Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Photo by reinvented
The stock market is bouncing up and down like Fatty Arbuckle on a bungee cord. The job numbers are just as dismal as they were last week. The CBO says we can expect unemployment to continue north of eight percent until 2016. Is it just me or is the honeymoon over?
In an interview on Bloomberg radio yesterday, New York Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch talked about the perilous state of New York’s economy. Mr. Ravitch was a key player in the rescue of New York City from the brink of financial collapse in the 1970s. He talked about bankruptcy being an option and how New York City’s possible bankruptcy really brought banks to the negotiating table. He also talked about how important the financial services industry is to New York as a source of tax revenue. Then he let the cat out of the bag.
Steven Slater tells off a plane load of Jet Blue customers, grabs a couple of beers, pulls the emergency chute and dramatically exits the plane, his job, and his career. He is soon hailed across the Internet as a hero. People walk away from home equity loans saying, “I’m not going to be a slave to the bank.” Challenge after challenge to any reference to God in the public square as part of an effort to drive faith underground. Our is government telling us that the only way we can survive is by a government handout. We cannot make it on our own. If you wonder why we are heading in the wrong direction as to 70% of your fellow Americans believe, perhaps we should give morality a closer look.
The story on Mr. Slater is unclear. He says one thing, witnesses say another. It will eventually get sorted out, but let’s assume for a moment that Mr. Slater is correct in that a passenger’s behavior set him off. In a more moral society, Mr. Slater could have done one of two things. One, he could have taken a deep breath, held his tongue and just written it off to that passenger having a bad day. He would have won the admiration of those who watched him behave with self-control and dignity. Or, two, he could have asked the pilot to inform the authorities to meet the plane on the ground because an unruly passenger defied the instructions of the flight crew. That passenger would have been arrested on the ground and would be facing federal charges. But instead Mr. Slater took the route of immediate gratification. He got on the intercom and told off the whole plane, grabbed a couple of beers from the beverage cart, triggered the emergency escape chute and then like a giddy child went down the slide and ran home. A moment’s thrill of control followed a world of grief. Was his moral compass broken or pointing in the wrong direction?
Shawn Schlegalis a real estate agent in Arizona. Since moving there in 2005 he bought several houses with each one financing the next. He is currently in default for $94,873 and is basically saying tough luck, I’m not paying. The lender got a court order garnishing his salary, but that was eighteen months ago and he hasn’t heard anything since. “The case is sitting stagnant,” he said. “Maybe it will just go away.” While I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for any bank that would approve this chain of financing, I don’t know if the lender was aware of what the home equity loan was for, but it is Mr. Schlegal’s attitude that disturbs me. He made the decision to do this and he feels it is not his fault. True he will be impacted if he tries to borrow again in the near future, but he doesn’t seem to care. This is reinforced by the commercials flooding the airwaves advising consumers how they can walk away from their credit card debt. How about selling the flat screen TVs and sports cars you purchased on the plastic, and pay it back? Meanwhile our government continues to use your taxes to help people who are over their head pay their mortgages. Why do you have to pay your mortgage and theirs? You were responsible, they were not. The very concept of such a program would have been baffling to the Founding Fathers.
Our current government reinforces the idea of Americans as imbeciles. The mortgage companies took advantage of you, they were predatory lenders, while it was government programs that told the predators to get busy. We have to have more home ownership, we have to help people achieve the American Dream, so Andrew Cuomo at HUD, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the good folks at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who made millions on pushing these products, all pushed these government programs on more people, encouraging them to buy houses they couldn’t afford and when the bubble burst they pointed the finger at everyone but themselves. They believe the American people are helpless idiots who cannot fend for themselves and if by some accident someone does succeed, it is the government’s responsibility to take as much of what they earned by the sweat of their brow and give it to the simpletons they claim to be responsible for. That is a racist, sexist, class warfare point of view that unless our Ivy League educated elites give us our daily instruction, we will shrivel up and die. It is anything but the American Dream.
