Rambling Perspectives

As I write this, it is 4:30AM and I have an unsettling bout of insomnia.  After a battle with the state unemployment office yesterday on my mother's behalf, I am still wound up tighter than the girdle on a Pentecostal preacher's wife at an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast, and a lot of things - many things - have been weighing on my mind the past 24 hours or so.  So, as writing is my therapy, I thought this would be a good time to "sound things out."

My mother is a 67-year-old Vietnam veteran and as of the past several months she has been out of work for health reasons.  To be totally honest, her situation has looked pretty dismal.  I have been really hitting on this whole thing about how some sectors of the population are obsessed with entitlement - they think because of their race, for instance, they are "entitled" to a lot of things.  This has caused me to be very vocal about some issues, and some of what I may have said yesterday could be misinterpreted as something it is not.  Let me say this right up-front - God created all human beings, regardless of race, etc., in his image, and all human beings regardless of physical factors have rights to basic liberties and such.  And, every race has its good and bad people, as human nature is prone to sinful behavior regardless.  The problem lies with when one race or group of people, who may have suffered some injustice in the past, decides to reciprocate the injustices on others.  With the election of the present administration in Washington, DC, we have seen such a setback in race relations over that very thing, and recently my mother experienced that first-hand.  However, to give you an idea of the gravity of this situation, I want to share a story from a few years back in the Saint Petersburg Times that I saved just for an occasion to discuss it like this.

Cathy Salustri was a 34-year-old White lady who in 2005 bought an affordable house in Bartlett Park, a predominantly Black area of Saint Petersburg.  Although even some of her Black friends told her this was not a good idea, she went ahead with it anyway.  Salustri, a New York native, had grown up in a multi-ethnic community and racism was not something that really was an issue.  Then, she moved to Bartlett Park.  In December 2005, things from her porch and yard started "walking off," and after a Black suspect jacked a scooter from her house and was apprehended doing it.  When she went to court, the guy who stole the scooter was brought up on drug charges, and apparently showed no remorse as he waved and smiled at his buddies - most of whom were Black also - and seemed to be having a good time despite the fact he was being tried for some serious offenses.  That really hit Ms. Salustri hard, and it colored her perception of Blacks since.  Was Cathy Salustri a racist for thinking that way?  I really don't think so, and here is why.  First, Salustri struggled with it - she didn't want to feel like that.  Second, deep down I really believe she understood that not all Blacks behaved like that, and that image of the lowlife, nonrepentant Black criminal is just as disgraceful for millions of decent hard-working Blacks as it was for Salustri.   Cathy Salustri, I believe, is actually a decent person who almost feels powerless to take action on crimes committed against her property - mostly by Blacks unfortunately - because she fears being labeled a "racist," and that has to change.  This poor girl finally just couldn't stand it anymore, and she put her house up for sale.  I have to be sympathetic to how she feels, because recently something similar happened to us.

One afternoon a couple of months back, I was taking a shower after working on a large project I was doing at home.  As I was drying off, I hear this knock at the front door, but am not yet decent to do anything about it, so I look out the peephole in our door.  As I do so, some Black woman in a brown dress and floppy white hat reaches up, snatches a windchime off our porch, and then walks off with it!  I was a little upset by that.  In the neighborhood we live in here, all of our neighbors are White, and many of them are middle-class people who keep to themselves.  However, there is a predominantly Black area about 3 blocks south of our house, and my guess is that this is where the thief came from.  Mind you, this was around 6 in the evening, and it was still light out, so she did that little stunt in broad daylight!  Regrettably, the "n" word sort of rushed through my mind as I thought about this woman, and I have had to repent of that a lot since.  Much like Cathy Salustri, I grew up in an area where racism and such was not really common - my small West Virginia town I grew up in didn't have a lot of Blacks, and to be honest the issue never came up.  And, even if Black people moved to town, after the people got to know them they were generally integrated into the life of the community and became part of us anyway.  And, the Blacks I did know as a kid were by no means criminals, and one of them even became my best friend in school, a guy by the name of Abdul.  However, upon moving to Florida to attend college, I was exposed to some things that, well, didn't sit well with me.  I have tried to rise above it over the years, but there has been a lot of nonsense going on, as this whole entitlement mentality often grips some of these people and they think their skin color is justification for obnoxious and criminal behavior, and they use it to manipulate the system and they make themselves very unpleasant people to be around.  I want to revisit that shortly, but wanted to first share another story related to this which involved my mother recently.

