Real People, Real Kids

The road not taken . . . let’s not forget that Michael Brown did have a choice . . . “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” Sounds good, except that the best available evidence is that Michael Brown never raised his hands in surrender nor did he say those words.
The facts are that he was high on marijuana when he robbed the convenience store. He assaulted the policeman, Darren Wilson, who shot and killed him only after Michael Brown stupidly tried to disarm the policeman, fought with him for his gun and then, after getting shot in the hand, Michael Brown first ran from the car and inexplicably turned and charged the policeman. I can only assume that the poor young man was so high on drugs that he didn’t know what he was doing. My assessment of the demonstrators and their supporters (including the Congressional Black Caucus) is much less generous. Sad to say, truthfulness and law and order apparently are relative concepts to many of our leaders and yes, they do know what they are doing, and yes, they are responsible for the rhetoric they are spewing. (take note Al Sharpton, et al. at some point all of our chickens do come home to roost)

My hope is that the tide is turning . . . honest Americans are speaking out . . .

Charles Barkley, former great NBA basketball player and current NBA television game analyst referenced Ferguson recently: “Those who are looting, those aren’t real black people, those are scumbags. Real black people, they’re not out there looting. . . I’m not saying who is right or wrong . . . I know I’m black, but I’m going to try to always be honest and fair–we have to be really careful with the cops. If it wasn’t for the cops, we’d be living in the wild wild west in our neighborhoods. We can’t pick out certain incidents that don’t go our way and act like the cops are all bad. I hate when we do that. . . do you know how bad some of these neighborhoods would be if it wasn’t for the cops? . . . and I ain’t backing down . . .”

Joe Scarborough, MSMBC host of Morning Joe, said that he was sick and tired of the Ferguson protests because they are based on lies. Joe started out complaining about the St. Louis Rams players arriving to play ball on Sunday with their hands up, an obvious show of support for Ferguson protestors. Joe and his guests repeatedly referred to Michael Brown as a thug, and said that white people are also mistreated by the police and that the protests are centered on a lie regarding Brown’s hands being raised when he was shot. Joe asserted that 95% of Americans share his opinion of the Ferguson looting and burning.

So was Michael Brown a bully? Do most of us see through the Ferguson charade that has our president and attorney general on high alert: Michael Brown certainly looked like a bully in the video him using his bulk to intimidate a much smaller man in the convenience store as he robbed him. Did Michael Brown respond appropriately to questions from law enforcement? Nope, he cursed at the policeman (thereby drawing attention to himself) by refusing to get out of the middle of the road. Sounds like a guy spoiling for a fight to me. It could be that college students aren’t to be included in the ranks of those who are fed up with the race wars that our administration is trying to generate . . .

Georgeton University student, Oliver Friedfeld, in an op-ed for his college paper, asserted the following: “I can hardly blame the two kids who robbed me” because of the economic disparity between me (white privilege) and them (black poverty). “I trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me,” continued the college senior. Perhaps young Oliver’s parents who are paying $60,000 plus annually for their son to attend Georgetown University might have a different opinion. Having just recently paid for a college education for my son, I can tell you that I didn’t work for years to save the money to send my kid to college to have him state: “I don’t blame black kids who steal from me because I’m white and they’re not!” Does Oliver even realize how insulting his words are to the vast majority of blacks who would never ever consider stealing from others as a way of life? One wonders, does Oliver Friedfeld have any limits at all to his generosity with other people’s money or has he completely gone over to the dark side and become an utter ‘progressive?’ If the young men who mugged Oliver had gone online and stolen all of this year’s tuition, would the young man have continued to maintain that it was ‘okay for them to steal from me because I live in a million dollar house and they don’t?’ If they’d beaten him about the head and face as Michael Brown did to Darren Wilson, would Oliver have asserted, ‘well, I can’t blame them because they’re black and I’m not . . .

