Pushing racism for power and profit
To people like Jackson, Sharpton and Oprah, the young man’s death is not so much a crime as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for them to once again shine, if only for a few moments, in the adoring media spotlight. It’s an opportunity to feel like the victim, and to encourage others to do the same.
by Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D.
Here are the known facts: The shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black man, took place on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. Martin was shot and killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a man of mixed ethnic descent (Peruvian and white American mix). Martin was unarmed, walking from a convenience store to the home of his father’s girlfriend when Zimmerman, a community watch coordinator, began following Martin and called the Sanford Police Department to say he witnessed suspicious behavior. Soon afterward, there was a confrontation that ended when Zimmerman fatally shot Martin.
Zimmerman described the shooting to the police who arrived on the scene as self-defense. Responding officers handcuffed Zimmerman and took him into custody but they did not formally arrest him, saying that they did not find evidence to contradict his assertion of self-defense. The lead homicide investigator was not convinced by Zimmerman’s account and wanted to charge him with manslaughter, but the state attorney’s office said there was insufficient evidence for a conviction.
Does this sound like a catastrophic civil rights issue? Or a tragic crime which must be investigated, just like any other crime?
Imagine if Trayvon Martin was white, and the man responsible for shooting him was any race but white. Would this be a civil rights issue, then? Would it even be a news story, outside of Florida? Unlikely.
The tired voices of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Oprah are shouting from the rooftops that this is more proof of a racist and unjust society.
Yet we have a black President. The President is actually half-black, but nobody ever mentions this fact. He’s treated as a black man. If America is so racist, how did we end up with a black President?
And he’s more than a black President — he’s a very, very liberal one, essentially a socialist one. He is doing everything in his power to raise taxes, regulate or nationalize business, and he has completed the socialization of medicine, a liberal dream for more than half a century. If he wins a second term, he’ll turn the Supreme Court into a strong advocate of socialist and leftist policies for at least another quarter or half a century. Obama set out to “transform” America from its original existence as a constitutional republic respectful of individual rights into a completed welfare-regulatory quasi-socialist state. In three short years he has largely succeeded. The economy is no better, but civil rights leftists and other socialist liberals are happy.
What more do civil rights advocates want? They’ve won. They’ve won just about everything a left-wing, liberal socialist could ever dream of. Their biggest political threat is the (unlikely) election of poor, hapless Mitt Romney. So what? Romney will throw his Tea Party and conservative supporters under the bus once he becomes President, and they know it. This is the man who passed ObamaCare in Massachusetts and still defends it. The federal government is spending trillions of dollars on social welfare programs that are expanding by the minute, and draconian cuts loom over the Pentagon early next year. Isn’t this the kind of platform far-left presidential candidate George McGovern dreamed of way back in 1972? It’s now 2012, and the true blue left liberals have won.
They want Martin’s killer arrested, of course. That’s fine. But shouldn’t the case be prosecuted based on the facts of the case? And does anyone really think that Obama’s Justice Department, not known for its impartiality, will allow George Zimmerman to escape anything other than the modern equivalent of a lynching?
These civil rights leaders should relax.
CNN.com reports: “Civil rights figures, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, NAACP President Ben Jealous and others joined the marchers at the rally, saying the incident was only the latest in a long string of incidents with black men, particularly, as victims of racially motivated crimes.”
Why is a crime racially motivated just because the victim is a member of one race, and the criminal is a member of a different race? Does this mean that every time a white man is robbed or shot by a black man, that it’s a racial event? I’d love to see Sharpton and Oprah argue this point.
To people like Jackson, Sharpton and Oprah, the young man’s death is not so much a crime as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for them to once again shine, if only for a few moments, in the adoring media spotlight. It’s an opportunity to feel like the victim, and to encourage others to do the same. It’s an opportunity to help black people feel like victims rather than to face the hard truth that decades of Big Government (unfettered Big Government since Obama) hasn’t done a thing to help impoverished black people become independent, self-reliant or rich. And it never will. But they can’t have people realize this. This is why these tired old civil rights people must distract us from the real issue: That while they succeeded politically, they failed utterly in the only way that really mattered.
The shooting is also an opportunity for leftists to discourage people from self-defense against crime. The whole incident is being used as an excuse to say, “You see? I told you so. Only the police should own guns. People should not practice self-defense or self-protection!”
It’s more than a little ridiculous to see the leftists whose leaders now control all of academia and virtually all of the federal government scream for “justice” in the aftermath of this shooting. Leftists are always lecturing against “greed” and “selfishness.” But they’re being more than a little greedy themselves. It’s not enough that they have passed socialized medicine and are driving the federal government into permanent bankruptcy under the weight of worse-than-worthless social programs. Now they have to attack the idea of self-defense and blame it on something over which the facts have yet to emerge — and probably never will in this hysterical, victim-mentality culture so well represented by the likes of Oprah, Obama, Sharpton and Jackson.
Dr. Hurd has a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Psychology, Saybrook Institute, San Francisco, CA, November 1991. Degree awarded With Distinction. Master’s of Social Work (M.S.W.), Clinical, The University of Maryland at Baltimore, May 1988. Bachelor’s of Arts (B.A.), Psychology, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, May 1985. Distinguished Psychology Student Award, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude. Dr. Hurd blogs at DrHurd.com
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