Baltimore

Every 20 years or so America falls in love with liberalism.  It’s a feel good kind of ideology where Americans fraught with a combination of narcissism and guilt can wrap themselves in do-gooder's clothes while looking caring to those around them.  The old term was limousine liberals.  Ted Kennedy, the late liberal lion of the Senate, was a prime example.  While he was busy foisting busing on the rest of America, he was safely hidden behind the walls of his family’s compound in Hyannis Port sending his children to private schools.

Barack Obama was supposed to be the pinnacle of liberalism….except now it is called Progressivism.  He was to be the Great Black Hope who could fix all the problems.  Buttressed by a fawning press which still refuses to examine his obvious and egregious flaws, he turned out to be nothing more than a throwback leftist 60’s radical who utilized Chicago style thug politics to punish his enemies and crony capitalism to reward his supporters.  His agenda was an intellectual one based on punishing America for her sins against the world…actively using government resources to import illegal aliens to repopulate the United States while allowing liberal corporate bastions like Disney to fire American IT employees as it hires cheaper foreign labor from India to replace them.

And how has the African American community fared under Obama?  Let’s just say that Bill Clinton was not only this country’s first black president, he is this country’s only black president. Which leads us to the troubles in Baltimore where a new summer of discontent is ramping up after a full year’s plus build up beginning with Trayvon Martin. 

We are now entering the fiftieth year of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty.  Back in the late 1960’s the poverty rate was 14%.  Twenty trillion dollars later the poverty rate is still 14%.  In the process, the American family has been destroyed.  Teenage pregnancies have ballooned.  Our public schools are in free fall.  Single parent households are increasing with men losing their identities as parent and role models for their children.  Heroin use is rampant killing our young people every day as states turn to marijuana, a gateway drug, as a means to reduce their state deficits.  Ginned up figures showing a 5.6 % unemployment rate ignore the collapse of the American labor participation rate as discouraged workers capitulate and just give up.  There is no inflation according to government figures.  They must not buy cereal.  Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is being decimated…and the beat goes on.

Baltimore is the intersection of all that is bad in America.  One commentator called it the welfare state meeting grievances meeting women who have married the government.  A little harsh, but thought provoking.  The untold story is there is nobody left to blame.  The Baltimore story has an African American president, an African American Attorney General, an African American mayor, an African American chief of police, an African American state prosecutor, and African American city council, and a majority African American police force.  But that doesn’t stop the race baiters.  The keep on keepin' on.

Here’s the thing.  This is NOT an African American problem.  This is an American problem as liberal government policies implemented by both American political parties continue to fail.  America claims to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it was built on self-reliance and personal responsibility.  Our government has not only not supported those concepts, it has actively worked to destroy them creating a permanent underclass of all colors with no hope coupled with disenfranchised young men living in a matriarchal society.  It’s not only African Americans living in our cities.  This problem spreads to poor whites in small towns across the nation as incarceration rates go up with drug abuse and educational failure. The problem is actually worse there. You just don’t see it because it is hidden.

The justice system is in shambles as the mob demands “social justice” which has very little to do with legal justice as practiced in the United States.  As the political leaders capitulate to the mob, another nail is driven into our legal system.  5000 African Americans were killed by other African Americans last year.  138 African Americans were killed by police.  Where should the outrage be directed? 

Unless America wakes up and wakes up soon to the realization that while government can facilitate needed change, it is incapable of forcing change.  Government can build the schools, but it can’t force students to learn.  Government can steer business employment strategies through tax policy but cannot make people go to work.  And most importantly, government cannot become the primary parent in a family. 

Until government policies change to bolster family, self-reliance and personal responsibility rather than a means to provide a pool of steady voters bought with crumbs, Baltimore is just the beginning.