by John Myers
And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel your brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? — Genesis 4:9
“I’m not my brother’s keeper,” my mother used to say. She and my father survived the Great Depression. Through decades of hard work, they made themselves a comfortable life. But a higher authority than my late mother, President Barack Obama, believes we are our brother’s keeper.
Last week, Obama launched his initiative that will create opportunities for young black and Hispanic men. His explanation is that this is a way he is going to help those two minorities in an economy racked by civil discord. And his program is being hailed as the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. The Obama Administration will partner with foundations, nonprofit groups and businesses to equal the playing field for blacks and Hispanics.
The program should be called Big Brother because it focuses on a single leader, who happens to be black, who has decided by himself that young black and Hispanic youths are going to be given special advantages. If you are white, Native American or Asian, tough luck. In true Muslim tradition, Obama is not giving a hand up to young women of any race.
According to the President, groups have already invested $150 million into the program and will invest another $200 million over the next five years. And there is no stopping it; Obama has already signed an order to establish the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force, which will determine how to help black kids help themselves. It sounds discriminatory and self-aggrandizing for the President, who was shameless while presenting it.
“Fifty years after Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] talked about his dream for America’s children, the stubborn fact is that the life chances for the average black or brown child in this country lags behind by almost every measure and is worse for boys and young men,” said the President.
This is just the latest publicity stunt by Obama so that he can, with a wave of a wand and a few hundred million dollars, change black fortunes. Until now, he has been remiss in doing so, unless it added to his legacy.
Obama’s Sermon On The Mount
TIME reported:"Last February, Obama met with a group of young men at Hyde Park Academy on Chicago’s South Side, who were a part of the Becoming a Man program within the school. He spoke candidly with the group about his experiences, acknowledging the fact that as a man of color who was raised by a single mother, their lives were inherently similar. The only difference, he said, was the fact that he grew up in an environment that was more forgiving."When I went to high school, I must have missed Becoming a Man Day. I got those lessons from my father when I was young enough that discipline still mattered, before age 12 and not 17. During his long business trips for his magazine, my mother was his XO, always at the ready with the big, old, sterling-silver brush. I must have gotten 30 spankings growing up, but I earned them all. More importantly, they stopped when I was 11 after I had begun to associate my bratty behavior with a sore butt.
Every good parent knows that how his kids turn out depends on how they are raised as little children — not because of some feel-good Presidential plan set up for young men who are way too old to now learn values such as hard work, respect and personal integrity.
Furthermore, is Obama omnipotent? How does he know which environment is the most forgiving? I think black kids are taking hardly any of the blame these days, and it’s being pushed on to the whites. Lately, everything is Whitey’s fault. If some white man killed some poor, innocent black kid, it will be plastered all over the TV media for months, maybe years. And on it goes the direct and indirect message that the laws are written and the police are there to protect Whitey. Therefore, Whitey is at the root of every social injustice. America’s black leaders bang that war drum louder each day.
America could have better race relations without black leaders like Obama, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey forever mucking in the past and making white people feel guilty, while black people feel victimized.
Are We There Yet?
If you have children, you must have heard a thousand times on any trip, “Are we there yet?!” One of my first memories dates back to when I was 3 and I was sitting in the middle seat between my older brother and sister flying two hours from Calgary to Vancouver, Canada, to meet our parents. The last hour I wanted a minute by minute update: “Are we there yet?!”What I want to know is when we are there yet with the collective white guilt over the treatment of African-Americans for the past 300 years? When can we stop harping about it in everything from the NFL to the Academy Awards, to the policies cooked up by the Oval Office? Can just somebody give us a date that we can put this in our past? After all, the whites who committed those crimes are either dead or soon will be. And if we cannot ever put it into our past, how were we so able to forget the genocide we did to Native Americans?
The truth is I don’t hold out much hope for a deadline, especially when the sins of the father seem to stretch to perpetuity and when the non-solutions provided by some of the influential voices in black America sound a lot more like Joseph Goebbels than Mahatma Gandhi.
Just read what Winfrey had to say regarding the racism “problem” when interviewed by the BBC in November shorty before she received the Medal of Freedom from Obama:
"Of course, problem is not solved. You know, as long as people can be judged by the color of their skin, the problem’s not solved. As long as there are people who still — and there’s a whole generation; I say this, you know, I said this, you know, for Apartheid South Africa; I said this for my own, you know, community in the South — there are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die."
Sins Of The Father, You Know?
Oprah, who do you want to see die? Just old people? What about younger people whose parents may have had them “bred and marinated in it (racism).” Do they have to die, too? And who gets to decide who is a racist and who is not? What if we find out, Oprah, that you are a racist? Is it possible you hate the Swiss because they treated you shabbily in that Zurich shop when you just had to have that $38,000 handbag last summer? If so, do we have to wait for you to die before racism is gone?And then there is the question of blacks who are racists. Is it OK for them to hate whites, given decades of discrimination and centuries of slavery, which, by the way, ended 148 years ago?
It doesn’t seem productive when black leaders like the President and Winfrey make excuses about male black youths and do not hold them to the same accountability as white youths. Yet there are other black leaders just as bad as Obama and Winfrey.
Blacks are still being treated so poorly, said Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to a crowd of 18,000 in Detroit last month, that African-Americans should have their own court system.
“Our people can’t take much more. We have to have our own courts. You failed us,” Farrakhan said.
“How long must we let people stand their ground, shooting us and getting away with it while we don’t get justice?” added Farrakhan. “We want justice. Equal justice under the law. We want the federal government to intercede to see that black people get justice in accordance with the law. Otherwise, I’m going on record with this today… we have to have our own courts.”
What’s next? Separate courts for Hispanics? How about for Asians? I am a Canadian-American. Do I get to go trot off to my own courthouse if I get in trouble?
These are all race-baiting, muck-raking, money-making ways in which blacks have been let down by their self-appointed leaders and have not had to face up to their own responsibilities. The result is that race relations are worse now than when Obama was first elected. He bears responsibility in this, but he has had plenty of help from the likes of Winfrey, Farrakhan and many others — all of them spreading the message of irreversible shame against white America as a weapon to press their liberal agenda.
Meanwhile, white resentment grows along with black anger. That sets the stage for race tensions and even race riots. Maybe that was the intention from the start.
Yours in good times and bad,
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