United Liberty

We’ve been bombarded recently by the story of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old black boy shot as he walked home from the store. The facts remain uncertain at this point, so I’ll not comment specifically. On the other hand, it’s been said that death and taxes are the only sure things in life, but I think we can make a compelling case for a third; namely, that race-baiting media prostitutes like the “Reverends” Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton will trip over themselves rushing to the scene of a camera…oops, I mean, crime…at least where a black victim is involved. These men and others like them make a living peddling influence on racial issues, whipping up angry crowds at rallies and marches, calling for boycotts and civil disobedience in the name of “justice”. Even Trayvon’s mother got in on the lucrative act, copyrighting her dead son’s name.

In the Martin case, we can add the likes of Barack “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon” Obama (is there ANY subject that man can’t make about him?) and black filmmaker and social agitator Spike Lee. Lee, in his anger at George Zimmerman, Trayvon’s shooter, “tweeted” Zimmerman’s home address, with the clear intent of having a mob go to Zimmerman’s home to mete out the “justice” the legal system had so far failed to provide. Except it wasn’t Zimmerman’s address, but the address of an elderly couple whose lives he now put at risk. Lee apologized only for the clerical error, but not for circumventing the justice system and trying to organize a lynch mob. It was echoes of Al Sharpton and the mythical Tawanna Brawley rape all over again. Facts have no meaning, only racial outrage.

The frothing-at-the-mouth hysteria in this case is based on the fact that Trayvon was shot by a white man, George Zimmerman. There is only one problem…Zimmerman is not white, he is Hispanic. That problem was quickly rectified by the media, which simply created a new category of racial classification, the “white Hispanic.” So for those of you reading at home, I’ll recap; Trayvon Martin, a black-black boy, was shot by George Zimmerman, a white-Hispanic man, which our black-white president, Barack Obama, sees as a tragedy and indictment on the state of race relations in America (disclaimer: I am a white-white man, so normally I am forbidden on commenting on topics of race, but I am married to a white-Mexican woman, so I able to comment by proxy).

In February 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder called America a “nation of cowards” who are afraid to have a conversation on race. Yet, based on the vitriolic attacks from the left and black “civil rights” leaders any time someone tries to make it a two-sided conversation (about the culpability of the black community in its own demise, instead of just talk about America’s racist past and reparations), it is abundantly clear that the last thing these people want is an honest conversation on the topic…just ask Bill Cosby.

That’s because, if we were to have an honest conversation about black victims, we’d see categorically that racist whites are the least of the problem. It would also reveal that the “Reverends” Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson don’t really care if black people are murdered, just so long as the murderer is not white or Hispanic. You doubt me? Then consider this. According to the FBI Crime Statistics report (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-…), in 2010 there were 2,720 murders in the United States in which the victim was black. Of those, 2,459 died at the hands of a black perpetrator (nearly 91%, more than ten times as many as died at the hands of a white person). Do you recall media outrage then over any of these victims? Any rallies led by Jackson or Sharpton, bullhorns in hand, screaming that “justice” be served? Any press conferences held by Obama decrying these tragedies? Me neither.

Murder is not even the largest cause of violent death when it comes to black people. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, from 1990-2007, approximately 8,630,000 black children were killed in the womb. Were these not also lives of innocent black children which ended violently, the only difference that these lives were extinguished at the hands of doctors with the approval of the mothers? Not only are there no marches and rallies, no cries of outrage and demands for “justice”, the deaths of these black children are actually defended by the likes of Sharpton. Last year, Sharpton decried as “classic racial profiling” a pro-life billboard in New York, depicting a young black girl, which stated “The Most Dangerous Place for An African-American is in the Womb.” This was in reference to the fact that in New York City, for every thousand black babies born, 1,489 hundred are aborted (in other words, 60% of all black babies in NYC are killed in the womb). Black “leaders” in politics and civil rights are complicit in this genocide, defending and demanding taxpayer funding of the abortion mills like Planned Parenthood that exterminate their own people.

Have we now reached a point where human life only has value as it relates to racial, socio-economic or political categorizations? Where was the outrage for the brutal kidnapping, repeated rape and torture, and eventual murders of young, white college students Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome at the hands of five black thugs in Tennessee? Would this not have been a national outrage had the races of the victims and perpetrators been reversed? Why no rallies for the ten people shot dead in Obama’s hometown of Chicago over St. Patrick’s Day weekend, victims of gang violence, including 6-year old black girl Aliyah Shell? Was her death not as tragic as Trayvon’s?

We should also factor in the danger of political correctness in these tragedies. Much has been made of the fact that Trayvon was wearing a hoodie, and we are told that we should not make assumptions about his character based on his manner of dress. Why not? Isn’t our dress generally indicative of the type of person we are? If you saw a white man with a skinned head, swastika tattoos and dressed in paramilitary gear, would you assume he was on his way home from a reading of Maya Angelou poems? Rev. Jesse Jackson once said, “I hate to admit it, but I have reached a stage in my life that if I am walking down a dark street late at night and I see that the person behind me is white, I subconsciously feel relieved.” Is Jackson a racist?

At the end of the day, this is not about race, this is about culture. Too many kids in the black community (and white and Hispanic) are enamored with the rap/”gangsta” culture; a culture which glorifies violence, drug use, misogynistic “pimping”, and which shuns education and responsibility. How can we raise children to be decent, honorable citizens in such an environment? How can we give them hope for the future if their future is likely to include imprisonment or violent death at a young age? How can we raise children in stable homes when so many are born out of wedlock and raised by single mothers? Black children raised in poor, two-parent homes are no more likely to become criminals than children of rich, white parents; a two-parent family is critical.

We’ve become a society that all too often shuns and mocks traditional morals, and castigates those that advocate for those morals. Yet look at what has been wrought after just a few short decades of eroding traditional morality. Are our families stronger today? Our society? If not, what will it take to end our obsession with politically correct moral relativism? A few more dead Trayvons? I pray we learn our lesson sooner.