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Jewish World Review June 20, 2011 / 18 Sivan, 5771 One Man's Conversation About Race By Arnold Ahlert
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
When one weaves together two seemingly unrelated stories in the news last week, one outcome is almost inevitable. First, the stories: in Jersey City, six children, all under the age of 14, were running naked through the streets, until they were rescued by two teenage girls. The second story involves a Fox News report that "flash mob" robberies are on the rise. No doubt some of you can guess where this is leading, but let's go through the exercise regardless.
Last Tuesday, in Jersey City, Nilaja Wyatt, 17, and her friend, Aaliyah Glover, 16, brought the rescued children to Glover's apartment, which is underneath the one where the children live. Wyatt decided to get involved when she observed one of the children nearly getting hit by oncoming cars several times, and was told by Glover that one of those cars had been driven by Glover's mother. "They were running up and down the road no clothes on," Wyatt told MyFoxNY.
Afterward the two teenage girls broke into the children's apartment upstairs where they found yet another child, a 2-year-old, who had been left alone. "He was crying," said Wyatt. "He had a snotty nose, everything, crying standing by the door." The teens decided to bathe and feed the kids while they waited for their mother to come home. At that point they noticed there was no food in the house. "They were hungry," Glover said. "We asked them did they eat, he said (sic) he didn't eat in two days." She told The Jersey Journal something else as well. "They didn't know how to eat with forks," she added.
When the mother, Francine Davis, 40, didn't come home, the teens eventually called the police. Witnesses told WABC that Davis, out with a boyfriend, eventually returned to the apartment Wednesday at 4 a.m. Later in the day she turned herself into the police. Davis, who reportedly had nothing to say about the incident, remains in jail on a $50,000 bond and faces child endangerment charges. The kids are in foster care. Police Chief Tom Comey reported that the children had been left in the care of the oldest sibling, who was 14 yet that child is autisic and unable to care for her siblings. "You left your children in the care of somebody who wasn't emotionally or mentally capable," said Comey. "What can you say? There's nothing you can say that can ease that."
Sure there is unless one wants to remain Chief of Police in the age of political correctness. Political correctness is the concept which illuminates the flash mob story as well, as tying it to the one above. Why? Because there is one common thread in the flash mob story, that is the same common thread which was also omitted in every report of mob violence that occurred over Memorial Day weekend in Charlotte, Rochester, Nashville, Miami, Myrtle Beach and Boston, as well as previous flash mob stories regarding attacks against people in Chicago on the streets and on public buses.
All of these mobs were black youths, as were the children and mother, as well as the heroic teenage girls in the above story and most of the media refused to mention it.
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Assuming Francine Davis and her six fatherless children remained under the radar, it doesn't take much of an imagination to conclude that, as some of them grow up, joining a pack of Facebook-organized teens intent on doing as they please, absent any moral constraints, is hardly a bridge too far. Something will inevitably fill the vacuum left by their mother, which if the two teenage rescuers are accurate, has left these kids with a void so large, that even the use of utensils or any kind of regular eating habits cannot be assumed.
Yet it is precisely this void which seems to elude so many people, including the so-called "experts" for whom poverty per se remains the disease, as opposed to a symptom of something much more profound: an entirely different way of thinking in which, for example, leaving an autistic child in charge of five siblings in a house with no food, somehow seems reasonable.
Why? Because for anyone on either side of the color line to brand such behavior as unreasonable is to ask for the kind of trouble most people wish to avoid. To point out that the kind of thuggery which precipitates the behavior that took place over Memorial Day weekend, as well as that which engenders flash mobs is not only tolerated, but glorified in the inner-city black community, is apex of political incorrectness. To note that a bone-headed, reflexive macho-ism, coupled with penchant for using guns to settle even the most minor disputes, has become almost routine, is to be immediately dismissed as "racist" by those for whom the wholesale destruction of the black American nuclear family is seen as little more than an "alternative family lifestyle." To note that story A is an incubator for story B is "blaming the victim."
That's exactly what Daniel Patrick Moynihan was accused of when he predicted that America would pay profound consequences for "defining deviancy down," specifically citing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program as the prime culprit in 1966. Before the advent of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, AFDC had been reserved for widows, as a means of funding once-married women who had lost the primary male supporter of the family. In the 1960s, president Johnson and Congress changed the qualifications: any household where there was no male family head present became eligible for taxpayer subsidies.
Moynihan knew exactly where such "compassion" would lead: "From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles," he wrote, "there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder…are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved."
And now such chaos is not only tolerated, it has its enablers. It is enabled by the entertainment industry which promotes gangsterism, a Democratic party for whom black "victims" equals reliable voters, and far too many black Americans themselves, who ostracize their own brethren for straying off the progressive, big-government plantation. It is enabled by politicians like Mayor Mike Bloomberg, in the typically clueless fashion that has become his trademark, when he blamed the availability of guns for a shooting in Brighton Beach last week where a 16 girl was killed by someone "aiming" a gun at a crowd. Someone whose reasons for pulling the trigger will not make sense to outsiders, but will be very much in tune with the inner-city worldview where "respect," aka street-cred, is earned for being able to "out-thug" everyone else. It is enabled by guilty white progressives who believe personal responsibility is too much to expect from the "benighted classes," along with black racial hucksters who egg the guilty on for personal aggrandizement and financial gain.
The result? The perfect storm of social dystopia continues unabated.
Americans on both sides of the color line genuinely interested in a color-blind society, the people who believe in Martin Luther King's idea that "content of character" trumps "color of skin," have been cowed into silence for far too long. This column is written with the intent of cutting through much of the political correctness that invariably accompanies any so-called national conversation regarding race, one that automatically brands anyone a racist for stating out loud what too many people prefer to whisper about.
But it is not racist to point out the glaringly obvious. And it is glaringly obvious that until the self-perpetuated destruction of the black family, with all of its attendant pathologies is confronted, it cannot be changed. It is glaringly obvious that a progressive ideology which has institutionalized inequality in the form of racial quotas and lower standards for "people of color" as a means of proving how much it "cares," is an insidious perpetration of soft-core bigotry. It is glaringly obvious that people on both sides of the color line have been burdened with such unnecessary baggage long enough.
All Americans should be proud of what Nilaja Wyatt and Aaliyah Glover did, even as they ought to be equally distressed with the behavior of Francine Davis. Yet the unanswered question remains: in inner-city black America, who is the exception and who is the rule?
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© 2011, Arnold Ahlert |
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