Posts Tagged → sharpton
Some thoughts on MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech
Our family just sat down to watch Martin Luther King Jr. deliver one of America’s most powerful speeches, his 1963 I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Thank you to YouTube for publishing this historically important footage.
We had a discussion about it, and here are some thoughts that resulted:
MLK’s face is clearly moved, the righteousness of his words providing a passion that cannot be ignored then, or now. How refreshing is that.
The causes of justice, freedom, voting rights, and integration were true tests of just how honest America was going to be, how accurately it was going to live up to its promises. Genuine race and fairness issues are almost gone today, due to that passion.
How refreshing it is to hear true righteousness, and dignity, and careful measure. Few leaders since MLK have been able or willing to lead listeners down different paths simultaneously.
In the context of Georgia Congressman John Lewis’s crazy comments about November’s election results, MLK stands out as a real outlier. Race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are phonies, and Congressman John Lewis has been riding on his one real achievement from fifty years ago. Are there any honest brokers remaining on race issues? What I would give to have MLK back with us today. America could use his gentleness, his insights, his vision. His truthfulness.
After all, a great deal of the goals MLK put forth in his speech have been achieved. What has not been achieved could easily be ascribed to the destructive methods of Sharpton, Jackson, and now Congressman Lewis, whose personal attack on the president elect brought a swift and accurate rebuttal. American blacks are more the victims of their regressive “leaders” than they are of any racism.
One of my favorite bits of knowledge is that MLK was an ardent gun owner. He was not politically correct. Oh, I don’t believe he was a violent man, bitterly clinging to his Bible and guns in preparation for some racial Armageddon. Rather, he was a hunter, a target shooter, and a practical self-defense-oriented American who believed it was better to defend one’s home from violent intruders than it was to die unarmed.
Unfortunately, this great man left America far too soon, but like all righteous martyrs, MLK’s murder inspired great change in the greatest nation ever on Planet Earth.
Thank you for your many gifts to us, Martin Luther King, Jr. We thank you for the biggest one, your ultimate sacrifice that America might live up to its best hopes and dreams.
The trouble with racial double standards
If you are troubled by racism, and if you are feeling fired up about the Don Sterling episode, do an Internet search on “black on white violence.”
The search result you will be treated to is a seemingly endless parade of cell phone videos of white people, many of them children, being beaten into unconsciousness or violently harassed with flagrantly racist language.
You will see lots of sickening violence associated with this racism.
What you will not see is anyone really standing up and calling it out.
Jay Z wears a huge anti-white medallion around his neck. Spike Lee is a Bigot par Excellence. Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, and Jesse Jackson have perverted what it means to be a “man of God.” But there are no consequences for these men. Nothing. Zero.
The problem with double standards is that they have a way of quietly really pissing off a large majority of people, who quietly simmer until they have had enough. That is now happening in America. Many of the great civil rights triumphs of the 1940s – 1970s are being overshadowed by a slowly awakening American awareness that things did not work out the way most people envisioned.
In fact, despite the great civil rights triumphs, including the election of a black US president, perfectly good people are being called racist, old fools like Don Sterling are being used to falsely impugn entire groups of Americans, and black-on-white violence is being deliberately swept under the rug in order to protect a false narrative about America’s supposed faults.
Meanwhile, the really blatant racists like Spike Lee, Jay Z, Jackson, Sharpton, and Wright are feted, elevated, and paraded before an audience that increasingly sees them wearing no clothes.
Race Relations in America, Justice for Chris Lane, etc.
Guest writer Patrick J. Buchanan says it best about the issue of race in America, in the piece below. Buchanan has plenty of his own baggage, but in this piece he hits the nail on the head. It’s an excellent read, originally published at http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/dead-souls-of-a-cultural-revolution/
Dead Souls of a Cultural Revolution
By Patrick J. Buchanan
August 22, 2013
Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell.
Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The former said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.”
As Lane was white and the shooter black, racism has surfaced as a motive. Thursday came reports that killing a white man may have been an initiation rite for the black teens in joining some offshoot of the Crips or Bloods.
What happened in Oklahoma and the reaction, or lack of reaction to it, tells us much about America in 2013, not much of it good.
Teenagers who can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom are moral barbarians, dead souls.
But who created these monsters? Where did they come from? Surely one explanation lies in the fact that the old conscience-forming and character-forming institutions – home, church, school and a moral and healthy culture fortifying basic truths – have collapsed. And the community hardest hit is Black America.
Black mobs routinely terrorize cities across the country, but the media and government are silent. Read the detailed account of rampant racial crime in “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America.”
If we go back to the end of World War II, 90 percent of black families consisted of a mother and father and children raised and disciplined by their parents. The churches to which these families went on Sundays were stronger. Black schools may have been largely segregated, but they were also the transmission belts of patriotism and traditional values rooted in biblical truths and a Christian faith.
Though such schools graduated hardworking, law-abiding and productive citizens, today they would be closed as unconstitutional.
Indeed, all of those character- and conscience-forming institutions of yesterday are in an advanced state of decline today.
Seventy-three percent of black kids are born to single moms. Black kids who make it to 12th grade may often be found reading at seventh-, eighth- or ninth-grade levels. In some cities the black dropout rate can hit as high as 50 percent.
Drugs are readily available. And among black males ages 18 to 29, in urban areas, often a third are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole, or walking around with a criminal record.
Where do the kids get their ideas of right and wrong, good and evil? In homes where the father is absent and the TV is always on. From radios tuned in to rap and hip-hop. From films where Hollywood values prevail and the shooting never stops. From street gangs that sometimes form the only families these kids have ever known.
Still, crime has fallen since 1990, we are told.
And so it has. But that is only because the baby boomers, the largest population cohort in our history, passed out of the high-crime age group a quarter of a century ago, and because the jail and prison population in America has tripled.
What kind of leadership do we see today in Black America?
What can be said for an NAACP that was lately demanding a Justice Department investigation of a rodeo clown running around a bull ring in rural Missouri in an Obama mask, but cannot find its voice to address a black-on-white atrocity in Middle America?
When Trayvon Martin was shot to death in a murky incident in Sanford, Fla., Jesse Jackson rushed there to declare: “Blacks are under attack. … Killing us is big business.” Trayvon was “shot down in cold blood by a vigilante … murdered and martyred.”
After Chris Lane’s cold-blooded murder, Jesse tweeted: This sort of thing is to be “frowned upon.”
If I had a son, said President Obama, he would have looked like Trayvon; 35 years ago, I could have been Trayvon. Can the president not find his voice to speak to the parents of Chris Lane?
Since Lyndon Johnson took office, 50 years ago, we have spent trillions on his programs for health care, housing, education, food stamps, welfare and civil rights. Are we living in that Great Society we were promised?
In that same decade, we were told that the social, cultural and moral revolution bursting forth on the campuses would rid us of the repressive old-time morality and Old Time Religion, and lead to a more equal, just, humane and better America, a beacon to mankind.
Yet, are not the killers of Chris Lane who shot him for the fun of it the “do-your-own-thing!” children of that cultural revolution?
The death of Trayvon was said to be reflective of the real America, a country where black folks live in constant fear of white vigilantes and white racist cops. What nonsense.
In the real America, interracial violence is overwhelmingly black-on-white. Even if the media will not report it, everybody knows it.
And journalists will not dig into the numbers that prove it, for the truth would undermine their ideology and contradict the narrative that governs and gives meaning to their lives.
For liberals, America is always “Mississippi Burning.” It just has to be that way.