LEECHES
Posted on 08/12/2002 5:06:20 AM PDT by weegee
But a group packed council chambers the day before the vote to argue in favor of the resolution. And protesters over the weekend picketed the home of Councilman Michael Berry for voting against it.
If that's how they choose to characterize it. There were over a dozen phone calls with profanity and death threats lobbed at Michael Berry and his mother. The phone calls were made to his mother's home and she lives over 2 hours away. Michael Berry is pursuing investigation. He gave statements to the FBI (I don't immediately see how they are involved although his brother works for the feds and got a phone trace implemented while the calls were still coming in).
As she dried her hair from the rhetoric of such nonsense-spewers as Randall Robinson and Cornel West, she concluded that a fat lunch ticket could be at the end of this argument. She further decided that she would legitimize her parasitism by rallying under such noble-sounding rhetoric as "slavery's lingering effects" and "modern-day disparities of the legacy of slavery." She slept better that night having avoided language such as "willful disenfranchisement" and "culture of failure." And the ghosts of half a million dead let her slumber in peace.
Would this be offset by the years of paid leisure that generations of welfare dependency has provided?
What I’d really like to see is reparations to me for the slaves that were taken from the possession of my ancestors without compensation.
Owl_Eagle
”Guns Before Butter.”
Anyone who owned slaves should be forced to pay anyone who was a slave. No sense in berating the decendents for the actions of their grandparents, however.
It may take decades but it will be considered an entitlement (it is even considered to be owed to the woman in this article even though her relatives were not slaves). How about we collect the money from the nations that sold the slaves in Africa? Maybe we get the Dutch to pay out as well for transporting the slaves.
Slavery was already in America before the United States was established. We abolished slavery in under 100 years. Meanwhile slavery continues to this day in Sudan. So much for righteousness...
How about this for starters: no American slaves and no American slave owners are alive today. Further, no children of either of these classes are alive. I'd say that any connection to slavery has, therefore, been cut.
Face it, probably every single person on Earth, the Queen of England included, has ancestors who were slaves. At what point do people have an obligation to "get over it" and move on with life? I'd save that it is when slavery (or some other great injustice) is within living memory. Otherwise, descendants of slaves will be paying descendants of slaves.
How do you determine who gets what? Do all Blacks get equal reparations? What if someone is only 1/4 Black? What if someone is descended from both slaves and slave masters (like "Chicken George" in Roots)? What about those Blacks in this country that had no slave ancestors, but are recent immigrants? What about those like Michael Jordan, Bill Cosby and Oprah who've obviously not suffered any economic harm from slavery (and each of whom is, further, probably only partially of "pure" African descent)? What about the Chinese and Irish immigrants in the 1800's that were treated at least as badly as slaves - do they also get reparations?
What do we pay to the descendants of those who fought to free the slaves, let alone descendants of those wounded or killed in the effort? What case would there be for making those people pay any amount of reparations?
What, besides a payoff, would the advocates of reparations call trillions of dollars paid to Blacks over the past 4 decades via the various welfare programs? What would they call affirmative action, which clearly discriminates in favor of Blacks over Whites?
Now I'll make this more personal. I am Jewish. My ancestors were in Europe and subjected to regular persecutions of various sorts for the entire time that slavery existed in the American colonies and in this nation. I've done extensive genealogical research on my family, and I know of no member of my extended family who even visited the Western Hemisphere before 1887. No direct ancestor of mine entered this country until 1908. How did my ancestors, let alone I, contribute to the misery of slavery, and how can I be held responsible?
Let's take the focus off of me, and expand it to the entire Jewish people. We were held as slaves in Egypt for roughly 400 years. Many of the advocates of reparations are also of the opinion (false in my view) that Egypt was a Black African nation. If that's the case, then I want reparations. I'll settle for a mere $1 for the suffering and toil of all of the Jewish slaves over that entire period, but I insist upon interest (at the extremely modest rate of 1% per year, which doubles the principal in a rather Biblical 70 years). Since the Exodus occurred around 1200 BCE, that leaves us with 3200 years of interest, or approximately 45 doublings. That amounts to approximately $35.184 trillion, or roughly $2.2 million for every Jew now alive. I'll tell you what - those who want reparations can take their share out of my $2.2 million and give me the difference. I'll be bold and say that my wife and child would make the same offer.
Obviously, the last paragraph is pure nonsense - and roughly on a par with the nonsense being spewed by those in favor of reparations. The bottom line is this:
I will be damned if I pay one red cent for reparations. I wouldn't pay a penny if all 16 of my great, great grandparents owned slaves.
I firmly believe (and, to be honest, hope) that any attempt to tax the people of this country to fund reparations will result in the largest increase in the mortality rate of "legitimate" government officials since the Revolutionary War.
You just don't know, do you?
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.
Would? Try already has. I wrote a critical article, Reparations: TANSTAAFL, on reparations earlier this year.
I've received more hate mail than you can shake a stick at. On the other side of the coin, the article has generated more commentary and e-mail than any article I've ever done. The positive outweighed the negative mail at about a 60-40 split.
Needless to say, this is something that'll occupy the race warlords for sometime to come.
Not only does he not know, but I'm not going to waste my energy trying to tell him, either...
Didn't Jesse envision the same thing and look what happened with that, out of the multimillions he's received only his friends have benefited and only $12,000(?) went towards families he were suppose to help.
Well said.
A simple solution to all problems suggests itself: The US should purchase Sweden, and any AfroAmerican who figures he or she has been harmed by slavery should be allowed to own two Swedes. Everybody in the picture would come out ahead. It's even possible that some modern day George Washington Carver or Booker T. Washington could show the people at Saab and Volvo how to build cars...
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