By Irene Starkehaus -
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Mike Madigan, Rahm Emanuel – for them, the problems that tear apart our society may be different, but the solutions are always the same. And the process flow chart is always deliberately circular. Construct a crisis. Devise new regulations. Find a scape goat. Raise taxes. Divert funds to special interests. Circumvent reform. Wait for a new election cycle. Rinse. Repeat.
John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Robert Dold, Mark Kirk – for them, the problems that tear apart our society can't be solved, so they must cooperate with the circular flow and not to become the latest scapegoat. They must pay lip service to the artifice that displaces reform so they can share control with the powerbrokers. They must then manage the decline and hope for a soft landing. They must behave with measured reason to indicate their willingness to compromise. They must tolerate a system devoid of morality because so many people have their hands out waiting for their share of the ill-gotten gains that it would be impossible to change.
Conservatives need to be the true voice of reason against this insanity.
Steven Crowder is a former standup comedian turned conservative pundit who has done some very impressive videos documenting the decline, decay and abject poverty reigning supreme in Detroit, MI. Here is his latest video about Detroit in which he responds to criticism that his previous videos were cherry picked to portray Detroit badly while ignoring the city's bustling success stories:
Anecdotally speaking, I can attest to the fact that Crowder has in no way misrepresented the devastation of Detroit. I spent some time there two years ago. The blight is real. Even the business district looks like a war zone. Where one building stands tall as a shining example of ingenuity and prosperity, the ones on either side almost invariably look like a bomb went off. The city spent a fortune revitalizing the waterfront, and it is beautiful. If you happen to be there after the sun goes down (which I was, unfortunately) it is not as beautiful. It's more akin to Taiz, Yemini.
I understand that IR readers already know this, but it bears repeating. The failure of Detroit is not just a philosophical model of progressivism's final solution…although, it is that too. America's inner cities are not pawns in a chess game of legislative give and take where representatives dicker over the degree of bankruptcy and therefore the amount of collateral damage.
The failure has a very real, very human face, and that is all you need to know in order to demand an end to the insanity.
"My demons won today." These were the final words of BLM activist MarShawn McCarrel before he fatally shot himself on the statehouse steps in Columbus, OH in early February. There's an article about his suicide and the growing depression of young black students that appeared in the Washington Post on February 15, 2016.
The article – as is typical – goes on to lay the blame for his death and the death of other young black students on the police and white people who can't understand institutional racism. Rather than offering anything remotely resembling introspection, the article pandered to its audience.
I read this piece. I read it and I wanted to take umbrage…so many legitimate reasons to be offended by the blame, the hostility, the violence, the waste. The stupid, useless waste of human life. Real people dying at the altar of political and journalistic laziness. I wanted sit down and I wanted to write a post that blasted the mischaracterization of the police. I wanted to rail. I wanted to return that slap of my own face and the faces of other scapegoats tenfold.
I started to, but then I stopped because I was suddenly overtaken by sadness over this young man who never stood a chance. So, I wept for MarShawn McCarrel. I wept for the loss of this unique, irreplaceable person who did not need to die. There were better options that lived outside the prison of inequity that BLM builds around itself, and I wept that MarShawn McCarrel could not even begin to envision solutions or opportunities that were not somehow connected to grievance politics.
There will never be another MarShawn McCarrel, and ghost of his wasted potential screams louder than I ever could.
Using Black Lives Matter as one of many examples; because you are a conservative, sometimes real, despairing human faces look at you with a fury that is as breathtaking as it is undeserved because everything that they were promised by their representatives and mentors ends up looking like Detroit.
To this end, I understand how frustrated you feel, how tempted you are to let them reap the fruits of their own exploitation. You, as a conservative, have every right to wonder why you are the one being blamed when you told everyone what would happen if we continued to kick the can down the road.
There's a soul killing rage being directed at you by the people drowning in the undertow of progressivism. That rage seeks to categorize you, war against you, spew violence against everything in its wake. The rage exists because you won't drown too – this is the only natural outcome that is possible unless we change our approach as conservatives.
Conservatives need to recoil against those who continue to pretend to offer a helping hand and then use the opportunity to hold heads under water, who compartmentalize the people of Detroit, the people of Harlem, the people of Chicago's south side, the people of every inner city that's run by Democrats as a means to their own political ends.
These human faces – they are not chattel to be used and sold out. Each and every individual who believes he has no chance because the game is rigged must be given the opportunity to understand that equality does belong to him. Already. It's there. It is his birthright. No one has to give it. No one is in charge of empowerment. There's nothing mystical or faraway about it.
Each and every individual who believes he has no chance because the game is rigged must also be given the opportunity to understand that prosperity will never be achieved by negotiating paths to half-citizenship.
Free education, free housing, free cell phones, free food – these may feel like just desserts for a person who believes himself to have been shafted, but only for a little while. It may feel like it's the least that society can do. It may feel like historical inconsistencies in the protection of liberty demand reparation, but eventually the "free and equitable" that liberals redistribute start to feel like the chains that they are, and like the chains that progressives intend them to be.
Long ago, conservatives ceded inner cities, education and the culture to progressives as territory too far gone to recover.
Perhaps as conservatives, we become frustrated because the task before us seems insurmountable. For every one young person that can be brought out of the slavery of progressivism, there will be hundreds more that will fall to gangs or feminism or BLM. It begs the question; what difference can I make?
There is that story. I'm sure you know it.
A young man is walking along a beach on which thousands and thousands of starfish have washed ashore. He sees an old man, walking slowly and stooping often, picking up one starfish after another and tossing each back into the ocean.
"Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" he asks.
"Because the sun is up and the tide is going out and if I don't throw them further in they will die."
"But, old man, don't you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it! You can't possibly save them all, you can't even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won't make any difference at all."
The old man listened calmly and then bent down to pick up another starfish and threw it into the sea. "It made a difference to that one."
It might too have made a difference to MarShawn McCarrel.
