Common Sense Dies in Darkness

By Patrick Hall

As a recovering Progressive Liberal Democrat, now in my fourth decade of sobriety, I recall when I was impressed with the catchy phrases and shining political semantics lavishly dispensed among my fellow Democrats.  By any means necessary, blaming the victim, blacks can’t be racists, the SAT and other testing instruments were culturally biased,  the man wants to keep you down,  no justice-no peace,  treating everyone the same is racist, burn-baby-burn, these along with a host of other favorite political antiphons firmly controlled our body politic. We were extremely comfortable with this shared ignorance. What common sense or little objective thinking we posed at the time died in darkness.
 
In more recent times, with the popularity of Hillary Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village, its message, either by design or happenstance, played down the reality that it just takes a father figure or some reasonable facsimile of two stable adults, that often makes the difference in the life chances of not only black kids, but any individual. But then again, this would fall under “you’re blaming the victim” doxology, often invoked by liberal politicians, black advocacy groups like the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the money laundering scheme is the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation. With the support and PR efforts of CNN-NPR-BBC-EU Press and most of the mainstream media cloister, these constituencies guarantee the continuation of the socio-political and economic stasis, which grips the underclass.

The current fury and outright lack of support of our men and women in blue, embodied by the Defund the Police Movement, is a calamitous fabrication. It is a distortion built on the historical memory of police brutality during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the deep South. It simply doesn’t exist to the extent the political class, and Black Lives Matter says it does.  The George Floyd killing by rogue police officers and other rare incidents of police misconduct universally condemned by all law enforcement, have been used to defame the thousands of men and women in blue, who do the difficult job of protecting all lives.  The police are the ones, who show up in the early morning hours to intervene in domestic disturbances and outright criminal maleficence, being perpetrated by the criminal element in too many black communities. The police are the ones, that run in the direction of gunfire, while others cower, or live conveniently away from dysfunctional inner-city areas. It is the police who engage in millions of interactions with the citizenry.  Out of these millions of contacts, only a minute portion may go sideways. But that is all it takes for the Victim-Industrial-Complex, with support from the Democratic Party and the MSM media (one in the same entity) to inflate these incidents. It drives the fear-porn of police brutality.  
 
The police are the least of the social pathologies infecting the black communities of New York, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, East St. Louis, Newark, and Chicago.  Since 2010 alone, black criminals have killed more black people than the total number of soldiers, that have perished in our involvement in places like Afghanistan and the Middle East.  Despite being only 13% of the population, Blacks are responsible for 52% of all homicides. In many inner cities, the proclivity for murdering their brethren is well over 75%.  So, with a straight face, and the total abrogation of common sense, the media in conjunction with social justice warriors, like Black Lives Matter, tell us, that the police are the clearest and present danger.
 
In the working-class community, in which I reside, we have a very diligent Neighborhood Watch Program. Why? It is not to protect us from the police, but from criminals, who too often are black.  Many of us have concealed weapon permits and other such firepower to protect our homes and loved ones.  We don’t have the luxury of deluding ourselves into thinking, that the police will do us the most harm. It is black criminals.

We have home security systems, dogs in our yards, as well as bars on lower windows and doors.  This is not to protect us from law enforcement, but unequivocally from blacks, who engage in far too much criminal mischief.  If something is not tied down or locked up it will quickly go missing.

If many young (and not so young) black men seem to come into contact with police; it is because they disproportionally behave like criminals.  Disparities in criminal offending and victimization are the real culprit. This is the actual danger, that many in the black underclass live with daily. Black criminality has little or nothing to do with the effects of institutional racism or the legacy of 400 years of slavery that critical-race-theory quacks, the 1619 Project, and their acolytes in the MSM have tragically propagated in Post-Civil Right America.    

We don’t need to “reimagine” policing or law enforcement, that many unencumbered by reality Progressive Democrats are now preaching in their latest homilies.  The defunding of the police openly advocated by the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation (a Marxist Group) is also beyond insane. It makes as much sense as Barrack Obama’, “leading from behind” political speech as the basis for foreign policy.  Unfortunately, all of the political bloviating, and ideas of the Democratic Cultural left are just a continuance of the utopian, perfectionist culture of the baby-boomer generation and their disciples. That is to say, we, the baby-boomer generation have the predilection for replacing things that worked, with chimeras, ideas, abstractions, slogans, political word salad, and bad ideas, which sound good.

[Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science.  Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, Freedom's Journal Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.]