Put another way, could Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton travel to Lancaster County Pennsylvania and energize an audience of Amish as he has done in Ferguson Missouri and elsewhere? The difference is not in the content of the speech nor in the man, the difference is in the culture of the audience.
These are not top down matters but questions of culture. American colonials at the time of the Boston massacre were temperamentally enraged at his Majesty's occupation troops in Boston, but they were also culturally disposed to Fair Play and to go where facts and common sense took them even at the cost of satisfying their own emotional predilections. We see in the streets of Ferguson Missouri something entirely contrary, we see the same phenomenon that we see in the so-called "Arab Street" an abandonment of reason, an embrace of demagoguery, in short, a mob mentality unfit to undertake their duties in decent, civil society.
This is not to dismiss the demagoguery of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton but to identify the disintegration of a culture as the condition precedent for demagoguery and mob mentality to flourish.
So the problem is cultural but the solution is not to be found by a government in blue police uniforms. As our culture disintegrates, as the black culture disintegrates at an accelerating pace, the solution is not to be found by a government attempting to substitute in the school system the virtues which are lacking in the African-American home. All the school lunches, breakfasts and dinners in the world cannot compensate for the dystopia of the African-American experience. Certainly, the problem will still exist even without the distorting demagoguery of Jackson or Sharpton. But we as a society deploy government in blue uniforms or bearing school lunches to solve a cultural problem which they cannot solve and, when they fail, we blame those institutions of government like the police force in Ferguson Missouri and in the next breath demand more government to fix the problem.
Each one of the government "solutions" in the long run only accelerate the disintegration of the culture because they attempt to shield the culture from the consequences of its own miscarriages. If we pay unwed mothers to have babies, we are going to have more bastard babies, more criminality, more poverty, more drug abuse, more cultural disintegration. Compare this with the colonial response in John Adams day and the response of the nation right up to the progressive era and really up to the time of Lyndon Johnson. For the most part society allowed bad behavior to experience the consequences of that behavior and by the natural order of things, we got a lot less bad behavior.
We permitted the culture to heal itself.
