The second “Super Safe Sunday” upped the ante of the first (which featured a hit-and-run) by, of course, ending in a shootout, and so the Shreveport City Council took decisive action this week – by praying.
Mind you, I see nothing wrong with invoking the Deity, given that I do it on a daily, and more often, basis. But we’re also instructed that He helps those who help themselves, and too many of those with power in Shreveport don’t seem to be keeping up their end of the bargain.
This series of community events, which to date have appealed almost exclusively to blacks, was created with promoting alternatives to violence by staging at the Fairgrounds in and around Independence Stadium featuring music, three-on-three basketball, dunking booths with local radio personalities, karaoke, and adult and child hula hoop contests. With violence infiltrating gatherings for both events that already have taken place, the city has suspended its logistical support for the event, essentially canceling or postponing it.
The Shreveport Times had some thoughtful words on the subject:
But what happened Sunday runs deeper than merely bolstering police numbers or closing off thoroughfares. It's about the warped mind-set that chooses gunfire as a reaction to an insult or offense. It's about zero tolerance from the community for such behavior. It means denouncing violence, not by pastors alone, but by young people in their relationships with each other, even working with authorities to bring suspects to justice.
It's about individual responsibility assisted by a firm but compassionate community that reaches out to young people to provide alternative models for managing anger.
With the last phrase, they’re on to something, but thery don’t try to analyze the logical concatenation from “managing anger.” Why is there anger out there that needs to be managed?
The Times in part hits on it when it mentions “individual responsibility.” The people involved in the activities obviously lack it in terms of their relations to other human beings. Instead, it gets replaced with a sense of entitlement married with a lack of self-restraint, an attitude that they should have things and power to which they otherwise demonstrate they do not deserve. Rather than conforming to norms of behavior that help the entire community and, ultimately, themselves, they violate them to the detriment of the entire community and, ultimately, themselves.
Yet the most interesting, and sensitive, question which no doubt The Times was extremely reluctant to address, was why this pathological attitude is far more prevalent in the black community than others. Unfortunately, the answer is because too many political elites with the wrong philosophy have allowed too many within the black community to think that this counterproductive behavior not only is acceptable, but trés chic.
After all, for decades big government has been telling people it’s all right to be selfish, to blame others for the actions you take in response, and make them give you resources and power. You’re pregnant but you don’t want to be? Don’t worry, the courts say, it’s all right to kill the unborn. You want to get more out things of life than you deserve given your contribution through your labor to society? It’s all right, we’ll tax heaviest the greatest contributors to society and transfer the money to you. And, particularly relevant to the black community, it’s OK to blame for anything that goes wrong in your life some bogeyman like “white America” or anybody who insists on judging people on their merit and behavior rather than on their skin color.
In other words, too many politicians, liberals and mostly Democrats, have been spreading the fictions that people are not wealthy not because they cannot contribute as much to society as do the wealthy, but because they lost “life’s lottery” and thus the wealthy are “robbing” them; that government must redress this balance; that people are free when they can do whatever they want regardlesss of the costs to others or society; that government should promote the efforts of these “disenfranchised” groups (defined as anybody not white, middle class or wealthier, Christian, practicers of heterosexuality, unborn, and especially if female) rather than enforce a standard of noninterference among people and especially in concerning the government relative to the people; and that they (in government) know best the solutions to everybody’s problems.
This pathological thinking regrettably is worst of all among black leaders, who ruthlessly try to stifle dissenting voices in and out of their own communities. Is it any accident that by championing an ideology that glorifies the self and blames others for inadequacies that behavior based upon these tenets of liberalism will erupt within that community? This is the “anger” – inculcated by liberal elites into the black community by saying blacks today are put upon by “the man,” explaining away the community’s retarded economic progress as something caused by others, excusing thuggish behavior (increasingly glorified in film, sound, and print) as some kind of understandable reaction to this “new slavery.” All too many (mostly young and male) in the black community have responded to this rhetoric and the conditions created by implementing the liberal agenda with pathological behaviors such as those put on display at and around these events.
Properly understanding the origins of this behavior seen at these events, which does not mark the behavior of typical black citizens but at the same time is much too disproportionately highly represented in the black community (and victimizes primarily it), provides the appropriate solution for the city to pursue. Unless incredible security measures are taken, such as metal detectors going into the festival area, and heavy, no tolerance policing in the area, given the too-many rotten apples in the basket, safety cannot be guaranteed. Shreveport cannot afford these measures at the expense of increasingly meager resources, and these events cannot go on.
Instead, a new approach for helping the black community needs to begin by using the energy behind the idea for the events to the throwing out of power the elites and their ideas that have created these conditions, and to investigate a more realistic, mature political philosophy that will actually help any community whose leaders and people embrace it.
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