In a column of 16 January – Martin Luther King Jr. Day – Lexington Herald- Leader’s Tom Eblen remarked that if the assassinated rights-leader were in Lexington, he would make it a point to spend time at Main and Esplanade Streets with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, who are still demonstrating at that location but without camping out, of course. Eblen might also have mentioned that at one time this location was a slave-auctioning site, though, come to think of it, he probably did – a sort of veiled allusion.
There’s no argument with the annual observance plus all the streets, buildings and parks named after King, not to mention the multiplicity of statues throughout the country. He was a great man and represented/conducted a great cause – civil rights. He was one of the most important Americans of last century.
Connecting King’s cause with the Occupy cause, however, is an imagination too far. King’s cause was by way of erasing differences in the classes while the Occupiers have made it practically a religious effort to promote class warfare, with the final result being that the government will punish the producers, taking what they cobble together and re-distributing it to the non-producers, the virtual definition of socialism/communism.
The Occupiers’ main ally occupies the White House, though (with a wink and a nod) he has surrounded himself with Wall Streeters and conducts huge fund-raising rallies to cadge campaign loot from them…promising a billion-dollar effort to retain his seat. The fat cats don’t give huge sums without something in return, so the conclusion to be drawn is obvious. To his give-’em-the-spin credit (or blame), he has united the unions and the entrepreneurs, sworn enemies, in support of his incredibly flawed administration, defined from the get-go by a tax-cheat as the Treasury secretary.
The guest speaker at this year’s main event in Lexington is Marc Lamont Hill, a Columbia University professor and TV talking-head. From a telephone-interview with Hill, Eblen furnished this statement: “And the gap [between what is had and what is possible, presumably for African Americans] isn’t an intelligence gap, an effort gap, it’s an opportunity gap.” There may be no intelligence/effort gap, but there certainly is no opportunity gap. The civil-rights laws of the 1960s, not to mention even the use of National Guard troops in an effort to inculcate fairness in schools in the 1950s, were designed to guarantee against an opportunity gap, even to the point of establishing quotas.
In fact, the abuse of these laws was demonstrated by SCOTUS Justice Sotomayor, who, using ethnicity as qualifier, ruled against whites in a job-promotion case involving test-scores, and was overturned by the SCOTUS even as she was being confirmed. Hill is too smart not to recognize the gap that actually does exist, to wit, a morality gap.
This introduces another claim by Hill, namely, that America’s core problem is poverty. The largest segment of the population living in poverty is the single-mom-and-family category, especially in the black community, in which more than 70% of babies are born without fathers of record. Contrarily, in 1960 before passage of all the entitlement-legislation, about 75% of black families were headed by live-in parents. If not for an inordinate percentage of abortions in the black community, the numbers of blacks on welfare now would be astounding.
The almost indiscriminate breeding – lack of morals, to many – is responsible for poverty, with the heaviest onus borne by African-American men who do not support their children (especially not marrying their children’s “mothers”), forcing the taxpayers to do it for them. This is not hate-speech, as Eblen probably would have it, but just plain fact.
Rather than express the truth, Hill takes the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton positions – blame whitey. This wears very thin now, after 50 or so years, though the politically correct crowd, probably including Eblen, continues to flagellate itself over something for which it was not remotely responsible – slavery. Racist operators like Hill love it and make a cottage industry out of exploiting it. Only the gullible fall for it.
To see the disconnect of people like Hill with King, one has only to look at the 30-foot statue (tall as a three-story building) of King on the National Mall, created by movers and shakers in the black community. By contrast, the statue of Lincoln is 11-feet shorter and the statue of President Franklin Roosevelt, a four-term president, is merely life-size.
The King statue was designed in China, sculpted by a Chinese artist, delivered in pieces to the Mall and assembled not by Americans, union or otherwise, but by Chinese coolies. It’s no wonder that, towering Mao-like as it does over everything else, it could be called the Great Buddha on the Mall. King is depicted as looking (glowering) down on everyone and everything…within the shadow of the Great Emancipator and the World War II memorial. It’s an “in your face” monstrosity, something King would have rejected, preferring probably something on the order of a pensive Gandhi, perhaps his most important mentor.
Only someone who is politically incorrect would call attention to Hill’s propaganda and the garish statue, but so be it.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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