Posted on 04/29/2015 10:37:29 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A photo published in The Baltimore Sun on Tuesday showed young black men gleefully, almost hysterically, dashing out of a looted Baltimore CVS store that would later be set ablaze.
One was clutching a box of Froot Loops and half-gallon of ice cream, and one had a couple 50-ounce bottles of Arm & Hammer Laundry Detergent, dermatologist tested, for sensitive skin.
The mob mentality that existed at that moment prompted them to grab items worth less than $20. It was a criminal act warped by the African-American experience in the U.S., where they and their ancestors have long been denied the staples of daily life as immediate as food and as abstract as opportunity to participate in the American dream. Their crime makes an undeniably convincing argument for the need to discuss slavery reparations.
The concentrations of black populations in urban centers are the result of generations of racist policies on housing, banking, education, employment and criminal justice. These cities absorbed people freed from a 250-year-old slave economy that required a civil war to end it. The truth is, the bigotry and commercial exploitation of African-Americans that enriched the nation’s earliest industrialists still exists and continues to funnel black communities into dead ends from which escape is difficult, to say the least.
Those young men with their ice cream and laundry detergent have the choice of seeing their neighborhood as valuable, nurturing communities, or as traps built by the power structure that has determined this is where they belong.
The police, who should be serving and protecting, too often rule by intimidation, meting out punishment beyond the charge of their office. This is not about police going into neighborhoods and straightening out black-on-black crime. It’s about men being afraid to go to jail for not paying child support, making eye contact with a police officer or selling loose cigarettes. These aren’t criminal behaviors, they are responses to living under intimidation.
Looting, violence, vandalism and crime are no solution. They are unjustifiable. They are wrong. They are deplorable. But should they be unexpected any less than infection follows an untreated wound? Two wrongs don't make a right, but until the wound is healed, how could we expect to prevent the infection? Reparations is a way to treat that wound.
The reality of life for the urban black American is heartbreakingly present in the instruction the mother has to give her son regarding police interactions, in the student who isn't even aware that her chances for success are less than those of her more affluent peers. But for so many other Americans, these lives are viewed over one electronic device or another and become reality for what amounts to a few moments in the world of media.
U.S. Rep. John Conyers has in every session of Congress since 1989 filed a bill that would begin a discussion on reparations, but it never passes. This discussion must take place. We must understand why black lives matter, and why in 2015 it's necessary for so many beautiful Americans to be walking through city streets to remind us of that.
What form reparations might take is unknown, but we know that all the policies imbued with racism mentioned above need repair. That might be the place to start.
President Obama said from the White House on Tuesday, "If our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could; it's just that it would require everybody saying, 'This is important; this is significant.' And, that we don't just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don't just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped, but we're paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids."
Let’s remind Congress that “This is important; this is significant,” and remind ourselves of it, while we’re at it.
I stopped reading here. Anyone willing to write this is a complete moron.
The “reparations” that should be paid are those from the blacks for decades of crime against whites, the rampant damage caused when they loot and burn, the general blight of cities where their numbers are highly concentrated, and the bottomless pit into which American society has pissed $20+ trillion.
Yeah, isn’t it interesting these calls for “reparations” come from haughty elites in the lily-white liberal enclaves of the NE...
Because rivers of the blood of whites in the Civil War wasn’t enough. Because billions in “entitlement” programs and wealth redistribution haven’t been enough.
And who would pay whom? Some white guy whose ancestors came to this country post CW, with their clothes on their backs? To whom? Some black person who has never been a slave, neither his parents nor grand parents? What about mixed race people?
I’d only agree with one caveat-all who take any offered reparations need to go all the way on the “re-set” they desire-they get their money and then immigrate to Africa. No halfway measures. If we have to do a “re-set” on the money, then we do a “re-set” on their being here.
Let’s follow this all the way, why should American black slavery be singled out as exceptional? Italians can pay germans for enslaving their ancestors, the Scandinavian countries (Vikings) can pay Britain, etc. Black slavery wasn’t unique in history, other than that it was the only slavery for which whites shed blood to stop it.
Yes, I can see by all the mal-nourished, ribs-sticking-out skinny blacks, that they’ve been denied “even the staples of daily life”. I weep for them in the grocery store when they are forced to resort to buying lobster and steaks with the free money Dear Leader gives them from his stash, while their keeds eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at school, also paid for from Obozo’s stash.
Isn’t that the truth. And we oppress them so severely, that they can’t get far away enough from us-oops, wait, white flight never fails to have the concomitant black flight on its heels.
In the eyes of these morons, there is no black criminality for which YT is not ultimately at blame. If a crime happens which is so heinous that it would be too disgusting for even the most rabid anti-white hater to blame whites, it gets ignored by the national media, like the horrendous torture/murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.
——Their crime makes an undeniably convincing argument for the need to discuss slavery reparations.——
Wow...you simply can’t make this stuff up...
——There’s points in this essay where I think, “maybe this is very high level absurdist satire” and it could border on genius.——
I was thinking along the same lines...
Sadly, it wasn’t...the article borders on insanity...
I think the demonstrating blacks should pay whites reparations for all the BS we have had to put up with because of “ignant” bs we suffer through everyday..
Part of reparations would be that blacks would be exempt from taxes.
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I would be happy to withhold my taxes
Translation: these voters have graduated from their Democrat indoctrination. It's time to start exporting them into the nicer Republican areas using Section 8 housing.
No need to read beyond this UNSUPPORTED assertion.
Democrats have failed at social justice. Misguided government policies have failed at equality, have failed at accountability.
Misguided government policies have competing constituencies engaged in street battles. These low information voters fail to acknowledge or explore the “root causes” caused by decades of costly and ineffective policies. Fatherless homes are the rule. Children are taught dependency and hate. Can anyone connect the dots?
All of these counterproductive initiatives were imposed by Democratic mayors and city leaders.
Is there anybody out there who has ears to hear?
Isn’t welfare a form of reparation?
as a bystander, observing how these people act and what they do, I come to a conclusion that there is a reason why slavery existed.
reparations for WHAT....for the BLACK STUPIDITY.....
the educational opportunites are REJECTED by the BLACKS, and they choose FREESHIT over diligence, application and hard work.... and the TAXPAYER is supposed to PAY FOR THAT...???
they choose to live like animals breeding and leaving..... that’s the TAXPAYERS problem...... THEY SHOULD BE PAYING BACK THE TRILLIONS WASTED ON SOCIAL PROGRAMS FOR THE LAST 55 YEARS SAPPING THE PRODUCTIVE USE OF THE MONEY.....conyers is a fing jerk clown of the rev al and jessie jackson ilk.....full of hot air and pretending to address an issue....WE ALL KNOW WHAT THE SOLUTION TO THE “BLACK CONDITION IS”... SELF RESPECT AND SELF RELIANCE...
Reparations seekers regard every white owned house as full of loot stolen from their slave ancestors, so this Cape Cod View article is best read with a loaded shotgun parked across one’s knees.
Evidently the looters are intimidated by the children they will not support. Shame on those babies!
This country needs a service financed by private donations for buying one-way plane tickets for dissatisfied negroes, so they can fly back to the motherland.
Reparations? LBJ’s Great Society programs haven’t been enough?
It’s never enough. Because, the dirty little secret is that tax-funded *programs* never enhance anyone except the political class.
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