The other day I wrote about Tim Wise

and his so-called anti racist activism.

I have been looking around for a while and I see a lot more conservative Blacks running around and getting elected.

I suppose that is a good thing in that it sort of makes the race card that has been played get a lot less credibility, but it might be a pretty good time to look at who the racists very well might be.

The liberals under the guise of various social programs have made it so that getting an education is not necessary for a lot of people. It's a whole lot easier to get knocked up and sit on the dole for the rest of your life, and in many cases one will live a whole lot better than a lot of us who bust their asses for a living.

It's human nature of a sort to take the path of least resistance and I think that it would be a lot easier to simply get on the welfare rolls and skate through life doing little or nothing. Why not?

Sleeping in sounds pretty good to me and so does being half bombed all the time. Start the day with a 40 and go and hang out somewhere and eat a pretty good meal on the taxpayers dime. Not that bad of a deal.

It gets generational and there are some out there that actually think that everyone gets a government check.

I listen to Brother Jesse, Al and a few others talking about keeping the black man down and that's a crock.

The country is full of successful blacks everywhere you turn. Look at the Marine Corps. The Black population is about 11% and the Corps runs about 20% Black. Being a good Marine is a damned hard row to hoe, yet there are a disproportionate number of Blacks that are damned good Marines.

A while ago I was talking to a truly polished older attorney that had come out of the deep south and we swapped notes regarding the changes we have seen over the years. He is a Black gentleman that had come up hardscrabble, yet here he was. He was a polished, well respected professional. He briefly told me of his highest hopes as a child. They were possibly getting on at the local mill of some type. They actually hired Blacks from time to time.

His shot at life came when he got drafted and decided to make the best of it. He completed high school in the service and spent 2 years in Germany where he saw a lot and learned. From there he went on to college and paid close attention to what would be expected of him in a world he had been able to even dream of a couple of years earlier.

He went for it and he made it.

I mentioned collecting quarters for the Freedom Riders in the sixties and he seemed genuinely impressed.

Then I looked at him and smirked and said that I didn't collect the quarters for him to be able to just wander into the mahogany paneled smoking room and drink brandy in cut crystal and smoke cigars.

He gave me a perplexed look when I said that.

I told him that there were things a guy has earn on his own and that he had done it all by himself.

He looked seriously at me and I chucked that I wasn't welcome in the paneled room even though my roots go as far back as the Pilgrims, yet there he was. God bless him for that.

I never aspired for such things, which I suppose is fine because I'm happy where I am.

Thinking about that tonight and thinking about that Tim Wise malcontent I wrote about a couple of days ago makes me wonder who really is keeping the Black man down.

I think it damned well may be the liberal part of American society for enabling so many people to skate through life.

Sure, seeing some lazy bum being supported by the sweat of the working stiff irks me, and it irks me to no end, but there is another thing that irks me even more. It's the waste of talent out there sitting around and doing nothing at taxpayer expense.

If the welfare rolls were slashed there would be a lot more people out there that were forced to work and, given half of an opportunity many would succeed. They wouldn't get rich, but they would at least be self sustaining and be able to take care of themselves.

A number of them would figure out that education and drive will make them a little more comfortable and they would strive to get ahead. In the process, some would become very successful and do a lot to making this country a better place to live. They would get their pride back.

Society as a whole would gain as there would be another group out there chasing the American Dream on their own. The sky would be their limit.

Truth of the matter is that World War Two did more for the Black man than any other thing I can think of. It took young men and put them in places they never had even heard of and gave them more responsibility than they had thought possible. Many of them became NCOs and a few of them were actually commissioned which says a lot because Jim Crow was one of the biggest Sad Sacks in the military at the time.

When you think of some sharecroppers son as a platoon sergeant or First Sergeant, it ain't a bad deal at all. It opened a lot of eyes. Running a company or a platoon is a lot of responsibility. Many people don't know that the famed 'Red Ball Express' that supplied the troops in Europe was about three-quarters Black.

The NCOs had to come from somewhere and they came from the ranks of the men who drove the trucks to the front.

When the war ended, they were entitled to the same GI bill everyone else was and some of them used it to further themselves. Having done things in the service, many of the more ambitious were steeled with confidence and a willingness to get ahead. Having been shot at, they were not so easily scared, either.

Of course, progress was slow and grudging, but it was genuine. It was the real progress that was merit based unlike the false kind instilled by quotas and minority recruiting. It was rough, but coupled with the doings of Dr King an entire race was on the move toward self-improvement. We Shall Overcome was an anthem to many Blacks and a lot of supporting whites at the time and many Blacks did in fact overcome the blatant racism of the time. It was a rough time in the history of the nation.

Those World War 2 veterans and their kids faced some pretty rough treatment under the likes of Bull Conner, George Wallace and others and still had the guts to sstand their ground. I respect them to this day.

I'm proud that as a kid I collected a couple of bucks in quarters to have tried help make it possible.

In the middle ot this President Lyndon Johnson decided to declare war on poverty and started in with a number of social programs enabling many people to sluff off a bit. In a way, it split a race between those that wanted to get ahead and those that wanted to skate and in my mind set the roots for the entire entitlement mentality of the nation.

We spent a lot of money and ten years later the same people that were poor before the War on Poverty was declared were still poor. It had done nothing, and in fact we were poorer for it because a lot of people had hopped on the government handout.

Of course, all of the people that jumped on the skate wagon were not Black. There are more whites collecting than there are Blacks, but the percentages among Blacks tends to be higher.

Frankly, I think that the people that are keeping the Black man down are the politicians that keep enabling people to get by doing nothing. It's keeping a lot of people that could be self supporting down and dependent.

It's also depriving us of capable citizens of all walks of life, from laborers to doctors to mechanics and plumbers to scientists and engineers because maybe if these people were forced off of welfare and started to shift for themselves many of them would become something and if not you can bet their kids would.

Somewhere in the welfare rolls sits a young person that would make a pretty good nurse or a guy that could create an amazing new way of doing things, but it won't happen so long as the person is sitting on their ass collecting.

It's the Brother Jesses and Al and the Tim Wises and the people in office that are keeping people down.

Then again, I may just have a little more faith in people than our so-called leaders.

If it makes me racist by wanting to put people in a position where people have a golden opportunity to carve their own path and plot their own course than I guess I'll just have to live with it.



my other blog is:http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/