Roy Ortiz (per his own words) has lived and worked illegally in the United States for seventeen years. He is now suing Colorado first responders who risked their own lives to rescue him last September when he became trapped in his car during a flash flood. Mr. Ortiz’s words exemplify what appears to have gone awry in our country.On Sept. 12, 2013 Ortiz’s vehicle was washed off the road, and the rushing waters flipped the car upside down. Several other cars followed Mr. Ortiz off the road that day. Mr. Ortiz first called his wife, and then called 9-1-1. It took North Metro Fire Rescue about one hour to bring Ortiz to safety after they received his 9-1-1 call requesting help. Ortiz now claims that rescuers were negligent in their duty because they should have extracted him from his car more quickly. Besides, it was God who saved his life, he contends. Ortiz, who reports that he also works as a minister of the gospel, spoke to Denver news sources: “Well, I’m happy. I’m really happy to be alive…But I’m looking for some help with my bills. I don’t have the money to pay.” He and his lawyer are requesting 500K toward the 40K medical bill. Yeah, the numbers don’t add up, but personal injury lawyers don’t come cheap, and we are planning to soak the American taxpayer here, aren’t we?

Could it be that the reason many ‘average Americans” don’t have the money to pay personal bills is not because they’re financially imprudent, but because our government has become increasingly so? At the school district where I was employed there came a day (back in ’09, I believe), when school psychologists and educational diagnosticians were told to buy all of the testing equipment that we possibly could. No constraints related to need or usefulness to the district were put on the purchases, as this was federal stimulus money and had to be spent within 30 days. One item purchased by my district was a new van that one of the special education supervisors then spent an additional 50K to modify. When I told her that I had a friend who refurbished RVs that had been repossessed from private citizens due to the economic downturn and that he could likely provide her with at least four vans for that price, her response was: It doesn’t matter what it costs! This is federal money!

My former sister-in-law (a naturalized American originally from Monterrey, Mexico who became a citizen when she married my brother) perfectly exemplifies the sense of entitlement that is fostered by those in political power today. About twenty years ago, Karen borrowed a shiny new car from a dealership in McAllen, Texas to take it out for a test drive. She then failed to return it. Two weeks later, my brother received a call from police in Victoria requesting that he come and retrieve his wife and two young daughters from the local lock-up. It seems that Karen, who had been absent from home for over a month at that point, had been arrested for driving a stolen vehicle. Reportedly, the following dialogue ensued:

Sheriff (investigating the presence of a stolen car in his town): Ma’am, are you aware that the car that you are driving was reported as stolen when it wasn’t returned within 24 hours? Now there’s a warrant out for your arrest. And both of your babies are crying, ma’am.

Karen: That is utterly ridiculous. My girls are crying because you stopped us and they are afraid of the police. And I did not steal this car. I borrowed it because I needed a new car.

It is my understanding that my brother was more than willing to allow his then wife to suffer the consequences of her actions, but as he was worried about his kids, he took off from work and motored to Victoria and posted bail for Karen. After retrieving his wife, he picked up his daughters who were being cared for by the wife of the sheriff at her personal home and expense. When my brother offered to pay her for the girls’ food and the new clothing the grandmotherly lady had bought them from Target, the woman told my brother that she had once thought that she’d seen it all, but his wife had convinced her otherwise. “Your daughters are beautiful, and I wish I could do more for you and them. But you’d better keep your money,” she said, “because I’m afraid that you’re going to need it.” And what did Karen have to say about her misadventure on the ride back to McAllen?

Karen: My children are not allowed to wear clothing purchased at Target, Wal-Mart, or other discount stores!

Back to Mr. Ortiz, very much alive due to Divine Intervention, but in possession of some medical bills, who is suing the Boulder County sheriff’s deputies (by name), a member of the Westminister Dive Team (also by name), Broomfield, and the North Metro Fire Rescue District. “Of course he was thankful because those divers did have a major role to play in saving his life that day,” lawyer Ed Ferszt said. “That doesn’t negate the fact that a mistake may have been made. I can understand why there’s a lot of furor over people thinking that he’s biting the hand that feeds. Does that mean that officers of North Metro Fire are above reproach?”

