Comments
by Scoper...
Fanning the Flames
It's easy to hate someone who owes
you money. It's easier still to hate someone who did you wrong and won't
pay you compensation. Easiest of all to hate someone whom you believe hated
you from the beginning. But hatred can fade over time, when people make
a conscious effort to realize that it's about the most unproductive emotion
there is. Even race hatred fades through the years, but watch out! A brand
new aspect of it might be about to rear its ugly head.
It's the idea that white Americans
owe black Americans money as reparations for the slave era. How much money?
Try 4 trillion dollars. That's how much a coalition of African-Americans
is claiming as a debt. But that's just peanuts. A coalition of African
nations wants 777 trillion dollars from several nations, including the
U.S. Basically, they want the deed to all the countries with a white majority.
If you're thinking only the "lunatic
fringe" would support such a thing, think again. Start with Rep. John Conyers,
D-Mich. He's already introduced a bill that would set up a commission to
look into whether there needs to be some sort of government-mandated "payback."
The Chicago city council recently voted overwhelmingly in favor of a reparations
resolution. It probably wouldn't be binding, but it's where their heads
are. The concept is wriggling its way into mainstream politics.
Most people smart enough to know
how to log on to the Internet know that chattel slavery ended in the United
States in 1865. (Not with the Emancipation Proclamation, which was essentially
toothless, but with the Union victory over the Confederacy, which wasn't.)
No one is alive who endured slavery, nor is anyone alive who kept blacks
in bondage. It's been that way for decades.
So who deserves to be paid? And who
deserves to pay? All blacks, by all whites, apparently. Those at the forefront
of this movement are of the mind that any injustice any black has suffered
at any time must have been dealt by the whip-holding hand of Whitey. But
what of the vast majority of whites who never owned slaves? (Even in the
antebellum South, only about one in five did.)
This can't be compared with post-war
reparations to the Japanese and Jews in Germany. Those moneys were paid
to the actual victims during their lifetimes. Some things do have a shelf
life. Yes, there was institutionalized racism (the "Jim Crow,) but how
do you calculate the cost of name-calling and dirty looks? The math on
that must be pretty special.
But even leaving the numbers out
of it, the very idea is a racial powder-keg, which could cause all the
civil rights progress of the past 35 years to blow up in everyone's face.
Why? Because it's at least as racist as the history it seeks to address.
If you define racial-discrimination as treating people differently because
of the color of their skin, then what would you call "reparations?" White
liberal guilt might be rampant today, but this is just picking a fight.
Ah, but that may be the point! Overall,
race relations in the U.S. are so much better now than they were even 30
years ago, that there's actually a shortage of race-based issues to rail
against. This is political oblivion for some black "leaders" who depend
on conflict to fuel their power base. As time passes and people of all
colors get along better, the Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and NAACP upper
echelon see themselves as being rendered irrelevant.
This is why a confederate battle
flag flying from the South Carolina Statehouse dome didn't draw any attention
until last year, even though it had been there since 1961. Ironically,
when the controversy exploded nationally, it was fashionable to denounce
everyone who spoke in support of the flag as a bunch of slack-jawed rednecks,
so dumb they're still fighting the Civil War.
As this "slavery reparations" question
gains momentum, you might ask yourself this question: Who's really
still fighting the Civil War?
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