Sorry so quiet

My Li’l Bro Thom had a virus last week that kept him miserable and sick for about a week – seems I have it too – there is a whole clammy, room-spinning, can-I-just- puke-now component to the thing, too. Makes the idea of sitting up and reading for more than a few minutes unpalatable. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

I did get up in the wee small hours because of a nightmare – thought I’d read a little to clear my head and ended up reading something that made me forget about nightmares.

I found the story because I was reading Cobb’s take on a piece by Victor Davis Hanson and where Cobb thought the racial-tension train was next headed. The comments are interesting, too.

As I said over at Cobb I don’t know that the horrific story of rape and terrorism at Dunbar Villiage is sexual or particularly “racial” either, although clearly some think so; the story is about power.

That a place like Dunbar Village exists outside of a wealthy coastal enclave is pretty much par for the course. If you move beyond the edges of The Hamptons, or Malibu, you will find poverty and crime, and it is the same in all of the great cities; just beyond the beautiful boulevards of Paris, one finds what some might call “near third world” squalor, ditto Rome, London, Vienna. Lately, in those cities the poor have changed from native to immigrant (African, Asian and Eastern European). In Vienna the further you walk from the city center, the less Wienerschnitzel you see, the more Shish-ka-bob, in Dublin, you can find as much Tandoori chicken as mashed potatoes, as immigrants settle in and bring their energy and talents to start businesses.

In America, unfortunately, while our immigrants routinely prosper, the poorest neighborhoods remain the African-American ones and the folks in those neighborhoods are the embedded pawns in a socio-political tug-of-war in which it seems like nobody actually has the best interests of the people in mind and opportunists simply wish to exploit their plights to further their own agendas. Witness Al Sharpton’s rush to distort the Dunbar Village issue and make this horrible story more about himself and his agendas as he stirs his usual pot.

It seems to me that the folks living in places like Dunbar Village, where they are terrorized daily by marauding fiends, are in a similar boat as the people of England who dare not leave their houses after dark for fear of the yobs who have taken over their streets, thanks to the ineffectual police who are themselves restricted in how they may respond, due to loose policies. In both places and cases the absence of intact families, coupled with a dependency-mindset actually encouraged by government, have wrought something which ought not be tolerated in a sane society. The behavior should not be tolerated, nor should the social-conditioning that fosters it. And in that sense, we have all helped create yobs and Dunbar Villages, when we have handed over our control and our common sense to government, and not insisted upon common standards of acceptable behavior.

One wonders why it is that in the cases of the Yobs of class-conscious England and the Dunbar Villiages in America, these native-born folks cannot pull themselves ahead as the poorest of immigrants routinely manage to do. I think perhaps it is because the immigrants have never been told by their new countries “you can’t, so don’t even try. You’re limited in what you can accomplish so we’ll just take care of you.” That “compassionate” and spirit-killing message has been taken to heart by too many; it has been destructive.

And perhaps that is why “yes we can,” chanted over and over (with nothing substantial behind it) is managing to sway people. Part of the American Dream is the notion of personal empowerment. If the message you have absorbed for several decades is one of “low expectations” then whether you are a black American or a “lower class” white Anglo you’re going to look for power where you can find it, and if someone says they’ll help you attain it, well that’s attractive-sounding.

All of this reminds me that I meant to link to Villainous Company and her piece on race relations, last week. It’s a good read.

Rachel Lucas has more about Sharpton and the Dunbar Village story.

And sorry but I must head back to bed. I hope this is not totally incoherent.