Have any of these people ever heard the words with which President Kennedy concluded his inaugural address? And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country . . . . With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

It was Margaret Thatcher who used these words: The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money to spend. Great Britain has learned that lesson the hard way, and now the United States of America is learning the same thing!
Blanche DuBois was a tragic figure; an unfortunate soul who lived her life pretending to be something that she was not. When Blanche could no longer maintain the fiction that fueled her grandiosity, she descended into genteel lunacy and willingly allowed herself to be institutionalized. Blanche suffered a psychotic break and was committed to a mental institution. It was as she was being led away by a kindly doctor that Blanche uttered these famous words: “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

In Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche, an English teacher, is fired for having an affair with a seventeen-year-old student. She is a recent widow subsequent to the suicide of her husband, another tragic character who had been unable to deal with the public discovery of his homosexual affair. Most lives contain elements of both tragedy and comedy and certainly the public and private personas of Bill and Hillary Clinton reveal elements of both.

Former president Bill Clinton, when asked about his alleged affair with White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, uttered these words, I did not have sex with that woman and later, it all depends upon what your definition of is, is. When Monica’s famous blue dress containing Bill Clinton’s ejaculate was subsequently placed into evidence during his impeachment proceedings, any words spoken by either Bill or Hillary regarding evidence that gave the lie to their previous words have not become part of the public record.

Hillary and Bill have spent their lives depending upon the kindness of the American public. Hillary is now running for president (again). In addition to having been the First Lady, she’s been a Senator from New York and Secretary of State. On September 11, 2012, an attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi took place, resulting in the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. During Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State, warnings about terrorist plots went unheeded, as did Ambassador Stevens’ requests for additional security at the embassy. Subsequent to the sacking of our embassy, the refusal of our government to go to their aid, and the death of four Americans, Hillary, in a manner reminiscent of Blanche DuBois, was unavailable for comment as she had recently been committed to a medical institution. Hillary had checked herself into a hospital (as reported by Bill) to be suffering from a very serious head injury incurred during a fall which no one witnessed. It fell upon Susan Rice to spin the White House’s version of what had just happened in Benghazi on all of the Sunday morning talk shows. Sadly, paraphrasing the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The louder she talked of her honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” The Clintons’ hypocrisy puts to shame Blanche DuBois’ pretensions to virtue and culture. As William F. Buckley Jr. once said, “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”

Dr. Ben Carson was asked this question: Do you think the welfare system is racist? He responded with these words: “Let me put it this way; when you rob someone of their incentive to go out there and improve themselves, you are not doing them any favors. When you take someone and pat them on the head and say, ‘There, there you poor little thing, I’m gonna give you food stamps, I’m gonna give you housing subsidies, I’m gonna give you free health care’. What would be much more empowering is to use our intellect and our resources to give those people a way up and out.” A more apt question might have been: “do you consider our present welfare state to be a totalitarian form of social engineering?”It seems to me, that surely, after all of this time, most thinking Americans understand that playing the ‘race card’ or the ‘feminist card’ or the ‘immigration card’ or the ‘age card’ is a tool used by those in power to divide and disarm their critics. Or, perhaps Dr. Friedman (Jewish Rabbi, Generation to Generation, 1985) was right when he said: the unmotivated are notoriously impervious to insight.
Although I don’t typically watch The View, I wasn’t surprised at politically correct Whoopie Goldberg’s somewhat irrational and contradictory response to Dr. Carson: “As a former welfare mother, very few people want to be on welfare. Very few want to walk with their kids and take food stamps. Most people would rather work. I don’t feel bad about being a welfare mother because I contribute as an American—that’s what we do. And because the welfare system is so bizarre; you can’t work, they don’t allow you to work because they take the money from you. So if we fix the system so that it doesn’t hurt the people, maybe it’ll get better.” Listening to Whoopie’s words, I started to laugh. I wondered if the hosts on The View ever actually listened to their own commentary? They take the money from you? Exactly what money is Ms. Goldberg referencing? The tax dollars of hard-working Americans that are doled out to the Welfare Mothers? They don’t allow you to work, because they take the money from you. Yeah, right! Welfare moms who go to work lose the handouts that they have come to expect as their due. Way to go, Ms. Goldberg. You just made Dr. Carson’s point; did you even realize this? However, as a totally irrelevant aside, I still love Whoopie’s performances in Sister Act and Ghost!