Who is empowering the real wolves?
Once upon a time there was a boy who used to shout, "There's a wolf! Help! There's a wolf!" The good people of the town would run to help him, but when they found him there weren't any wolves, just the boy with a tin cup trying to bum money from the good people to buy booze. Some of the good people even gave him some money, but this happened so many times that pretty soon the good people stopped showing up.
The only people who kept showing up were politicians and some shady types who wanted to learn how to lie from a real master. Then it so happened that one day a real wolf decided to attack the boy since no one who really cared about the boy would defend him when he cried "Wolf!" anymore.
The politicians and ne'er-do-wells watched amid the boy's screams as the wolf devoured him alive. Then, while the good people of the town started digging a grave to bury the boy's remains, one of the politicians went to a microphone and began to condemn the good people for not coming when the boy cried "Wolf!" and saving the boy's life. Then when a number of the good people formed a hunting party to go kill the wolf, the politicians make a law against it, saying "The wolf shouldn't be punished for doing something which is in its nature to do."
The End
Inspired by this article. I agree with some of the ideas expressed in it and I disagree with others. So I decided to write this story instead of doing my usual commentary.
I can't get past this passage in the cited article:
ReplyDeleteAfrican Americans still suffer from the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. Black children are more likely to be born into poverty, and into a fatherless home, which makes it harder for them to get out of poverty, and more likely they will fall into crime — and maybe leave their own kid in fatherless poverty.
Sorry, but that is just too facile. (Obama trotted also trotted this out in his statement after the Trayvon verdict.) I want someone to explain to me just what "legacy" of slavery (which ended ~150 years ago) and Jim Crow laws (which ended ~50 years ago) is causing poverty, crime, and fatherless families today. Unless one is willing to call the Great Society programs a "legacy" of slavery and Jim Crow, I'm not buying it.
America is extremely willing to welcome "others" into society who are willing to contribute. Immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and on and on have arrived in recent decades, many without the benefit of even knowing the language once they got here, and people of those heritages are prospering and contributing. As far as a color-blind society goes, yes, we see what ethnicity they are, and we don't care.
The problem with much of the black community here is the culture of dependence that the government has enforced. I'll cite Justice Thomas in his dissent in the Michigan law school case, in which he quotes Frederick Douglass:
Frederick Douglass, speaking to a group of abolitionists almost 140 years ago, delivered a message lost on today’s majority:
“[I]n regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us… . I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! … And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury.”
As Dreher would say, read the whole thing.
But I'd guess I too would largely agree with the article Pauli cited. While some would say that the disproportionate number of young black males in prison is because society is judging them by the color of their skin, I'd say it is rather that society is judging them by the content of their character (as reflected in their actions) and has found them wanting.
You point out the stuff that ruined the point of Carney's article for me. It is much truer to say that crime causes poverty than to say that poverty causes crime.
DeleteGreat quote from Frederick Douglass. This type of rhetoric is missing from the lips of the race-baiters who style themselves as leaders in the black community.