Probe demonstrators display wages of liberalism

If you want to see the fruits of liberalism and how it has warped the culture, you needed to look no further than Baton Rouge’s City Hall a couple of weeks ago at a semi-rally addressing the probe into the police shooting of ex-convict Alton Sterling.

Three months ago two Baton Rouge police officers wrestled Sterling onto the ground, apparently as he resisted arrest after a call had gone out saying he had threatened somebody with a gun. Tragedy ensued when it seems one officer felt it necessary to fire his weapon into Sterling. A short while later the federal government took over the investigation into potential police misconduct.

There it sits at present, which did not sit well with relatives of Sterling and community organizers. They planned to march for answers to the Governor’s Mansion two Mondays ago, only to chuck that in concluding the heat made such a venture too taxing. Instead, already at City Hall they made their way to a chamber where officials and local ministers discussed in a scheduled meeting the larger question of potential police reform.

About five dozen demonstrators crowded the room, indecorously and continually inserting themselves into the conversation, making demands for resolution of the matter and insinuating they might not remain peaceable over what they saw as a slow pace to the investigation. Of course, neither those in the room except for one Department of Justice official nor any local or state official has any control over the inquiry, because DOJ has full power over it. Sterling’s relatives in particular displayed impudence, upset that the attention spotlight on them had faded and asserting the case in open and shut fashion involved his murder and so therefore any delay denied justice.

No one took a census of participants, but video evidence showed that almost all of the demonstrators appeared non-elderly and able-bodied, there on a normal work day. And while generalizations can be hazardous, I suspect several things about the group are true: (1) a large majority are not employed, (2) of those that have children, a large majority are not married and their children come from more than one biological father or mother, (3) almost all of them and/or their dependents receive any or all of Medicaid; Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program; Temporary Aid for Needy Families; Housing Choice Voucher Program; public housing; rent assistance; Women, Infants, and Children Program; and/or Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program benefits, and (4) almost none of them pay income taxes. And some of them may collect “crazy kid checks” and use (perhaps pitching in a bit of their own resources) “Obamaphones,” among other additional government benefits.

In other words, they live their lives – a good portion of them probably their entire lives to date – contributing almost nothing to the economy or paying little for government except through their spending of largesse from taxpayers, living largely if not completely on government handouts (and perhaps, as in Sterling’s case, on criminal activity). They are used to having government take care of their basic needs and then some, on demand.

So where’s the surprise that they would go in and order government to cater to another of their desires? They have been trained to expect that, courtesy of the Great Society, War on Poverty ($24 trillion spent, barely budging the needle on the proportion of Americans officially living in poverty, that allows America’s poor to have one of the highest standards of living in the world for the poor and to reside in the upper fifth of all incomes worldwide), and successor policy programs. It’s all they really know.

All of this courtesy of obnoxious liberalism that discounts personal responsibility, conjures conspiracies that supposedly oppress people of certain groups and classes, and stupidly equates compassion with transfers of wealth. The same liberalism that encouraged scapegoating that led to a disturbed man shooting six area law enforcement officers in apparent retaliation for Sterling’s death, killing three.

The damage liberalism has inflicted upon the culture is inestimable, but its product clearly is visible in the attitude displayed by the demonstrators, petulantly wanting what they want immediately because of their expectation that government by definition caters to their wants, regardless of their attitudes and behaviors, without any productive reciprocity on their part, and the only reciprocity being in they won’t disrupt society, if not foment violence. And every year government continues to transfer wealth way out of proportion to genuine need, that segment of the population only will grow, fraying more deeply the social contract that has made America the epitome of societal evolution.