Perish the thought, sir
Posted on 09/14/2005 1:58:45 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
This article is a perfect example of not being able to defend the indefensible. Not that that stops them. They just resort to feeble attempts of smearing others who've done nothing but point out the obvious, which they don't even try to defend.
Perish the thought, sir
I only heard Rush and he criticized the trillions spent on the war against poverty - the failed welfare state. That hits Democrats squarely between the eyes. They've nurtured the welfare mindset, lifestyle and voting block.
Hey! I used to be one of those! Working for crappy wages, trying to get through school on the GI Bill...
Of course, the "working" part tends to get you out of that category after awhile.
And let's be honest, race was the card played libs.
You say that's not enough to make up for Katrina, slavery and the lack of Colt .45 they've had to endure? Ok, as the ultimate gift, well give then Oregon!
Yes, these commentators are exposing Democrat policy failures.
It's damn hard to miss.
Deggans is upset because it's so politically incorrect to speak of these things!
Is is mind in a vice?
Oh yes let's play the race card. Earth to Eric, it has nothing to do with race, it has everything to do with attitude, you know, "content of character."
And I'd like to know why so many of these people are diabetic.
Why aren't questions like that being asked.
Hey, NO morons!! You live below sea level! Your city is run by idiot named Nagin who has the IQ watts of a night-light! Your state is run by a woman I wouldn't hire to sweep out a McDonalds! You were living in filth, sin, poverty, welfare, illegitimate births, illiteracy, crime, murder, rape, crooked police and politicians before the hurricane. Nothing has changed except now you have to shovel a lot of mud!! Ever think about leaving this hell-hole?
Well, it looks like a lot of people displaced by Katrina aren't looking back. They've been given opportunities and care by strangers saddened by their plight and who hold out hope for their futures. That's something the Democratic Party couldn't do with decades of hand-outs.
They've been given a chance at living.
I thought cruise ships had already been rejected
They have fathers........... but they didn't bother to stick around and do THE RIGHT THING!
Well said!!
The Sunday Times - World
September 11, 2005
Focus: White do-gooders did for black America
Black poverty is the result of 30 years of misguided welfare rather than racism, says John McWhorter
As it quickly became clear that there was a certain demographic skew among the people stranded in New Orleans, journalists began intoning that Hurricane Katrina had stripped bare the continuing racial inequity in America.
The extent to which this was hidden is unclear, actually. An awareness that a tragic disproportion of black Americans are poor has been a hallmark of civic awareness among educated Americans for 40 years now.
The problem is less a lack of awareness than a lack of understanding. The publicly sanctioned take is that “white supremacy” is why 80% of New Orleans’s poor people are black. The civics lesson, we are to think, is that the civil rights revolution left a job undone in an America still hostile to black advancement.
In fact, white America does remain morally culpable — but because white leftists in the late 1960s, in the name of enlightenment and benevolence, encouraged the worst in human nature among blacks and even fostered it in legislation. The hordes of poor blacks stuck in the Superdome last week wound up there not because the White Man barred them from doing better, but because certain tragically influential White Men destroyed the fragile but lasting survival skills poor black communities had maintained since the end of slavery.
Few thinking people regret the flower children’s opposition to the Vietnam war, sexism and racial discrimination. But these advances also spelt the demise of old standards of responsibility. Taught that criminality and violence must be judged in proportion to the extent to which poverty and discrimination have coloured one’s existence, the enlightened white person saw black violence as “understandable”.
This meant a largely theatrical black separatist ideology, drastically short on constructive aims, had a public sanction that it had never had before. Hating whitey for its own sake now had an ear among the influential and quickly became the word on the street.
There was a new sense that the disadvantages of being black gave one a pass on civility — or even achievement: this was when black teens started teasing black nerds for “acting white”.
Behaviour that most of a black community would have condemned as counterproductive started to seem normal. Through the late 1960s blacks burnt down their own neighbourhoods as gestures of being “fed up”. But blacks had been “fed up” for centuries: why were these the first riots initiated by blacks rather than white thugs — when the economy was flush and employment opportunities were opening up as never before? Because the culture had changed, in ways that hindered too many blacks from taking advantage of the civil rights revolution. Meanwhile, the most grievous result of the new consensus was black American history’s most under-reported event, the expansion of welfare. Until now, welfare had been a pittance intended for widows, unavailable as long as the father of one’s children was able-bodied and accounted for, and granted for as little time as possible.
In 1966, however, a group of white academics in New York developed a plan to bring as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible. Across the country, poor blacks especially were taught to apply for living on the dole even when they had been working for a living, and by 1970 there were 169% more people on welfare nationwide than in 1960.
This was the first time that whites or blacks had taught black people not to work as a form of civil rights. Politicians and bureaucrats jumped on the new opportunity for political patronage and votes, and welfare quickly became a programme that essentially paid young women to have children.
Only in 1996 was welfare limited to five years and focused on training for work. But by then generations of poor blacks had grown up in neighbourhoods where there was no requirement that fathers support their children. Few grew up watching their primary parent work for a living. Most people paid nominal subsidies as rent and were thus less inclined to treat their living spaces well.
The multigenerational welfare family with grandmothers in their forties became typical: young women had babies in their teens because there was no reason not to with welfare waiting to pick up the tab.
This is the hell that most of the people in the Superdome either lived in or knew at close hand, and none of them could help being stamped by it. Welfare reform was only nine years ago. The women now past the five-year cap are mostly struggling in dead-end jobs. This is better than living on the dole. But these women are weighed down by too many kids created under the old regime to have the time or energy to get the education to get beyond where they are. Poor black neighbourhoods are not what they were at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, but they are still a crying shame.
The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50 have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.
What Katrina stripped bare, then, was not white supremacy, but that culture matters — even if what created the culture was misguided white benevolence. Social scientists neglect that before the 1960s poor blacks knew plenty of economic downturns and plenty more racism.
Those who don't stick around aren't really fathers - just sperm donors and there is no shortage of those!
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