Barack H's Race Speech

Let's take Barack H's advice and start a discussion about race in America. If Barack H really wants to have a discussion about race, then he'd better let people of ALL races speak without screaming RACISM towards every white person that mentions the ills of black culture in America. When Barack H told the world that his white grandmother had made statements in his adolescence that "made him cringe" maybe he should step back and take an objective look as to WHY she felt the way she did. When Jeremiah Wright's comments are defended by those in the black community (and by holier-than-thou white liberals), one of the first things they say is that Reverend Wright came from a different era and that is where his beliefs stem from. Is that an acceptable argument then, to defend the nervous grandmother who walks past a black man on the street who is dressed like he's straight out of prison? The black people today are NOT the black people of his grandmother's day. The black people in this country are being thrown to the wayside and used as political pawns by those who claim to be their advocates. In black neighborhoods (like the one I live in) you see the effects of government dependency on a daily basis and it becomes clear as to why these ghettos continue to grow and get more dangerous. Hartford Connecticut, with a population of a mere 124,512, is the 2nd poorest city in the United States based on percentage of the population living below the poverty level. 31% of all residents of Hartford live below the poverty level, while 44% of all Hartford's children fall into that same category. Why is this? Corruption, government dependency, unions, and failing social program after failing social program. Since 1989, poverty in Hartford County has increased 44%. As quoted in the New York Times from a 1996 article, "Hartford officials say the city already has too many social service agencies, which they say scare away the middle class, hurt businesses and shrink the tax base." At least someone understood it. When you create dependents, you teach whole communities that as long as they wake up in the morning, they will be taken care of and do not have to do a thing for themselves. Like the article said, the tax base shrinks. When you have an entire community receiving tax money, instead of contributing to the tax revenue, how does a city sustain itself? You need outside people to see potential in your city and they will invest. When people see that this investment is a losing game, they go elsewhere. So now, Hartford is a city that needs state money all the time, with a population that has more of a chance of serving jail time before they turn 18 then they do of graduating high school. After all, why would they see any need to get an education when they know that they will get the government to do everything for them anyway? So these kids now have no sense of responsibility, they see all their friends making fast money selling drugs and joining violent street gangs, and suddenly that becomes their culture - totally void of any sense of duty, only a sense of entitlement. Now that these kids make money fast on the street, they see their idols in rap videos and in people like Malcolm X. They do not have any other education on any other topic or any other context for the small bits of information they have picked up along the way so they really do begin to believe that they are KEPT down by evil whites, when really, its the social programs that they have let themselves become slaves to. I talked to a puerto rican man who had $5,000 saved up. Instead of going out and buying his family a quality health plan for the year, he bought chrome rims for his car, and still told me that I was being prejudice by wanting to "deny" minorities access to health care. Even though I said nothing of the sort, that is what he heard. No one is denying anyone anything! The $5,000 that he had was his key to health coverage! It's the same $5,000 that the white guy in suburbia had to pay, its the same $5,000 that the black priest had to pay, and its the same $5,000 that HE could have paid! So by calling everyone racist by not wanting to give more money to programs that fail, the issues are never addressed and therefore they exacerbate the problem. For example, in Hartford now, they are PAYING students with TAX money to attend school (http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Pay+kids+to+attend+school%3F-a0143827857)!! Well, I attended all my years of school, can i deduct that from my taxes next year? Check out former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's idea on how to get poor inner city kids to go to school (http://newt.org/MediaCenter/tabid/61/Default.aspx). Even if the kids did go to school, the quality of their education has rapidly declined over time. If we can just deal with the reality that the teachers unions refuse to take a fundamental look at the way these schools operate, at the expense of generations of children, then maybe we have a starting point to talk about Barack H's favorite subject, "CHANGE." Speaker Gingrich points out, that by spending money on a dysfunctional system, it does not fix the broken system, it just becomes a BIGGER dysfunctional system. For example, in Detroit, the public school system is one of the most HIGHLY FUNDED in the country yet it is ranked as one of the WORST school systems in America. By throwing money at a broken system, that just funds a BROKEN system! It is like trying to fix a broken chair. If your chair only has 3 legs, you know it is broken and something needs to be done. But if you just double the size of the 3-legged chair, it is still unable to perform its primary function (aka it's STILL broken). What you have to do is CHANGE the configuration of the chair - you have to start from scratch and build a FUNCTIONAL chair! So when an outside company tried to put $200 million into the school system and create more schools to give parents a choice, the teachers' union RAN them out of town and cried RACISM. They argued that the whites want to come in and put themselves in charge of education the blacks. Now that the company left without investing, are the Detroit students better off? Did running that investor out of town HELP your schools? Was he a racist? Or was the mere fact that he was WHITE and tried to HELP, enough for them to call him a racist? I say the kind of change that Barack H needs is the kind that is based in reality, not in the cynical view that all whites are inherently racist. I, for one, am SO FAR from being a racist. I have many black friends currently and in the past and ANY one of them can tell you that I couldn't care less about skin color. But if I ever tried to bring this topic up in a public forum in Hartford, I probably would never have even gotten past the first sentence. This is just a skimming of some of the important topics that need to be discussed on how to help the underprivileged in our society. There are an infinite number of topics that I didn't even get to, such as entrepreneur spirit and how no one in the ghettos even can fathom the notion that they CAN do ANYTHING...putting incentives to finish school, not guaranteeing that all will be okay if they don't finish....changing the way the court system processes people as if they were numbers, and changing the jails to EDUCATE the imprisoned, instead of breeding violence....and on and on.. That was a rant, and didn't go into alot of detail. The detail will come in later postings, but i just needed to get the word out to JUST SAY NO to the disparity that Barack H preaches and calls it "hope." JUST SAY NO to the nonsensical types of changes that Barack H calls for....and especially JUST SAY NO to Socialism in America - Government programs never work, only competing private enterprise does.