Posted on 04/14/2014 12:19:40 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
WHEN I WAS young, public service television commercials were not uncommon. One of the more famous ones featured an American Indian looking at a polluted landscape. At the commercial's close, there was a tear in his eye. Less iconic was a commercial about fair housing.
A superintendent is showing a substandard apartment — it needs a lot of work. If I recall, he shows the bathroom and how getting a nickel washer from the hardware store would fix the plumbing. The commercial's goal was to educate people of color that there were laws protecting them against housing discrimination.
I was nearly 7 years old when the Civil Rights Act became law in 1964. Growing up on Long Island, my neighbors looked just like me. I lived in a working-class subdivision in western Suffolk County. The houses and families were nearly identical. White couples. Lots of children. Maybe the occasional above-ground pool from Harrow's.
The struggle for racial equality was background noise to a little boy. While cities burned and John Lindsay walked the troubled streets of New York City, my hometown was much like any other suburb in America.
It wasn't until I was in my 20s that I learned that Levittown, the model for the mass distribution of GI vets and their families into the suburban landscape, was originally a restricted community. The idea that racial discrimination could have been written into the covenants of a tract-housing project not even an hour's drive from Manhattan disturbs me still.
Looking back, Long Island was always a very segregated place — maybe not by law, but by economics, and I expect years back, subtle red-lining. As bad as things may be today, they aren't like that.
President Obama traveled to Austin, Texas, last week to deliver a speech at the LBJ Presidential Library. President Lyndon B. Johnson has a mixed legacy as the man who assumed the presidency after the world stopped on a November day in Dallas, the man who pushed our nation full-speed-ahead into Vietnam and the president who delivered by sheer force of personality the Civil Rights Act, and later the other pieces of legislation that formed The Great Society.
Obama was marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. The significance of America's first black president speaking 50 years after the passage of such extraordinary legislation is important to note. America has come far these 50 years. In many ways, our society has become more colorblind. Interracial marriage is no longer illegal in any state. Progress has been made in lessening the education gap between white and black. But a gap still exists.
And while persons of color do not have to deal with poll taxes or the likelihood of being ousted in the night by men in hoods, new forms of not-so-subtle discrimination have gained favor in some parts of the nation. Under the guise of fighting voting fraud, some states are trying to make it harder for low-income people, poorly educated people and seniors who are both poor and non-white to register to vote.
I'm not a fan of Big Government, but I am a believer in Big Democracy, and the only way to ensure that everyone is treated equally is by the passage of legislation that forces that, not by waiting for the goodness that might lie dormant in all people to awaken in the hearts of each and every American. People who talk about communities always doing the right thing by their neighbors without the added push of government intervention are people who have never been denied service in a restaurant because of their color or ignored in a store because of their color or profiled because they were the black in an all-white setting.
Such things can still happen. If Trayvon Martin had been a white youth wearing a hoodie in a residential Florida neighborhood, he most surely would have been a household name only to his family and friends and not the face of a national tragedy.
The Civil Right Acts of 1964 could only have been pushed through Congress by a Southerner. And by a Southerner who was a consummate politician, unafraid of anyone or anything, and with a personality as large as his home state of Texas. There is no one like that in American politics today.
Obama's signature health care reform is not as radical as the Civil Rights Act was in its day, but it is vilified as an extension of The Great Society. The dark side of the Tea Party movement is a belief that federal social programs are antithetical to the Founding Fathers' goals.
The Founding Fathers lived in a world where even the rich people went to the bathroom in a porcelain pot. The social challenges of modern America require modern solutions. The Great Society is about choices — not just the choices of where to live and go to school or whom to marry, but about what things are non-negotiable for a nation founded on the precept that all men are created equal.
Fifty years after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, there is a movement afoot in America to rip apart the safety net constructed thread-by-thread by Johnson. I think back to the old commercial about polluted rivers and streams and I see a new commercial: I see people lining up at polling places denied the right to register to vote, I see roadblocks toward higher education, I see seniors and working moms unable to pay for basic food at a grocery store because they have no government assistance. And I see not an American Indian towering on the screen. I see Lyndon Johnson, a complex and not-always-heroic leader, holding in his hands copies of the legislation that created The Great Society. A single tear streams down his face.
This is kinda funny. The GS was a complete and utter failure.
>>Would you lump veteran’s benefits into that rule?<<
Veteran’s benefits were EARNED. By those who CONTRIBUTED TO the nation (in ways vastly beyond those of us who just pay taxes and walk the straight and narrow).
In no possible way, shape or form are Veterans’ benefits “welfare.”
Iron Eyes Cod, the iconic “Indian” from the PSAs was born Espera Oscar de Corti on April 3, 1904, in Kaplan Vermilion Parish, in southwestern Louisiana, a second son of Antonio de Corti and his wife, Francesca Salpietra, immigrants from Sicily.
Corti like most of Alfred P. Doblin’s column,was fraudulent.
Cody. CODY. Damnnit don’t drop your Ys
God forbid that a black person be expected to buy and install his own nickel washer.
That would be racist.
Perhaps. I am not one of them.
“Obama’s signature health care reform is not as radical as the Civil Rights Act was in its day, “
Yet, in order to receive a policy under Obamacare, one must present a valid ID! Must be a racist law afterall...
Morons....
“I see seniors and working moms unable to pay for basic food at a grocery store because they have no government assistance.”
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Maybe if most of these Mom’s got married and then had kids they wouldn’t have to struggle. No sympathy from me.
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Or if the tax rates weren’t so high to pay for the free loaders, the working folks would be able to afford to pay for their own basic needs.
The author is a moron....(not you.)
Where’s the barf alert?
I thought the Civil Rights Act was all about making sure black Americans could not be forced to use separate washrooms and water fountains. Or chased away from the lunch counter. Or made to sit in the back of the bus. Or denied their right to vote so long as they were not a felon.
The obvious on war on poverty is to stop subsidizing it.
The war on drugs I’m afraid isn’t that simple. Back in the days when people had more self control you wouldn’t need to regulate such things. These days we can agree that the war on drugs is a failure, but to declare defeat and capitulate isn’t such a great alternative either.
I don’t have any answers on what to do, because none of the answers are any good.
I hear North Korea is a lovely place. Everyone is equal. Everything is provided for by great leader. No one is fat, except dear leader. And a ruthlessly efficient national government forces everyone is treated equally
The over-the-top fantasy that he concocts in this editorial is not surprising. Just take it as a lesson of what type of liberal zealots and fools run newspaper editorial boards.
Half a century of wasted tax payer money and failed programs that filled the pockets of those who planned it
”Liberals” love to use “society” as a euphemism for government. When Johnson boasted of his ability to produce as “great society,” he has actually promising a great government.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think low and no information citizens SHOULD be voting. If you don’t understand the basics of government, law, and politics, why should you have a say ?
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