Alas, Baltimore
By Greg Richards
AmericanThinker.com
It couldn’t have ended any other way, the black community having been subjected to the most intensive campaign to dissolve its culture in history. How did this come about?
To understand that, we have to ask another question. Why did it take until the middle of the last century, until 1964, to get a Civil Rights Act passed? Because the Democratic Party would not take its boot off the neck of the black man until Martin Luther King made the black vote a political force.
The Democratic Party is the party of slavery, segregation, lynching and the Klan. Under Lyndon Johnson’s Senate leadership in the 1950’s, the Democrats used the filibuster to obstruct and then to water down the two Civil Rights Bills that Eisenhower was able to get through – the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
Given its deplorable record on race, after 1964 the Democratic Party had to find a new role to attract the now significant black vote. Its answer? Offer something the black community was not asking for but could be attracted to. Comprehensive welfare. The Great Society.
But there was a problem.
If the government provides the livelihood in the welfare community, and here we are talking about the black part of that community, it displaces the breadwinner; even more it displaces the role of the breadwinner. It takes away the role of men in the family and thus in the community.
Taking away someone’s role, someone’s mission, in life is the ugliest thing you can do to that person, to those people. You make that person, those people unnecessary. They are not needed. That is what the Democratic Party did to men in the black community. The black family survived 250 years of slavery and 100 years of segregation. But it was destroyed by 50 years of liberalism, of Democratic Party policies.
Where does President Obama stand in this? Obama basically has no relationship with the black experience in America. That is why he thinks Al Sharpton is an authoritative voice. Obama is a third world socialist. By picking Sharpton as his advisor on race, he is associating himself and his policies with Welfare America, not Enterprise America.
Sharpton does not represent, he doesn’t even really know about, Enterprise America – making and selling; saving and investing; getting and spending; studying and learning. What are those to him? He creates chaos out of untruths and gets paid for the publicity. That is what Obama has embraced as “race relations.” No good is ever going to come of it. The more successful it is, the more of a dead end it is.
Welfare makes no family history for its recipients. It nurtures no relationships, no shared experience, no tenderness. It is an atheist’s dream – a bleak, blasted emotional landscape allegedly made bearable by some material goods. It is not a community. It does not make a community.
But it keeps people dependent. It keeps Democrats in power. And as Thomas Sowell has educated us, the first task of a politician is to get reelected. It is not so much that kids in such a situation don’t want to learn. It is more basic than that. It is that they have no need to learn. What is school learning going to do for them in Democratville?
Democrats have created failure and called it prejudice.
Are there enough police in Baltimore? Who knows? What we do know is that there are not enough fathers. Democratic policy for the inner cities means families without fathers, boys without men to show them how to grow up. Why are there so many young black men in jail? Because the Democratic Party made sure there weren’t fathers there to show them how to act like men.
What is to be done? The country cannot afford to go any further down this road, to undermine civil society in the black community in order to assure its dependence on the government and be a sure vote for the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party destroyed the role of men in the black community. Can that role be revived? We have to believe that it can.