There’s no varnish that can shine up the next few paragraphs. The race-baiting, race hustler/peddler/scammer Al Sharpton is filling the airwaves and cable news with his one-man campaign to stir-up racial hatred, incite riots and civil unrest. This populist charlatan is doing his ‘best’ work these days to insure the cause of racial harmony is set-back a couple generations. He knows therein lies his hope of ‘best’ success. Sharpton is literally a one-man sideshow promoted by MSNBC. However for the rest of us lies ruin, including for African-Americans.
Sharpton began his race-baiting national career via the Bensonhurst incident and co-opting the then 15-year old Tawana Brawley and her false rape charges. Since then, he’s built a continuing corrupt enterprise through his National Action Network. Racing from one potential racial housefire-hustle to the next, Sharpton stokes each one long enough to get the national media inflamed, his donor list pumped up and then runs to the next one.
He’s likely the ‘best’ dissembling, duplicitous-populist-self-promoter to come along in a generation or so. He has little relationship with the truth and, frankly, why should he? The truth, in his skillful hands, has little to no place in the discussion. He succeeds by feeding into longstanding myths and fallacies. His best art is misdirection and the specious statement.
Amazingly, he seems to be doing such a fine job getting the latest string of police shootings, take-downs and incidents converted into a racial detonation that even liberal African-American leaders are beginning to criticize his methods and message. Albeit they’re way too slow and way too late. Conservative African-American leaders have long criticized Sharpton to no avail. Sharpton and his outriggers have the majority of blacks convinced such conservative voices are “Uncle Tom’s.”
Will any of them succeed in taking down such misdirected politics of race? Likely not and here’s why: The entire population has been so long trained in the ‘politics of tribalism’ and the completely fallacious ‘group rights’ concepts. They have done so at the expense of individual rights. So much so that most conservatives seem no better equipped to understand why the message of victim-hood and ‘collective right’ is a fundamental myth. The entire population are forced to talk and think about African-Americans as a tribe because that is the way so many think of themselves. Groupthink is what enables ultimate control, even though it is the most inhuman and inhumane way to think if one actually wants freedom and liberty to be fundamental values of their society and governance.
So many of the most ardent and intelligent conservatives buy into some form of “collective right” artificial construct. They espouse different forms, such as “corporate rights” but it is the part and parcel of the same fallacious special and collective rights concept. They also give rhetorical cover to such artifice as “women’s rights” and “human rights” attempting to avoid the wrath of the politically correct crowd. Instead they should be categorically rejecting same for the myths they represent.
As explained in the 3-part series of articles being posted starting here, the proper understanding and definition of rights lends itself to being endowed only upon individuals. All other attempted applications are myths and totally erroneous. However, more than a century of propaganda and education have done their job well.
This, in fact, is probably the greatest single battle of our age that remains to be finally joined: the elimination of the artificial construct and legal structure that has built-up around ‘special,’ group or collective ‘rights.’ The series of fundamental legislative and judicial errors and legal policy constructions of the 19th and 20th centuries will continue to destroy the cause of freedom and liberty until this battle is recognized and fully joined.
So many Americans of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds have bought-in to the collective right myths to their detriment. However, African-Americans have probably the highest degree of buy-in. They have been co-opted to the highest degree by “limousine liberals” and their own leaders. They fail to recognize how the federal and state plantation of government subsidy, benefit and control has been substituted for the southern plantation of the old south. No whippin’s are needed when benign buy-in can more easily be obtained through taxpayer and deficit-generated largesse and programs. Nor do many seem to realize how it has also generated some perverse cultural or ethnic/racial behaviors.
When a Euro-American gets arrested or commits a moderate to serious crime, even the most heinous, I don’t feel any ‘group guilt’ that somehow it reflects upon me as a Euro-American. How could it? Why could it? I look at and treat every individual one at a time as they come in accordance with how they treat me as an individual.
Not even when some criminal is part of the specific Irish or Scottish (most of my heritage) “tribe” I may happen to belong to, do I feel any ‘group-guilt’ for the acts of that individual. That whole concept is bizarre. How or why I should feel some sort of guilt or responsibility for the actions of another person because we happen to be of the same ethnic, cultural or racial background? That seems a pretty ridiculous concept on its face.
Maybe, if they were an immediate part of my family…however even then, if we’re not a family of criminals, I might feel ashamed but not guilty of anything. If 95% of all Scots-Irish Americans were committing virtually all the crime, doing all the drugs, having all the abortions, had the highest rate of divorce and dysfunctional families, it casts no reflection on me whatsoever, nor should it. Why would it? I don’t do any of those things.
Afro-Americans, or any minority, allowing themselves to continue buying-in and be exploited by such concepts like racial shame, guilt or anything like it due to the actions of others, are a mystery to me. Anymore than I should or would feel some form of racial guilt because earlier and other Europeans and Euro-Americans at one time enslaved, hated or segregated African-Americans. Such views are complete and utter bullshit. All people are individuals, free and independent to conduct their lives in any manner they choose as long as they respect my rights to do the same.
People that feel and act as collectivists are allowing others to define, control and keep them on that plantation without true freedom, liberty and self-determination. It is precisely that control which has obviously greatly harmed their culture and family structure. In fact, it has damn near destroyed the culture and family structure for so many. Yet, they persist in believing the myth, handed to and controlling them, willingly embraced. As long as they do, others are in charge of them and they have given up their actual individual rights without even a fight.
European-Americans are next in line with their own form of state and federal plantation with corporate and personal loan or direct subsidies, tax credits, loan guarantees, grants and the like. Here it’s not so much a cultural but an economic plantation they live on. It is both in the thinking that groups have rights, are owed something or entitled as a group that locks all the groups onto the government plantation. It is also what keeps America divided so the race-baiters and haters and political opportunists of all stripes can take advantage. Primarily it keeps the government in control of the plantation, to the detriment of all people.
The shootings of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, and the take-down of Eric Garner, each was an individual event with its own circumstances. The only pattern here is that each was committed by people, each with their own prejudices, poor training, bad behaviors, personal foibles and agendas. However, until all Americans are properly educated into what actual rights, freedoms and liberties truly are, the negative reinforcement pattern we are in will continue. To the extent that justice is not done in each case and outcome, we ALL suffer the loss. The tragic thing is that the current paradigm of mass ignorance and disinformation disallows justice instead of serving it. And, it allows the political opportunists of both political stripes to use each incident for their own self-serving political agendas to keep Americans divided and true rights, liberties and freedoms on the ropes. It enables centralized control to be the true nature of governance in the United States.