[quote]dhickey wrote:
Sifu wrote:
I’m half Irish but I wouldn’t even try to compare the way blacks were brought here and treated to the Irish experience. Steerage on the Titanic was paradise compared to the hold of a slave ship.
When the Irish and Chinese came here America was already a country. When the blacks were brought here the east coast was impenetrable forest and marshy swampland with mosquitoes the size of your fist.
Blacks are the ones who drained the swamps and cleared the land so America was a place people would be able to come to. At the time of signing of the Declaration of Independence Africans were the largest ethnic group in America.
I wasn’t serious. Just showing how silly reperations are.
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I do realize what you wrote was a joke. I had a serious point to make. I responded to your wisecrack because it could tend to make my point appear as one that was motivated by a lack of sympathy for blacks and what they have been through. Which is not the case.
I don’t think the idea of reperations is a silly one, I do think it does have some legitimate grounds. So that was not my point either.
My point is it is something that isn’t going to come about. So raising it just gives a false sense of hope, that makes people think they don’t have to get their lives together. What it does do is give people a sense that they are still being done wrong which makes them angry and bitter. All it does is poison people without helping them in any way.
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The only thing that would actually help would be education. If we made trade school or a college education available for any black who wanted it that would be the best solution.
It’s available to everyone now. I went to college with $30 and half a pack of cigarettes. No one paid for my schooling. My parents also made too much for me to get any kind of grants. [/quote]
It isn’t real easy to get grants or student loans. There is a strong culture of why even bother trying that needs to be overcome. Reperations is one of the things that reinforces that mentality.
Why did your parents make too much? Perhaps because they had decent jobs thanks to education and/or job skills. You probably came from a better place than a lot of ghetto kids even if you weren’t rich. With better role models and influences.
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They thought it better that I pay for everything myself. When they did offer me money for groceries or small stuff, I declined. I enjoyed living on my own and providing for myself. I had several jobs during school and usually carried at least two at a time.
Worked in the gym, worked as a personal trainer, changed oil at a jiffy lube, drove fork lift at Fleet Farm, wrote parking tickets on campus, fixed computers on campus, humped block and cement for a mason, and probably a few more.
It was a very small town where half the residents were students so there was insane competition for jobs. None of them paid very much. Most of my freinds were in similar situations. [/quote]
I bet there was competition for jobs. I also bet that a white kid who came from a nice white suburb and went to a good school would have a leg up in securing one compared to a black kid from the hood who went to MLK High School.
I also bet that while you were going to school you never got spit on, beat up or raped for talking like you were white.
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Jesse Jackson did have a point when he said that it costs just as much money to put a black kid in jail for a year as it costs to get a college education at Harvard. A Harvard education did wonders for Obama.
But even a community college education can do a lot. It is sad that the money is there to lock people up but it isn’t available to better them.
Unfortuneately there is a culture of living down to the lowest common denominator so many are disfunctional and those who could have been successful and helped others never do.
This makes no sense. How many of those in prison would be interested in any schooling. If they were interested they would be in school, not jail. We don’t put them in jail because we don’t know what to do with them. [/quote]
There are people in jail who are interested in schooling. They have to get work when they get out in order to be productive citizens. Schooling helps. Especially when they have a criminal record against them.
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They are in jail because they made bad decisions. Society owes them nothing. We are simply paying to keep them from robbing us, murdering us, or selling our kids drugs. White, black, or yellow.[/quote]
With this you really come across as a white kid who led a protected life in the suburbs, because you are really clueless about how American society works. You should learn about the school to prison pipeline.
It is not all bad decision making. There are people in jail who are there because they had circumstances forced upon them.
Eighty percent of prisoners are in jail because of the war on drugs. Only twenty percent are in there for all the other crimes. Those can be broken down into two categories, violent crime, assault, rape, murder and stealing. A good percentage of the assaults and murders are a result of the war on drugs. And a lot of the stealing is a result of the war on drugs.
Most dealers wouldn’t be selling drugs to kids if the war on drugs didn’t make it profitable for them to do it. Without drug turf to fight over there would be a lot less violent crime. Without the war on drugs policy of interdiction driving up the prices there would be a lot less stealing to support habits.
Most of the problems you just pointed out are an uneccessary self-inflicted wound. If we can borrow over a hundred billion dollars a year to waste on the war on drugs, we should be able to come up with money for schools.