tinyurl.com/7w2tr -> www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/StarParker/2005/10/17/171486.html
Contact Us Townhall Spotlight Jason Apuzzo Jason Apuzzo Jason Apuzzo is a writer/director living in Los Angeles and a founder of the Liberty Film Festival, Hollywoods first conservative film festival.
A Louis Farrakhan's "Millions More Movement" explains on its Web site that "It's time for our leadership to stop acting solely on behalf of our chu rches, mosques, temples, synagogues, and organizations. It is time for u s as leaders to come together and begin to think, plan, and act on behal f of the whole of our people." What it should really say: "When the Republican president's polls get sha ky, it's time for the demagogues to come to Washington." Do poor blacks really need to hear "millions more" excuses why black men can't be faithful to one woman and be responsible for the children they bear? Or why they can't get an education because white people hate us? Do poor blacks really need another venue for hip-hop multimillionaires to explain, in four-letter epithets, that blacks suffer because George W Bush doesn't care about them? This while these moguls get richer by the day peddling black booty on BET, inspiring black kids to live the life t hat guarantees to keep them poor? Despite Farrakhan's supposed objective to "empower" poor folks, he should understand, as more and more blacks are beginning to understand, that h e, and other long-standing traditional black leaders, really promote qui te the opposite. Poor blacks do not need to be "mobilized" to turn even more responsibilit y for their lives over to others. They need to go to school and take car e of their families. The place where this needs to take place is within a couple-mile radius of where they live. It certainly won't take place o n the National Mall in Washington. Blacks mobilized on the Mall in Washington in 1963 because there were leg itimate claims then that government was not doing its job to ensure for black citizens the constitutional protections of life, liberty and prope rty. The Constitution was amended after the Civil War to solve this problem. B ut, unfortunately, the number of laws a nation needs is directly proport ional to the amount of evil present. A hundred years after the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment, ensuring protection and due process for all citizens, blacks were still not getting it. This reality crystallized the civil-rights movement in the 1960s. Martin Luther King defined the problem and the challenge in his unforg ettable address on the Mall in 1963. The result was more legislation, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Righ ts Act. These laws went the extra mile to ensure blacks their needed pro tections. Nor can law ensure that a c hild will grow up to be a responsible adult. In a free society, governme nt does not, and cannot, act as a parent. Government can't ensure that b lack kids will become nuclear physicists. The work that blacks need to do in Washington today is to reduce governme nt interference with black individual lives, families and communities to solve our own problems. We need to increase the freedom we have to choo se how to educate our children and to increase the control we have over our income and savings. When black leaders suggest that we need government to do more than ensure our protection, they sound like the very racists who supposedly cause o ur problems. It may be news to Farrakhan, and perhaps to other black leaders, that bla cks are unique and individual human beings. It does not empower black citizens when they hear from th eir leaders that they are not unique individuals but racial objects. Am I suggesting that blacks in America today do not have to contend with the burden of racism? What I do claim is that the mo st damaging racism in our community is what it hears from its own leader s It is the message that black citizens cannot and should not be treate d as free and personally responsible individuals. Black problems today are in individual hearts, minds and homes. The only reason to go to Washington is to g et rid of existing barriers to allowing this to happen. Stark Parker is President of Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education.
Cut the pork" The victims of Katrina sacrificed much to the storm. You, their fellow ci tizens, sacrificed time and money to help them recover. It is not too mu ch to ask Congress to sacrifice its pork for one year.
jpg Divided they fall by Jennifer Roback Morse (Oct 17, 2005) Small children going between two households have to devote energy and ingenuity trying to figure out what to do.
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