We see efforts to ban the Pledge of Allegiance because it contains the phrase “under God”; to ban the display of the Ten Commandments in court houses; the ban of religious displays on publicly owned land; and to ban prayer in any form at school graduations, football games or other gatherings. While atheists, a small percentage of the population, do not believe in God, why is another person who believes in God so offensive to them that they can’t bear hearing it? But as faith is driven further and further from the public square, boorish behavior becomes more and more acceptable. There is something to be said about eternal damnation curbing one’s baser appetites than responding to the statement, “You want me to stop it? Make me.” There is something to be said for fulfilling one’s obligations because it is the right thing to do, but the right thing to do does not come from living in the here and now. That is self-gratification. Doing the right thing comes from a set of morals that say, “Character is what we do when no one is watching.” Those who believe in a God believe someone is always watching. Perhaps John Adams said it best:
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
What is racial profiling? I think most people would agree it is where an individual is observed and because of his or her race, some assumptions are made about their behavior. Let’s examine the Louis Gates case
Sergeant Crowley
Sergeant Crowley responded to a call of a possible Breaking and Entering. This was the result of a call to 911 reporting that a passerby and a neighbor saw two men, no race mentioned, attempting to force their way into a house. Crowley, who is white, and two other officers, one black and one Hispanic, responded to the call. Crowley began to investigate and Gates responded belligerently and called Crowley a racist. The altercation moved outside where a crowd began to form. Crowley warned Gates several times that he was becoming disorderly and even showed his handcuffs to make his point. The 911 caller said there was only one person shouting and it was Gates. Crowley is a highly regarded officer who trains other officers regarding racial profiling.
Dr. Gates
Dr. Gates is a well respected professor at Harvard University and had just returned from a long trip and found he was locked out of his house. To be fair, he was probably tired and irritated and having to deal with the issue of being locked out. He and another individual tried to force their way into the house. The witnesses, not knowing it was Gates and concerned about other reported burglaries in the neighborhood called 911. The police arrived, Gates saw that Crowley was white and assumed that Crowley’s being there was racially motivated and proceeded to call him a racist, insult Crowley’s mother, and take the dispute outside the house. So who exactly profiled whom?
Obama
Barack Obama, who was supposed to be the post-racial president really stepped in it, when he said the Cambridge Police acted “stupidly.” Perhaps there is a silver lining. By raising this local issue to national prominence, perhaps we can finally put to rest the battle of racial animosity. Let’s face it, there will always be prejudice. We are wired to be prejudiced. Our survival depends on being able to size someone up quickly as friend or foe and take the appropriate action. It is a natural instinct. However, unlike animals, we have the ability to reason and control our instincts.
This self control has been driven into whites for 40 years. You are guilty. You are racist. You must be re-educated. You’ve got to control yourselves. Has it worked? Well in a country that is still predominantly white, we elected a black man president with 53% of the popular vote. That’s more than Bill Clinton ever got by a long shot. It’s more than either Bush got and for a Democrat you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to find better poll numbers.
On the other hand, minorities have been told for the same period of time, you can’t be a racist, no matter what you say, because you don’t have power (that’s over, with Obama in the White House). It’s not your fault; you are a victim of society. You didn’t get the job because of racism, so let’s throw out the test. There is so much prejudice in this country you can’t get into college unless we put a box on the form to indicate your race and give you a helping hand. It’s not your faul; it’s not your fault. With all that conditioning who could be blamed for throwing the race card whenever there is a bad outcome and the other guy is white? It’s a conditioned reflex.
Playing the Race Card
I taught a graduate course in telecommunications. There was a student, who was black, that I really enjoyed having in my class. He actively participated and really enlivened the discussion. There was one topic that he didn’t seem to grasp and as a result he did poorly on an exam. He asked for a makeup exam, which I granted. My policy was that my makeup exams were notoriously tough. The reason was that the makeup focused on what you got wrong on the first test, and didn’t include a lot of what you got right. If you were going to get another bite at the apple, and you had more time to study and you knew where to focus, I felt that was the only way to be fair to the other students. He did worse on the make-up than on the original test but I took the higher grade of the two. With his other work in the class, he still got a good grade for the course. I later saw him on the elevator and he said to me, “I know why you failed me on those tests. It’s because I’m black.” Everyone took the same test, whites, blacks, Indians, Asians, immigrants, Hispanics, but I was accused of singling him out and failing him because he was black. What I found most interesting was that his body language showed he wasn’t really comfortable using the race card. He said it tentatively, rather than with the outrage some someone truly wronged. It was if someone had coached him to use it. Very sad.
A New Chapter
At the conclusion of today’s beer summit at the White House, they should symbolically take out a card that says RACE in bold letters on it and burn it. This should signal that we are all Americans, and using the race card should be as scorned as racial profiling. Whites have been learning this lesson for forty years; it’s time for everyone else to get the same education. We all have our prejudices. We must not assume that the motive behind every action is racial. Maybe the reason you didn’t get the job is that you weren’t qualified. Maybe the reason you didn’t get into the Ivy League school is that very few people do and your grades were not as good. Maybe the reason you didn’t graduate high school is that you didn’t study. With Barack Obama as President, it’s time to accept that anything is possible in this great country. You have to accept responsibility and work hard. I may not agree with much of what President Obama believes in, but he got to there by working very hard at what worked to get him there. There is no Affirmative Action checkbox in the voting booth.
