Black Lives Matter

The black community has a problem. It comes from both inside and outside itself.

Inside itself, the black community is trapped in a never-ending cycle of self destruction. The rate of black-on-black crime is horrendous. The drug war also seems to have too many young black males trapped, either in jail, or out of jail but unable to find work because of their criminal record.

Outside itself, the police are caught in a different kind of trap. They are supposed to defend blacks from crime, and yet they find themselves facing too many lawless blacks. Admittedly, they shouldn't assume guilt based on color, but they do. It's human nature, which has become even more ingrained by American politics which continues to group people together, as if everyone is the same in certain minority groups.

Racism exists today, but it isn't the vicious kind of previous generations. It isn't KKK lynchings, or laws forcing blacks to the back of the bus. No, today's racism is the benevolent kind. It offers quotas and lowered bars of achievement for those with darker skin. Mind you, not all blacks need this, but it leaves the "other" races looking at black achievers as somewhat less.

Picture a basketball game where a black team plays against a white team. However, the black team's basket is 3 feet lower than the white team's basket. Even if you had a black team full of Michael Jordans, everyone only sees the lower basket. If the blacks win, the response from everyone else is, "Yes, but..."

This creates a taint on black accomplishment. Even President Obama would not have been elected if he wasn't black. Don't believe me? Even if you supported him, ask yourself if you would have voted for him if he was a white man?

There is no quick fix to these problems. Anything we do as a society will take at least a generation to show progress. But there is a way:

"When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"--Martin Luther King Jr.

King gave us the solution: The secret lies in freedom.

When all of us, black and white and brown alike, are all truly free, and no longer slaves to government or crony capitalists, only then can we even hope to move beyond racism, both malevolent and benevolent.

Until we get past the idea that government "fixed" the civil rights problem, when in fact the tyranny of the majority of democratic government WAS the problem. Rosa Parks wasn't told to sit in the back of the bus because it was some kind of racist bus driver. She was in violation of the law. Never forget the civil rights movement was about getting government out of the way of people's rights.

Unfortunately, the civil rights movement turned into a jury-rigged apartheid system, which gave blacks more opportunity, even as it removed accountability, yet our legal system continues to grow into a brutal leviathan. Remember, the more laws there are to enforce, the more we leave it to the discretion of police which ones to enforce, because they are only human. If they abuse their authority, making more laws won't fix it. Creating more bureaucracy just makes it harder for them to do their jobs in the first place.

This is what I mean by freedom. If you want true equality, we have to have a certain amount of faith in our fellow man, regardless of his skin color. Using government to fix that only creates more problems.