I mentioned that my mother is 67 years old and is a veteran of Vietnam, and for a number of years she has worked as a CNA for several local nursing homes here.  Recently, she had to leave her job due to health reasons, and when she did she took a massive financial hit that has left her struggling.  So, she decided to apply for unemployment benefits here at what is called a local "one-stop center."  Like many of the bureaucratic clusters people call "government agencies," this is no different - surly employees treat the applicants often with indifference and contempt, and the time one has to waste waiting to do business in one of those offices is just ridiculous.  At any rate, Mom had to do some of her application process on the computers, which are a complimentary service offered by the state unemployment program to help people find jobs, file paperwork, etc.  They are actually a valuable asset - that is, if you are computer literate!  My mother though has never hardly used a computer in her life, and of course she needed help.  So, she asks this Black administrator for assistance, which is what the guy is paid to do, as he is, as a county employee, rendering a public service.  The employee, a fat guy, was more interested in staring at the cleavage of a Black patron that he totally ignored Mom, who by this time had a short fuse.  She finally said, "Look, I need some help!" at which time our portly Black friend throws a sheet of paper in front of her and says "Read this!"   Mom was understandably frustrated, and she vented later about it to us, referring to that employee utilizing frequent use of the "n" word.  My mother does tend to exaggerate some, so quite honestly I took what she said with a grain of salt until we had to go down there yesterday because again, the unemployment office screwed up Mom's benefits and she had to run around like a chicken with her head cut off to fax this and verify that - you wonder why we have a huge deficit of trillions of bucks, right??  Any rate, that Black employee was there, and he was indeed out there flirting with Black patrons in the lobby while a line of exasperated people were waiting to get some help.  It is bad enough when you have to go into one of those offices to wait, and wait, and wait, only to be treated rudely like a number by some crass government employee, and then this.   Which now leads to some observations I want to make.

Again, I want to reiterate that the bad behavior examples I have talked about in no ways should be used to stereotype all Blacks - many Blacks are good, decent, hardworking people who mind their own business and provide for their families, and they deserve respect for the good work they do.  Also, there have been many great Black statesmen - Alan Keyes, Herman Cain, Colin Powell, etc. - who have made an uncompromising stand for traditional values and are fellow soldiers-in-arms with those of us who have similar convictions.  Also, there are many stellar Black role models - Bill Cosby comes to mind, as he is not only a talented actor but also the type of individual you'd want as a neighbor.  The problem is that you have a significant and very vocal element of the Black population that thinks they "deserve" special entitlements because of the virtue of skin color, and they use this to justify a lot of bad behavior in many cases. These individuals diminish perceptions of Blacks by others, and often a lot of good, decent Blacks have to pay the price for those idiots and their behavior.  However, what is worse is that this mentality is reinforced by a group of self-appointed leaders that have accurately been coined "plantation pimps" - people such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, James Cone, Jeremiah Wright, and others like them - who, cloaked often in the sacred title of "reverend," exploit religion to shake-down the masses with impositional guilt.  And, that is another thing - I get so sick of some segments of the Black population using religion as a means of manipulating and screwing-over other Blacks by preying on their spirituality, and in that case I would say some regulation would be good to close down some of the jackleg "churches" one often finds in Black communities.  However, that mentality is actually a more sinister invention of an evil system, which although it exploits the "race card," is actually more racist because it reinforces bad behavior.  Let's give a little background on that one.

