Maybe I should say, "Some" blacks have separated themselves from America. Or, "Most" blacks have separated themselves from America. This is an opinion blog with some research and facts thrown in with my personal experiences. I am reflecting on two events of the last couple of weeks, one being my high school class reunion and the other being Glenn Beck's incredible rally. That being said, I also have a dream. My dream resembles Glenn Beck's dream of an America united around the founding principles. Failures aside, the dream of the founding principles is the goal and always has been, at least to me. This is why I believe Glenn Beck is finding so much support from mainstream Americans who believe in and strive for that dream.
Whatever else Martin Luther King had on his agenda, his words of "judging the content of character, not the color on one's skin," resonated with all Americans in his day and today. Those words sum up the entire perception I had of his struggle for rights. Those words are what I thought the struggle was about. It was later, as the years have gone on, that I have realized those words are not what the majority of blacks in America were wanting or heard. Evidently. I say that because those words are not what blacks have attempted to achieve. The goal post shifted from those words. King's march and speech became a platform for angry blacks to achieve reparations and elevated status far more divisive than uniting. The words we thought were so inspiring to bring us together became an avenue for blackmailing the country into a guilt complex and a chip on the shoulder of every black in the country who views himself or herself as a victim of white Americans. Equal justice has been twisted into social justice or racial justice. Equal opportunity has become racial quotas. Equal opportunity has become affirmative action. Pursuit of happiness has become a perverted government guarantee of something, anything, just name it.
I just returned from my high school class reunion. I grew up in the 50's and 60's in a small town in Ohio. I went to an integrated school. There were middle class blacks all through school who were from most walks of life. My black classmates shared the same education as I, shared the same access to everything in town, shared in every available activity. No one was barred from anything. I don't remember black classmates walking around with a chip on their shoulders expecting whites to feel guilty and bow down to them for their victim-hood. As people tend to do, people gathered in groups of friends who had things in common. And as with any town in any place there were cliques of people, if you classify people into groups. It was in the 50's I did notice social barriers of a sort regarding marriage between races, but other than this, I can not think of any other perceived restrictions. And in fairness to even that, those social barriers were put in place by generations of both blacks and whites. It wasn't a one way street. There were very likable and friendly middle class blacks we saw every day.
Sadly, by the middle of the 1960's with the race riots going on in the South, the attitudes were beginning to change with our black classmates and the blacks in town. Now here is the rub: we were in the North, and our area was known as a conduit for the underground railroad during the Civil War. Our area was full of abolitionist history It was always a point of pride as I grew up and reminders of that from our teachers were part of our education. But, by the 1960's, the oppression and subsequent riots of blacks in the South was permeating the attitude of the blacks in the North. Blacks were beginning to look at whites as the enemy, no matter where in the country they lived. The controversies of the day did not escape our little town.
So I went back to this reunion thinking our black classmates would be there. One in particular, who was always in my homeroom, was a girl I always liked. I was looking forward to catching up with her and finding out how her life had been going. No show. Not one black classmate showed up. Not one. The great divide has happened and they no longer believe they are part of what was once an integrated and fully functioning, united society. The town I grew up in was not the oppressive South, but yet the attitudes of all blacks in America have now been tainted and spoiled by a victim mentality that didn't previously exist in that town. We had a reunion. They didn't show up.
I've seen the good and the bad and the ugly regarding race in this country over my lifetime. Apparently the bad and the ugly has triumphed over the good. There are websites and media outlets making some kind of big deal that there were few blacks at Glenn Beck's rally. But blacks were invited. All could go and relish the messages there just as white people could. There were no exclusionary rules. For some reason, a majority of blacks don't choose to participate in the American dream of unity in the founding principles. They are on a conflicting mission, one that does not fit into the American dream. Their mission is the Obama message of social justice, the Sharpton message, the Congressional Black Caucus message, or the reparations message, or the affirmative action message, or whatever it is they are hearing from the Marxist left.
Race has become a worse divider of America than it was, under the victim mentality indoctrinated into the black population. That is why, if you disagree with some Marxist black political agenda, you are called a racist. It doesn't have to be this way. And in one town in the North where I grew up, it didn't used to be this way. This is my lament.
