WITH THE INFLUX OF THE TEA PARTY...
THE AMERICAN CAPACITY FOR ANIMOSITY has rapidly begun to escalate, due to the accident of the race of our new President. Need I recite the sad statistics? Here they came, with their steel faces and inflamed eyes, fearful visions and apocalyptic solutions, desperate for a new enemy. The unavoidable presence of a man of color in the White House had lit a fire in their bellies. Now they began to allow White men to claim to be the victims of Black kids, authorizing them to slaughter Trevor Martin and Jordan Davis, two unarmed young black men, sanctioned under the protection of the 2005 the Stand Your Ground Law down in Florida, a law brought about at the urging of the National Rifle Association, and with grim insistence by both the Republican legislature and the Tea Party of Florida. After all the work done by blacks and whites to destroy the stereotype of the shiftless, irresponsible black man, here come these self-styled clowns.
The following is about our failure - mine and yours.
We must begin with a look at the kids in the slums of the Black Underclass, who are now living below the federal poverty line, today's roll models remain much the same as they always were, nothing has changed: pimps, prostitutes, crack dealers and stick up men still roam their streets. But if the yahoos of the Tea Party have taught us anything, it is that they are not very good at repairing holes in the spirit, particularly when those holes belong to those who are of another color.
The black underclass has been a long time forming, since about the time the great migration to the north began during and after World War Two. This was caused by the mechanization that changed the economy of the South; where once a hundred black men and women toiled in a cotton field, now there was one machine and many began heading north. When they arrived in places like New York and Chicago and Detroit, they soon discovered that there might be jobs, but not any were for men and women who had spent their lives chopping cotton in the Southern heat. By the late 1950's the jobs which had supported many other immigrants began to vanish too, jobs in small factories, that did not require much formal education. Welfare became the dismal alternative to all those glittering visions of renewal. Hopelessness became the norm and Whites had now joined the Black Underclass.
In every major city, in those places where the Underclass reside, there are hundreds of abandoned buildings, structurally sound, but gutted by fire; they could be reclaimed through the use of sweat equity, converted into condominiums for a resurgent black and white and Hispanic working class. The Tea Party, of course, nix that idea. You could intelligently teach teenagers about birth control - clearly, graphically - then supply birth-control devices to everyone. Once again, the Tea Party did not warm-up to that one, either.
The Tea Party needs to stop the nonsense about "dead-end" jobs. There are no "dead-end" jobs for people who want to make something of their lives. When I was a kid I worked as a newspaper thrower, a messenger, a janitor, and a lowly assistant to the Woolworth's candy girl. I didn't make a career out of any of those jobs, but they taught me how to work. They taught me how to get up in the morning when I wanted to sleep-in for a few more hours. They taught me how to perform tasks that did not personally interest me. They taught me how to understand the needs and wants of other people and their expectations of me. Where will the jobs come from? Obviously, once again, the Tea Party seems not to care, or they would vote in favor of raising the minimum-wage. There is an extraordinary amount of work to be done in the United States, repairing the collapsing physical infrastructure of streets, bridges, highways. This work does not require a high school education. It requires a living wage. In the best of all possible worlds, of course, the federal government could help fund this immense project or any other project they wished to finance, including the building of day-care centers so the parents can go to work without worry.
To say that the richest nation in the history of the world cannot afford this is ludicrous. We must guarantee full employment for all, even at the risk of fueling inflation. Jobs are everything. A job for one man could take four people off the dole, jobs would take more pistols out of the hands of young men than another hundred thousand police. Any sensible citizen knows that the Underclass is a greater threat to our national security than the terrorists or any other foreign threat. They aren't presiding over the starvation of American infants whose families can no long afford feed or house them.
There is very little now that whites alone can do in a direct way for the maimed and hurting citizens of the Underclass. They need black leaders more than they need white pity. Or only white social workers. Or only white cops. Or white Tea Party lunatics who do absolutely nothing in the defense of the Underclass, white or black. They need someone to love them. Soon. If blacks and whites in powerful positions do not go to the defense of the penniless, do not go after the loathsome bigots of the Tea Party and drive them out of office, neither will anyone else. And they will surely be doomed.
