Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) says he is “still” marching on Washington, 50 years later. On Wednesday’s 50th anniversary, the first African-American President of the United States will commemorate the historic event with remarks from the same spot at the Lincoln Memorial where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
But the District of Columbia and nation President Obama will look out upon on August 18, 2013 bears no resemblance to the “southern” city of Washington and country MLK addressed five decades ago.
In South Carolina, the great-grandchildren of the authors of secession and Fort Sumter (including their Democrat Governor Ernest Hollings) had only recently raised the Confederate battle flag atop its State House to protest school desegregation orders issued by federal courts. But after King’s speech inspired Democrat President Lyndon Johnson to give up his previous opposition and join Republicans in Congress to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, de jure racial discrimination by government against blacks eventually came to an end.
Fifty years later African-American Tim Scott, twice-elected to the House of Representatives from his 83%-white Charleston, S.C. congressional district that includes Fort Sumter, now represents the Palmetto State as its junior member in the United States Senate. Rumor also has it that since 1963 Republican presidents have appointed blacks as national security adviser and secretary of state and the 70%+ White American electorate have twice elected a black man to be their Chief Executive and Commander in Chief in charge of the nukes, yet Democrats like Lewis “still” march on Washington? Could it be to highlight the other great difference between 1963 and 2013?
Thanks to President John F. Kennedy’s call for a supply-side tax cut to jump start entrepreneurs and job creation, the national economy was on the rebound in 1963. JFK was Reagan before Reagan was Reagan, but I digress. Fifty years later, thanks to Obama’s tax hikes on job creators, Obamacare and climate change-driven regulatory regime; unless you work and reside between Wall Street, NYC and K Street, DC or in a fracking state that Obama’s EPA hasn’t yet sued, you live in Year Five of an economically-depressed America segregated from Big Government ruling elites and their cronies living high on the hog thanks to your taxes and the debt they run up.
But no, the authentic hero of “Bloody Sunday” on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in an extensive New York Times interview, makes no mention of an economy employing less blacks (and whites), as a percentage of the work force, than at any time since the Great depression of any electoral, much less any character-content-related racial progress because:
“[Current events] remind us of our dark past”. He also met with the mother of Trayvon Martin…compared his shooting of the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till…[but] found it gratifying to see…protesting in a non-violent fashion.”
Lewis has also compared state voter-photo-ID laws and the narrowly-drawn Supreme Court ruling requiring that Department of Justice-pre-clearance (Section 5) of state voting rights changes be based upon contemporary data (and not the decades-old data in Section 4) under the Voting Rights Act, as a return to “Jim Crow”. Never mind that Sections 4 and 5 only concern pre-clearance in states and districts with a history of government discrimination against Blacks. Never mind that all other sections allowing court challenges of such changes remain intact and that an African-American Attorney General recently brought such a challenge against the State of Texas. Never mind that the son of a Kenyan twice garnered more White votes for president than John Kerry.
Nope, Rep. Lewis, the embodiment of King’s dream in the successful legislative aftermath of the March on Washington, is compelled, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, to mention current events that “remind us of our dark past”, even if those events bear no comparison to segregation laws, government violence against blacks in the streets and premeditated murders of black children by racist whites.
Sadly, Lewis is also the embodiment of the “victimology” ideology that African American linguist John McWhorter describes as a widespread ideology embraced by the civil rights establishment in his book, Losing the Race. And of course, for one to still march as victims, one must identify who or what continues to victimize you. Enter vague references to “institutional” racism, photo IDS, “white” Hispanics, and the oldie but goodie, white Southern Republican men. But just not those that voted twice for Tim Scott.
Maybe the best explanation of why Lewis, Obama, Holder and the Democratic Party writ large choose to wallow in faux reminders of of our dark past was best revealed at the 30th anniversary of the MOW on August 28, 1993 when black activist Ben Chavis spoke not of the equal right to by judged based upon character content instead of than skin color, but rather:
“We don’t want just equal rights. We want our fair share of the national economy.”
Sound familiar? It reminds of then-candidate Barack Hussein Obama’s spread-the-wealth advocacy when challenged by Joe the Plummer. Like how that policy has worked out five years on? I didn’t think so.
President Obama doesn’t speak much about the poor any more. Given his affirmative action to get as many of the jobless signed up for food stamps and other welfare, his conscious is clear. That increasing numbers are poor under his economic stewardship bother him not a whit. That they eat out of his hands, enables him to sleep soundly at night. Of course, they don’t eat out of his hands. They eat out of the hands of taxpayers that work today and the future interest payments to be made to Chinese bondholders by today’s children and the yet unborn.
Yet, the President still often speaks of empowering the middle class, even as his signature Obamcare, tax and regulatory laws and edicts their numbers to part-time poverty or worse. Who knew liberals’ lust for Equality! meant equally poor?
More whites today are unemployed, under-employed and poor than at any time since the Great Depression. Yes, there remains a large economic gap between black and white, but the greater gap is between Democrats and other Washington-NY-Boston elites and the rest of us. Like Lewis, we consider MLK to be a hero for his non-violent moral appeal for an end to racial discrimination. It ended thanks in large part to courageous men like Lewis and King.
But until ongoing electoral majorities identify liberal Democrat economic policies as the enemy they are to Liberty-empowerment of the poor and middle class for pursuits of happiness via jobs, laws that make us ever poorer will continue to march out of Washington.
Mike DeVine‘s Right.com
“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson
