain. It's a rigged game. Everyone is just angry and finds joy in being angry because they don't have to do anything else but be angry. It's sick.
We're all members of the lucky sperm club in some capacity, no matter how privileged and impoverished our lives are. We're alive! I'm not going to sit around and waste this life doing complex calculus on how much privilege or pity I've earned or deserve. The kind of opinions and abuse of language this Zimmerman verdict is bringing out in people is nuts! I've got uber-granola burnout college grads living in Beaver Creek waiting for first snow who're posting their "solidarity with Trayvon." Give me peace.
Tip
George Zimmerman is Israel. Anyone who wants to find the real facts can easily do it. However most people are lazy and want to think the worst of xyz. MSM is an enabler to lies.
Obama isn't here to help black people. Obama is here to help advance the communist agenda and use whatever "useful idiots" are handy to do it. For now, black people will do. Women will do. Gays will do. Anyone foolish enough to believe in him will do.
No question but that Zimmerman is a scapegoat.
Or sacrificial goat.
And Chris Matthews has said "I'm sorry" on behalf of all white people. What a self-righteous, sanctimonious jerk. Being white, whiteness, or crackerdom had NOTHING to do with this case. Fact: Zimmerman is as white as Obama is. This whole country is coming unglued about yet another non-issue. The Obamatrons must love it... no talk about Benghazi, IRS, NSA, etc. No talk about the phony, Fed-driven "economic growth" that has this nation's can-do spirit in the crapper. Add in employer uncertainty about what ObamaCare has in store... because government doesn't even know what's going to happen. Remember: we have to pass it so we can find out what's in it. Republicans may be incompetent, but Democrats are dangerous. The ideas of today's Democratic Party destroy what is good in the name of fighting something bad. It is dualistic, either-or thinking. People like Chris Matthews evolved from a Tip O'Neill-style Democrat into this Lefty moron windbag who claims to speak on behalf of white people. All he sees is race. It allows him to hold himself superior. Obama is his guy, all the way.
It frosts me to hear all this phony emotion, this moralizing indignation, this self-congratulation, this pitying pandering, this condescending nonsense. The crowd that says "whose morals?" sure love to moralize, don't they? These neo-relativists become like the preacher in "Footloose" when it comes to race. The City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy yesterday. I live in Metro Detroit and grew up here. I've lived with this zero-sum, victimized racial politics my whole life. It's pure B.S. Black nationalist Democrats have had hegemonic political control over the City of Detroit for over 40 years. Chart Detroit's economic-social-political fortunes and you'll see what's in store for our nation if we don't get a clue what bureaucratic and regulatory socialism is about. Detroit's misfortune has nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with the concept of VALUE and a culture that supports it so people can grow... also called upward mobility. To have upward mobility, you have to incentivize the behavior you want, rather than encouraging, subsidizing and glorifying the behavior you don't want. Mainstream African-American culture has regressed and become dis-integrated because they've been told the great lie: you can get somethin' for nothin'. Who told them this? Who told them America is against them and a horrible, racist hellhole? Democrats like Chris Matthews and the tingle up his leg. Where do you think he lives? In a mainstream D.C. neighborhood? Ha! Democrats brand themselves as the party of the little guy. Democrats care about black people, Republicans are the party of hate. That's the narrative, right? Okay, well then... have the Democrats delivered on their promises to make black lives better? Have they? I invite you all to come to Detroit for a personal tour of the city's neighborhoods. It's the definition of squalor and hopelessness. Does a young black person in 2013 have a better chance at growing up in a stable household, attending good schools and reaching his/her life aspirations as they did in 1964? No way. Not in Detroit. Here they have more rights and few opportunities because there is deep, deep social collapse. People like Chris Mattews disgust me. Pathetic. Spit-spit.
Tip
I think what one has to realize is that all of these disparate things we believe are going wrong in this country are the culmination of over a hundred years of progressivism. When the progressives figured out that they were not going to change this country into the utopia they desired they set about a long term plan to take over the country from within.
They first slowly took over the education system. If you can control the underlying thought patterns that are extant then one can control what people think is important. That puts one half way to controlling the dialogue that people are accustomed.
Then one has to slowly grow people's dependence upon the government through programs ostensibly meant to help, but more to increase dependency on an overarching government. The more dependency the less capable people are of challenging that government.
One has to control the culture by removing the belief in American Exceptionalism that is a part of the American ethos. Follow that with a sustained attack on religion and one can lessen what it is to be an American. One has to ensure that we see ourselves as hyphenated Americans with no common connection or language. We all have to be competing interest groups at the beck and call of government largess. Most of all we need to see each other as the enemy whether that be race, sex, ethnic, class or economic status.
Then one has to gradually take over all the levers of power. The legislative first, the judicial second and then the executive. The legislative branch is the key. Then everything flows from there. Then it is quite easy to grow government and gain control of every aspect of people's live.
Once one can take over the healthcare system then one now controls who lives and who dies. Add to that a large and growing regulatory system and there is not one aspect of life one does not control.
Everyone fails to see that a lot of what we think are separate issues are really part of the same issue. Until we recognize this we are always going to be asking the question as to why America seems to be something other that what we thought.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: "We got to continue this conversation, gentlemen, privately and on television. I mean a lot of people out there -- I'll just tell you one thing. And I'm speaking now for all white people, but especially people who have had to try to change the last 50 or 60 years. And they -- a lot of them have really tried to change, and I'm sorry for this stuff. That's all I'm saying."
And as Prof. Reynolds says, George is more black than Homer Plessy. His black grandfather is ignored.
So, in reality, it was
black-on-black, and there ain't no news in that.
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