What chance do they have?

By Patrick Hall

It occurred while shopping at a local Walmart.  This store had previously been christened, for better or worse, as the Ghetto Mart because of the endemic crime and other social pathologies, that often visited the area. Anyway, my spouse and I were on our way home from Sunday service and needed to pick up some hotdog and hamburger buns as well as some marshmallows for an outdoor barbecue, we were preparing for our grandchildren and the parents that afternoon.

Things were going along quite well, and my spouse was able to secure the needed items and proceeded to the self-check area.  I was a little delayed arriving at the area. However, as my spouse was trying to negotiate her shopping cart, she encountered another shopper, a black woman, with two small children. The woman had blocked the way to the check-out machine my wife had chosen. My spouse very politely asked the woman (several times) if she could get by. On arriving at the area, I heard my wife repeat the request. The woman in a very uncooperative, if not belligerent voice, said to my wife there was room to get her shopping cart by.  There wasn’t!  After several more requests, my wife carefully tried to create the necessary space, but the woman launched into a very loud diatribe, replete with all the swear words known to man, and began to “repeatedly” threaten to stab my spouse. I intervened at that point and slowly reclaimed the space, that my wife tried to make on-way to her check-out machine.  At that point, the woman’s tirade or invectives went to full DEFCON 1. She began screaming even louder threatening to stab me as well, accompanied by even more colorful language. At any rate, I didn’t say anything and took up a defensive position behind my cart and the “DEFCON 1 Black woman”. By the way, her homicidal scowling turned just about every head at check-out. Store security did nothing to try to arbitrate the situation.  Let me correct myself. One security official, standing about 40 feet away from the check-out area, slowly slinked out of the store.  Ok? I get it. I guess, he didn’t want to get involved in the ruckus, for $12 per hour or whatever he made. But the situation managed to de-escalate, but that is a whole other story.

What most bothered me during and after our encounter with this woman besides her, homicidal fulminations, cursing, and replete racial expletives against my spouse and me was this. The woman said all this along with her stabbing threats in front of her kids.  Maybe they were 4 to 6 years of age. But she showed no concern for her comportment in front of her children. What kind of chance do they have?  What kind of example was she setting for them in how to interact in an adult, if not civilized manner?  Of course, in her dystopic worldview, the latter probably comes under the idiocy embedded in the black underclass, as well as many within the black middle class, that such concerns are “acting white” or some other debilitating social mores. Mores that are endemic in the “devolved black community” of the Post Civil Right Era.

What kind of footing do her kids have to negotiate in an effective way to make their lives better in the wider culture?   Their mother, her children supposed primary mentor or role model was completely maladjusted. A product of the cultural anomie, that is part and particle of the lack of “civilized behavior” within a significant portion of the black underclass.   Does she read to her kids or provide a semi-normal positive household? Will she teach her children that America despite its faults, provides opportunities for everyone? Again, that is probably thinking too much like a white person, in the contorted thinking or cultural nomenclature shared by far too many blacks from all social strata.

Does she take her kids to the library or get them involved in social activities offered by the YMCA or various summer programs? Will she carefully monitor, the kind of friends her kids hang out with?  She may live in a less-than-ideal neighborhood or public housing project. But does she understand you can still make a choice regarding what friends or kinds of individuals can be positive, as opposed to negative in her kids’ lives?  I hope there is some reasonable facsimile of a “father figure” around. Maybe she was just having a bad day.  But I very much doubt it.  Her behavior was just too “straight-up ghetto” as they say.  There are a million excuses, that liberal social activists, so-called professional social workers, and DEI heretics can trout out to provide “a reason” or why a group or individuals evolved into this sorry state of being.  To paraphrase the late sociologist and psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm. There is a huge difference between a reason and an excuse.   But as my parents, born in 1908 and 1910, taught me and my older siblings, you should never let hard times, an “imperfect world” or circumstances, be an excuse for your behavior, lack of common sense, or outright stupidity.  The teachers who instructed my older siblings, many born in the 1930s, beat into our heads, that responsibility is the difference. You alone take responsibility for your own choices or lack thereof.
 
My father was not a formally educated man. He seldom, if ever said much to me personally. However, I remember one incident where he was dressing down one of my older siblings born in the1930s. He said, he didn’t want to hear the excuse (actually bull-shit) that some white person hurt your feelings, ergo you cannot achieve.  He, my mom, and their siblings who grew up in a world with “real bigotry” didn’t degenerate into the perpetually aggrieved, angry, worthless pity party, victims-are-us mentality, if not “dangerous spectacle” of a human being, my wife and I had to deal with.