Replies

It occurred to me that I have a history of being odd-man-out, not in sync with the thinking of my family and friends.

When I was in junior high school, my dad acknowledged my artistic talent and encouraged me to pursue a career in that field. Dad said, “You could be a great black artist someday.” While I appreciated Dad's support, I thought, “ Why can't I simply be a great artist? Why must my success be limited to the black world?”
Admittedly, I probably misinterpreted the meaning of Dad's statement. The reason is because my family and friends appeared to view the world through a narrow black lens, limiting blacks to certain tastes and behaviors. I was criticized and looked at suspect for enjoying music beyond R&B, black Gospel and Jazz. I have always dealt with people as individuals. Thus, I was criticized for having “too many white friends”. Early on, I viewed the world as my oyster, eager to explore life beyond the American “black experience”.
Though they love me, family and friends have been furious with me on numerous occasions over the years for not participating in their group think or indulging in unauthorized black behavior.
Rejecting Barack Obama is my latest offense. Not only did I reject the first black president, family and friends found it incomprehensible that I chaired a PAC against him.

So, why have I never quite fit in with my family and friends? Why have I suffered their rebuke all these years?

Well, possibly because you are aware — among many other things, as a republican citizen of our constitutional republic — of the history of this nation, and they are not.

Especially those aspects of it which have particularly affected Black Americans, the most important of which was the institution of chattel slavery.

On a historical note, human chattel slavery is as old as mankind. Islam continues to defend it to this day. It has always been an "'equal opportunity' condition," in that it was not confined to "people of color." In the historical past, slaves were almost always "spoils to the victor" culled from the losing side of wars.

Jeepers, the Barbary Pirates were raiding American shipping in the Mediterranean in the early eighteenth century, seizing American (mostly white) crews and selling them into slavery....

The federal government finally had to act. Which is why we have that line in the Marine Corps hymn, "...to the shores of Tripoli...."

Slavery is not specifically a "Black disease"; but today, American Blacks seem to want to "own it" all for their themselves.... Which, as the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton undeniably know, turns out to be a really good pretext for the flourishing of a culture of resentment, hatred, and indignation, a culture which demands "reparation" of past sins (committed by White people, even though — believe it or not — there were at least a few Black slaveowners back in the day; and they were not enslaving Whites or Indians. Go figure!)

I gather your family and friends have never heard of Frederick Douglass, to me one of the truly great American thinkers of all time.

For Douglass, the defense of human liberty was a fierce passion. He was incensed down to the ground by the Constitution's "three-quarters-of-a-person" language. But then, evidently he noticed that this language was in glaring contradiction to the Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are created equal.

Which instantly tells us that any reference to a man in terms of "three-quarters-of-a-person" is logically unfounded and totally bogus. It seems Douglass felt confident that this contradiction would necessarily be resolved in the future, not just on spiritual grounds, but also on rational grounds.

And he was right.

But something your family and friends seem also not to know is that, when the time came, it was the not the Democrat, but the Republican Party that stood up to redress the sheer injustice of slavery, and the bogus "three-quarters-of-a-person" language.

Over and against the screams and cries of the Democrat party, they passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution — which respectively abolished slavery; gave "equal protection" of the laws to Black Americans; and guaranteed their full right to vote as "100% persons."

For 100 years thereafter, the Democrat response to this magnificent (and long overdue) development was a "separate but 'equal'" doctrine" enforced by (unconstitutional) Jim Crow laws.

In short, it took a hundred years before the equal rights of Black Americans were constitutionally enforceable; and another hundred years before they were actually enforced — all thanks to Democrat obstructionism.

So, the burning question for me is: Why on earth do your family and friends find any "friend" in the Democrat party?

The Civil Rights laws of the '60s were acts of perfect cynicism on LBJ's part: He finally figured it out that "niggers" had the vote; so they might as well be Democrat voters. In short: They could be "bought."

Hence the Great Society — which manages to do no good for its beneficiaries, while bankrupting the rest of us.

Plus do your family and friends actually agree with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s sublimely truthful observation: That what matters is not the color of your skin, but the content of your character???

Jeepers, Lloyd Marcus, clearly YOU "get this."

So why do your family and friends find this so difficult to understand?

If I were a cynic, perhaps I'd say they actually prefer the condition of slavery to life as truly free men.

That is, they prefer the Democrat "Massah" to take care of them, and Democrat "plantation life" over the life of free citizens.

WHY??? Do they think so little of themselves and their abilities that they need someone to "take care of them?"

If this is so, then: whatta waste of human beings!!!

Thank you Lloyd Marcus for your absolutely outstanding essay/post!