Who's Responsible?
By Thomas Sowell
TownHall.com
The cold-blooded murder of two New York City
policemen as they sat in their car is not only an
outrage but also a wake-up call. It shows, in the
most painful way, the high cost of having
demagogues, politicians, mobs and the media
constantly taking cheap shots at the police.
Those cheap shots are in fact very expensive shots,
not only to the police themselves but to the whole
society. Someone once said that civilization is a
thin crust over a volcano. The police are part of
that thin crust. We have seen before our own eyes,
first in Ferguson, Missouri and then in other
communities, what happens when there is just a small
crack in that crust, and barbarism and arson burst
out.
That can happen anywhere. So can what happened in
New York. "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for thee."
It is a painful irony that, on the eve of the
murders of these two police officers in New York,
some of the city's police were already saying that,
in the event of their deaths, they did not want
Mayor Bill de Blasio to attend their funerals.
We can only hope that Mayor de Blasio has some
residual decency, so that he will not defile these
two officers' memorial services with his presence.
No politician in the country has done more to play
the race card against the police and spread the
notion that cops are the big problem in minority
communities.
It so happens that the police officers killed were
both members of minority groups — Officer Rafael
Ramos, Hispanic, and Officer Wenjian Liu, Asian. It
so happens that a substantial part of the New York
City police force are members of minority groups.
But you might never know that from the story told by
demagogues who depict the black community as a
"colonial" society being "occupied" by white
policemen who target young blacks. Mayor de Blasio
joined the chorus of those saying that they have to
warn their black sons how to cope with this
situation.
"What can we say to our sons?" some demagogues ask.
They can say, "Don't go around punching strangers,
because it is only a matter of time before you punch
the wrong stranger."
Mayor de Blasio has made anti-police comments with
Al Sharpton seated at his side. This is the same Al
Sharpton with a trail of slime going back more than
a quarter of a century, during which he has whipped
up mobs and fomented race hatred from the days of
the Tawana Brawley "rape" hoax of 1987 to the Duke
University "rape" hoax of 2006 and the Ferguson
riots of 2014.
Make no mistake about it. There is political mileage
to be made siding with demagogues like Al Sharpton
who, as demagogue-in-chief, has been invited to the
White House dozens of times by its
commander-in-chief.
Many in the media and among the intelligentsia
cherish the romantic tale of an "us" against "them"
struggle of beleaguered ghetto blacks defending
themselves against the aggression of white
policemen. The gullible include both whites who
don't know what they are talking about and blacks
who don't know what they are talking about either,
because they never grew up in a ghetto. Among the
latter are the President of the United States and
his Attorney General.
Such people readily buy the story that ghetto social
problems today — from children being raised without
a father to runaway rates of murder — are "a legacy
of slavery," even though such social problems were
nowhere near as severe in the first half of the 20th
century as they became in the second half.
You would be hard pressed to name just five examples
from the first half of the 20th century of the kinds
of ghetto riots that have raged in more than a
hundred cities during the second half. Such riots
are a legacy of the social degeneracy of our times.
Calling this social degeneracy "a legacy of slavery"
is not just an excuse for those who engage in it, it
is an excuse for the ideology of the intelligentsia
behind the social policies that promoted this
degeneracy.
Let those who have laid a guilt trip on people in
our times, for evils done by other people in past
centuries, at least face their own responsibility
for the evil consequences of their own notions and
policies. If they won't do it, then the rest of us
need to stop listening gullibly to what they are
saying.
The race card is nothing to play with. It can ruin
us all.
Thomas Sowell, a National Humanities Medal
winner, is an American economist, social theorist,
political philosopher and author. He is currently
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University.