Not so random thoughts of the day

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Via Shane Atwell:

Check out this approx. 4-1/2 minute video on Chicago residents fed up with the Great Society welfare machine of Democrat pols, unions and failed liberal policies.

Community resident Paul McKinley says, “Everything in Chicago is controlled by the Democratic party. Everything in my community is controlled by Black Democrats. There is no Tea Party in my community. There is no Republicans. So they can’t blame the Tea Party.” Later, he says, “I tell you that the liberal agenda is not the black agenda, it is not the family agenda, and it is not the American agenda.”

This video and what these folks were saying reminded us of our experiences in the black community here in San Diego.

Our job on the waterfront has afforded us the opportunity to play in shipyard leagues over the years. In our first season, many, many moons ago, we played on a team of all white staff engineers in a predominately black and latino league. We did alright and held our own with ourselves and our boy, "Tommy Gun" leading the way (everyone hated playing us because "those white boys be shootin' that ball!"). We didn't get the team back together the following year, so we were, more or less, recruited to play on one of the other teams the following year.

From then on, we were pretty much the only white player on whatever team we happened to be playing on. It was an eye-opening experience, though, for reasons you may not have expected.

At least once or twice a year, our team would get together to cook out, most of the time at Mission Bay where we would pot-luck it. Perhaps some of whatever grilling prowess we possess stemmed from the fact that we did not want to get embarrassed in front our brothers when it came to grillin'.

We're getting to the point, trust us: the conversations we had were fascinating. Amid all the ribbing and smack-talk, there would be openings of somewhat serious discussion about our families and where we came from and how we were reared. Mild competition arose over who had it tougher as a kid. We mostly listened as who wants to hear about growing up in North Orange County whose family's idea of austerity was focusing on school, church, youth sports and Dad's Sunday evening home-cooked dinner extravaganzas at the expense of dining out, vacations to Hawai'i or trips to Disneyland, though that may have won the Riehm family some medals for our particular demographic there in Placentia because it seemed all our neighbors were having all that fun.

Shorter: if you had a transcript of those conversations and cleaned up the language, you'd've sworn it was a bunch of cranky old white men talking about who had it worse. These were not the conversations envisioned by rich white liberals rather, without the political rhetoric, they were conversations about family, commitment, fishing, of course, and "doing the right thing". Mind you, these guys weren't angels but, they knew. They knew. Amid their own self-inflicted wounds of perhaps fathering children out of wedlock and other indiscretions, these guys all knew what was expected of them as grown men and none of it ever involved getting help from some other entity. Though, perhaps, their actions did not always reflect it, they were grown-ass men and knew they had to produce... for their children, for their family and for their bosses at the yard

We think the word has been trivialized and cartoon-ized but we believe there is a simple honor in machismo. There is a singularity and dignity in that word that says, "No, I got this. Thanks for the offer but this one is mine".

All the above, of course, is at odds with the modern statist welfare complex which has succeeded in infantilizing and apologizing for two, maybe three now, generations of black males. My friends, my teammates are fighting against a near-irreversible tide of culture that is stacked against establishing functioning nuclear families, functioning schools and functioning communities.

If we were, say, a 70 year-old black male living in inner-city Chicago, we'd probably be in a blind rage at this point knowing that the welfare state of LBJ's Great Society, for whatever good it had intended, had transformed into a a self-sustaining monetary black hole that, in reality, preyed upon and thus profited from the misery of the very people it had set out to help.

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