I have come to understand over the years that an awful lot of historical revisionism has been shoved down the throats of many American schoolchildren from kindergarten to grad school, and as I grow older and more informed, I have had to re-evaluate a lot of the stuff I was taught as a kid.  Take for instance the Civil War.  If you look at your typical garden variety high school history book, it is going to tell you that slavery was the focal issue of the Civil War, and much of the American public still buys that version.   However, the more I look into it, I see a bigger issue.  When the Industrial Revolution happened at the end of the 18th century, it made a lot of greedy individuals (the Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, etc.) extremely rich, and these greedy individuals worshipped at the altar of the Almighty Buck.  As they gained wealth, they also gained a lot of unwarranted influence over government officials, who likewise were often bankrolled by these same greedy people to advance their agendas even at the expense of the precious endowment of the citizen vote.  These greedy individuals became Corporate America, and they ironically enough were largely centered on the great population centers of the Northeast.   However, these Yankee "robber barons" wanted to expand their territory and fatten their coffers, and the slave trade back then was an area they wanted to invest in.  However by the early 1800's, many Southern states began to outlaw the business end of importing and selling slaves, and this created an issue for the "robber barons" and their government stooges, who wanted to also enrich their coffers with unjustified taxation.  So, when the South began to say that it could survive on its own without the Federal establishment, and that it wanted to regulate its own revenue, a group of rich New Englanders (many of them more racist than anything!) wanted a piece of the action of the cotton industry, and their flunkies in Washington (in particular "Honest Abe") were more than willing to oblige.  So, the "plight" of the slaves, and their ordered emancipation, was used as an excuse to keep Federal control over the South to get those cotton dollars. 

Were the corporate "robber barons" as well as "Honest Abe" and his kind in DC really interested in freeing Black slaves?   If one studies the evidence, that was the furthest thing from their mind, and to be honest, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were more compassionate of Blacks than were Grant and Sherman.  Lee freed his slaves long before the war started, but some Union generals wanted to use them for cheap labor in the factories so their corporate bosses could get richer up there.  I am about to advance something I have been saying for a long time, and it is controversial.  I really feel that if the Feds would have kept their nose out of things, and corporate greed would have been kept in check, in time the South would have had a very peaceful emancipation of its own slaves similar to what Wilberforce did in England some years earlier.  You notice that the UK has never had the level of racial tension we have had in the US, haven't you?   If certain powers-that-be would have stayed out of the picture, I think today things would be a lot different than what they are now.   Therefore, I think instead of people bullying and villifying Southerners on this issue, they need to point fingers at the real culprits - they lived on Wall Street, Boston, and Washington!  I have much more I could say on this one, but sufficive to say many Blacks are in a sense victims - they are victims not of Southern attitudes, but rather of Federal and corporate/industrial manipulation.  Even today, bad behavior is often encouraged rather than addressed, and in particular the abortion industry - you do realize that Planned Parenthood was the brainchild of a eugenics-driven racist tart by the name of Margaret Sanger, who wanted to exterminate the Black race in this country through abortion.  And, in doing so, it seems that Blacks were repressed, suppressed, and oppressed not by Southern farmers, but by Northern business interests; if you encourage bad behavior among Blacks, it will make aborting them more popular.  And, that mentality has carried over to today - more young Blacks are in prison, more Black girls are sexually active at an early age, and these behaviors are exploited by corporate-bankrolled crap being churned out in "rap" records and bad movies.  And, many Blacks have bought into it themselves, perpetuating that image as an ideal of "Blackness," and therefore further alienating their White and Hispanic neighbors.  Does this all sound like a conspiracy theory?  Maybe, but take a look at it for yourselves. 

I have soapboxed on this enough this morning, and there is so much more that could be said about it too, as it is a subject that needs to be addressed and the truth about a lot of nonsense we have been told needs to be revealed.  And, to our Black friends, I need you to remember something - the next time a White person is treated badly by one of your own and utters the "n" word under duress from the experience, don't dismiss that person as a "racist."   Rather, maybe you need to understand that the White party in the situation may have no problem with Blacks and doesn't desire to suppress their rights - it just isn't fair for Blacks to discriminate against Whites either, and Blacks should know better.  Racism is racism, and just because you're Black doesn't justify it, nor does it justify a White person being racist either; both are equally wrong.  Hopefully, that is some food for thought today.