Unrealistic Expectations

 

If ever there was a prescription for unhappiness, it would be to rely on government and bureaucrats to accomplish anything with any degree of competence. Those who believe that George W. Bush intentionally withheld aid or just royally screwed up in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina have something besides idiocy and politics in common with the 9/11 deniers: a completely unrealistic and uninformed idea of the efficacy and efficiency of any government plan, program or institution. Perhaps it is this naivete which makes these liberals view dictators such as Fidel Castro as misunderstood. The only truly efficient forms of government are dictatorships, after all. This is why I believe that, liberals are generally less happy than conservatives. (according to a study by the Pew Research Center, 28% of liberals and 47% of conservatives said they were personally very happy) 
The problem is that government, particularly in a democracy rarely ever gets anything right. To once again quote Winston Churchill, (who was quoting someone else) “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” The trade off for this inefficiency is the greatest amount of personal freedom ever experienced. The solution is an unthinkable one for those who believe that instead of God, government is the giver of every good and perfect gift. The solution to the inefficiency and inefficacy of government is not, let me repeat that, not–once again for those really slow Marxists out there– NOT more money, more layers of bureaucracy, more programs, more buildings, more paperwork, more regulation, more red tape, more political correctness, more “compassion,” more diversity, more conferences, more hearings, more panels, or more comissions. It is less of all the above. Because if you were paying attention to that list, that list of almost everything that government does, that list of everything that every liberal is clamoring for, nothing on that list accomplishes anything. Yet, absent any tangible proof, these liberals believe with a very child like faith that these programs will make everything right in the world–if only they had sufficient funding or, maybe just one more program.

White Guilt

Last night I wrote an eloquent, forceful, informative and entertaining blog on white guilt, the poison that has allowed the preponderance of political correctness and emphasis on diversity in today’s society. Unfortunately, when I was 3/4ths of the way through a longer than normal blog, I made a typographical error and I naturally pressed the backspace key, which for some strange reason caused Internet Explorer to go back a page. This was not the first or second time this has happened to me, but in this case in particular, I was throw-the-computer-out-the-window mad. I wasn’t able to recoup my loss and it was pretty late, so I just went to bed. So, here I am rewriting the same blog, something I don’t often do.
I had just finished reading Shelby Steele’s remarkable book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, a book that produced one of the most powerful paradigm shifts I have ever experienced, along with The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, which introduced me to the paradigm shift. Suddenly, many things that I knew on an instinctive level were explained in a logical manner. It brought reason and clarity to the upside down politically correct world that we live in. Moreover, Steele accomplished this in an eloquent 180 pages. To conclude my endorsement of this book, I would strongly urge anyone who is reading this to read this book, it might be the most important work of political nonfiction around. Certainly, anything that can cause such a dramatic paradigm shift is worthwhile reading.

White guilt is, no doubt, something that every white person in the United States with any semblance of a conscience has felt at one time or another. It is guilt not for sins committed, but for the sins of our fathers and forefathers. It is described as a lack of moral authority by whites because of the legacy of slavery and segregation. The result of white guilt is an inability to make any judgment of anyone of a different race, regardless of their lack of or abundance of merit. This is not to say that those of other races cannot be commended; rather, it is to say that those of other races should be commended, patronized, or rewarded without regard to their actual merit. As the Supreme Court decided in its 2003 judgment for the University of Michigan, diversity is an end into and of itself. This is one of the clearest displays of white guilt that one could imagine: it is better for the university to lower its academic standards and accept more minorities than it is for the institution to maintain academic integrity. Obviously, this situation begs many questions about those who make it into this institution without actually meriting entrance. It is very improbable that these students would be as successful as their peers who earned their way into the University. It is also likely that all minorities that attend such institutions are automatically stigmatized as less than stellar academically, regardless of their performance and merit. This is the “soft bigotry of lower expectations” that President Bush has eluded to in the past. It is the belief that blacks and minorities in general need institutional help from the whites who typically run and operate these institutions.

Unfortunately, on a large scale blacks and whites have bought into white guilt. Whites are required to prove that they aren’t racist, while blacks are expected to “act black” and eschew their own personal identity for conformance to racial stereotypes. Blacks who succeed in society or scholastically are deemed “oreos” and whites are told that they can’t condemn this practice. In fact, whites aren’t allowed to treat minorities as individuals at all. Instead they must give preference to minorities based on their skin color, not their lack of societal advantage or disadvantage. Therefore, the sons and daughters of upper class minorities should be preferred above a lower middle class white of a single parent family. This is what some refer to as “social justice.”