Posted on 05/05/2008 10:06:55 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Sometimes unrelated events nevertheless tell a coherent story.
One newspaper story that caught my eye recently was about two high-powered schools in South Korea where Korean girls study 15 hours a day, preparing themselves for tests to get into elite colleges in the United States. Harvard, Yale and Princeton already have 34 students from those schools.
When a copy of the 50th anniversary report on members of the Harvard class of 1958 arrived in the mail recently, I thought back to one of my fellow students in that class who had worn a hole in the sole of his shoe but put a folded piece of newspaper in his shoe to cover the hole, rather than tell his parents.
He realized that they would buy him a new pair of shoes if they knew-- and he also realized that they could not afford it.
He went on to become a professor at several well-known medical schools and to have various achievements and honors over the years.
From even further back in time, I received a letter recently from a man who grew up in my old neighborhood back in Harlem. When he and I were in the same junior high school, one day a teacher who saw him eating his brown bag lunch suddenly arranged for him to get a lunch from the school cafeteria without having to pay for it.
It happened so fast that my schoolmate had already taken a bite from the school lunch when he suddenly realized that he had been given charity-- and he wouldn't swallow the food. Instead he went to the toilet and spat it out.
By now his brown bag lunch had been thrown out, so he just went hungry that day. He went on to become a very successful psychiatrist.
Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20 years.
Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far left vision of victimization and grievances-- Wright from his pulpit and Obama as a community organizer for the radical group ACORN, as a collaborator with former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, and as the member of the U.S. Senate with the farthest left voting record.
Later, when the ultimate political prize-- the White House-- loomed on the horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer of divisions.
The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences.
It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases.
People on the far left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty-- telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting the work ethnic of the Korean girls, the dogged determination of my Harvard classmate with the newspaper in his shoe, or the self-reliance of my fellow junior high school student in Harlem who had too much pride to take charity?
When young people go out into the world, what will they have to offer that can gain them the rewards they seek from others and the achievements they need for themselves?
Will they have the skills of science, technology or medicine?
Or will they have only the resentments that have been whipped up by the likes of Jeremiah Wright or the sense of entitlement from the government that has been Barack Obama's stock in trade?
In the real world, a sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the mistreatment of your ancestors, is not likely to get you very far with people who are too busy dealing with current economic realities to spend much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people's ancestors.
Another seemingly unrelated experience was being in a crowd at a graveside in a Jewish cemetery last week. That crowd included people who were black, white, Asian, Catholic, Jewish and no doubt others. This country has come a long way, just in my lifetime.
We don't need people like either Jeremiah Wright or Barack Obama to take us backward.
The time is long overdue to stop gullibly accepting the left's vision of itself as idealistic, rather than self-aggrandizing.
I should have known it was ACORN that Barack Hussein Muhammad Obama worked for: Now the light REALLY comes on!
This is such a bizarre concept in the modern age that you almost wonder if Sowell has gone bonkers and is inventing the memory of it.
An era when the people of Harlem were too proud to take charity?
To the modern ear, it sounds like a fairy tale.
No, I’m only 48 years old, and I remember it. Sometimes it does seem like I dreamed it, though.
And there you have it, Obama, Wright, Jackson, and Sharpton in a nutshell......or better yet....nuts..hell
The past is another country. They do things differently there.
Brutal. And Sowell has the right to say it.
We know him as a brilliant economist, which he is. He was a high-school dropout who got a GED after a stint in the Marine Corps told him who he really was. From there to Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. He really is what Obama pretends to be.
You know, I was watching Gladiator on HBO a few minutes ago, and I came out here and sat down at the computer because I wanted to google a little about the real-life Marcus Aurelius & his son, Commodus, and I was just reading about some of Commodus's antics after he became emperor:
The emperor also had a passion for gladiatorial combat, which he took so far as to take to the arena himself, dressed as a gladiator. This action was considered to be unusual conduct for an emperor by the people of Rome. The Roman people also found Commodus' naked gladiatorial combats as disgraceful and disgusting... Privately, it was his custom to slay his practice opponents. For each appearance in the arena, he charged the city of Rome a million sesterces, straining the Roman economy.And in reading Sowell's piece and in thinking about it just now, it dawned on me that I, in calendar year 2008, feel about as far removed from any [hypothetical? mythical?] black American spirit of self-reliance [which Sowell is describing in his piece] as I feel removed from the Romans themselves.Commodus did raise the ire of many military officials in Rome for his Hercules persona in the arena. Often wounded soldiers and amputees would be placed in the arena for Commodus to slay with a sword. Commodus' eccentric behavior would not stop there. Citizens of Rome missing their feet due to accident or disease were taken to the arena where they were tethered together for Commodus to club to death while pretending they were giants.
It literally feels as though Sowell is talking about the ancient history of long-extinct peoples.
Too much TV is dangerous.
Take a look at his AWESOME Wikipedia page: Thomas Sowell
One of my favorite comments made by Sowell was: I'm so glad I got into Harvard before there was affirmative action!
It's so sad that libs don't even know about him!
bump!
ACORN - I had to do a search to refresh my memory. Here’s a link for those like me with CRS.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6968
They are always hiring: http://dallas.craigslist.org/npo/660629745.html
I’m 57. I grew up poor but I didn’t know it at the time. My parents looked on getting money from the government as a shameful thing. It was an admittance of failure. They never took the available even though some neighbors did. My parents spoke disparagingly of them, and rightfully so.
ACORN and Project Vote, also had the nerve to represent them re: legal. This dude has Palis in Gaza campaigning for him calling the states.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21YF7ggCG6g
This was an endorsement I had the honor of hearing live on the radio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_ZdACdhDBY
Ah yes... the no comment/comment on Jimmy Carter
(sick him Newt)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KWqihXeM7E&feature=related
He hooked up AAAN (Arab American Action Network) through his position in government re: Chicago (via the Woods Fund he sat on with Bill Ayers), attended salute for Edward Said of all people, dealt with Khalidi, two wanted by Interpol, and has facilitated wanted individuals getting visas to walk freely in Chicago while wanted.
Look at Robert Malley at Discover the Network, as well as his other staffers... that will tell it all.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2310
After you read all those articles in the side bar, read what Malley said about being misunderstood:
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/April_2008/0804030.html
Mmkay.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/03/kissing_robert_malley.html
Well, Ali Abunimah says it best:
Oh, and the pastor republished Hamas columns in the church bulletin.
http://www.bizzyblog.com/2008/03/21/hamas-obama-wright-resonates/
Oh and the view from Harvard (for the educated):
Arabs for Obama
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/02/arabs_for_obama/
Just had that handy...
That’s just the tiny stuff. Trust me.
I guess I'm an old fart. I recall my mother giving an older lady bags of clothing with the statement that "...she might know someone who could use these...we had out grown them."
There was a time when the preservation of dignity, even in charity was paramount.
Demean a few generations, though, and there is no pride left.
Amazing article. Right on the button. But that’s T. Sowell.
My dad tells tales of their childhood, when they were poor (large farm family) during the depression, but too proud to take charity.
Our (my siblings and I) favorite story is one about his school lunch. The other kids in grammar school would take regular sandwiches, of bread and meat or the like to school. My dad took a biscuit with collards or tomato gravy (i.e. something they had grown in their garden on a leftover biscuit from breakfast.) They ate in a common area, outside, and he was often teased at lunch, so his teacher would bring a "regular" sandwich from home and offer it to him. He refused, because he knew it was charity.
But the wise teacher soon outsmarted the elementary school boy. She'd ask him, "What did you bring for lunch today?" To which he'd reply, "A biscuit with collards." Then her standard line became, "I love biscuits with collards, do you want to trade me for my sandwich?" And to trade was "okay"...so he would, and then he'd go outside to eat with the other kids, "regular" sandwich in hand.
ACORN. How about that! You’re right, it makes perfect sense now.
I didn’t think it that bizarre because it fits in with a lot of what I already know to have been the case. It sounds bizarre only in contrast to what is believed to be the norm now. The question to ask is what exactly was it that accomplished the seduction to get a group of people to give up their self-respect. Once this happens, within a single generation, it is perpetuated more easily amongst those of succeeding generations. Some say that it was “the war on poverty”. That’s too general. What were the techniques used on actual people to seduce them and cause them to deviate from how their parents were raised? Was it an appeal to teenaged girls through school guidance counselors that if they got pregnant and had no husband they’d get all sorts of wonderful (wonderful to a 14 or 15-year-old girl) things? If so, there would have had to have been collusion between such “guidance” counselors and operatives from the federal government’s war on poverty to popularize what was being offered and to coordinate cash flow. There must have been actual meetings and plans drawn up about which strategies to use to “reach” which specific groups of people and the techniques to use to overcome objections the potential recipients could raise.
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