So, in a different way, will all of us.
THE AMERICAN CAPACITY FOR ANIMOSITY has rapidly begun to escalate, due to the accident of the race of our new President. Need I recite the sad statistics? Here they came, with their steel faces and inflamed eyes, fearful visions and apocalyptic solutions, desperate for a new enemy. The unavoidable presence of a man of color in the White House had lit a fire in their bellies. Now they began to allow White men to claim to be the victims of Black kids, authorizing them to slaughter Trevor Martin and Jordan Davis, two unarmed young black men, sanctioned under the protection of the 2005 the Stand Your Ground Law down in Florida, a law brought about at the urging of the National Rifle Association, and with grim insistence by both the Republican legislature and the Tea Party of Florida. After all the work done by blacks and whites to destroy the stereotype of the shiftless, irresponsible black man, here come these self-styled clowns.
The following is about our failure - mine and yours.
We must begin with a look at the kids in the slums of the Black Underclass, who are now living below the federal poverty line, today's roll models remain much the same as they always were, nothing has changed: pimps, prostitutes, crack dealers and stick up men still roam their streets. But if the yahoos of the Tea Party have taught us anything, it is that they are not very good at repairing holes in the spirit, particularly when those holes belong to those who are of another color.
The black underclass has been a long time forming, since about the time the great migration to the north began during and after World War Two. This was caused by the mechanization that changed the economy of the South; where once a hundred black men and women toiled in a cotton field, now there was one machine and many began heading north. When they arrived in places like New York and Chicago and Detroit, they soon discovered that there might be jobs, but not any were for men and women who had spent their lives chopping cotton in the Southern heat. By the late 1950's the jobs which had supported many other immigrants began to vanish too, jobs in small factories, that did not require much formal education. Welfare became the dismal alternative to all those glittering visions of renewal. Hopelessness became the norm and Whites had now joined the Black Underclass.
In every major city, in those places where the Underclass reside, there are hundreds of abandoned buildings, structurally sound, but gutted by fire; they could be reclaimed through the use of sweat equity, converted into condominiums for a resurgent black and white and Hispanic working class. The Tea Party, of course, nix that idea. You could intelligently teach teenagers about birth control - clearly, graphically - then supply birth-control devices to everyone. Once again, the Tea Party did not warm-up to that one, either.
The Tea Party needs to stop the nonsense about "dead-end" jobs. There are no "dead-end" jobs for people who want to make something of their lives. When I was a kid I worked as a newspaper thrower, a messenger, a janitor, and a lowly assistant to the Woolworth's candy girl. I didn't make a career out of any of those jobs, but they taught me how to work. They taught me how to get up in the morning when I wanted to sleep-in for a few more hours. They taught me how to perform tasks that did not personally interest me. They taught me how to understand the needs and wants of other people and their expectations of me. Where will the jobs come from? Obviously, once again, the Tea Party seems not to care, or they would vote in favor of raising the minimum-wage. There is an extraordinary amount of work to be done in the United States, repairing the collapsing physical infrastructure of streets, bridges, highways. This work does not require a high school education. It requires a living wage. In the best of all possible worlds, of course, the federal government could help fund this immense project or any other project they wished to finance, including the building of day-care centers so the parents can go to work without worry.
To say that the richest nation in the history of the world cannot afford this is ludicrous. We must guarantee full employment for all, even at the risk of fueling inflation. Jobs are everything. A job for one man could take four people off the dole, jobs would take more pistols out of the hands of young men than another hundred thousand police. Any sensible citizen knows that the Underclass is a greater threat to our national security than the terrorists or any other foreign threat. They aren't presiding over the starvation of American infants whose families can no long afford feed or house them.
There is very little now that whites alone can do in a direct way for the maimed and hurting citizens of the Underclass. They need black leaders more than they need white pity. Or only white social workers. Or only white cops. Or white Tea Party lunatics who do absolutely nothing in the defense of the Underclass, white or black. They need someone to love them. Soon. If blacks and whites in powerful positions do not go to the defense of the penniless, do not go after the loathsome bigots of the Tea Party and drive them out of office, neither will anyone else. And they will surely be doomed.
So, in a different way, will all of us.
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