In team competition, Congress has earned a medal already. But I was more impressed with Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who truly shone in her individual event. Her performance, entitled “When the racial slurs come from those we love,” was a masterpiece of moral redemption from start to finish.
“A special kind of an anguish claws at us when someone we love is also someone who is racist,” she began.
It’s one thing to witness anonymous internet racism of blogs and email chains.
The story is painfully different, though, when the appalling epithet erupts from someone who is otherwise beloved in our lives. Our responses, usually silent, run the gamut from shock and embarrassment to disgust and rage. There’s also a lot of sadness. The question is seldom asked but often wondered: How can we be so different from these people we love?
Apparently Dad was a great guy and an admirable father, a factory worker who made sure Schultz would be the first in the family to go to college. But he used racial epithets. In what context? Privately, or publicly? Was he Archie Bunker or Adolf Hitler? It doesn’t matter. Uttering such remarks, with any degree of seriousness and in any situation, isn’t just boorish and uncivil—it’s the highest moral crime in the history of mankind. If raising a family and being a good, hardworking citizen earns you redemption, Schultz doesn’t want to say so. It’s too solemn a matter for her to be the final judge.
The dilemma is a little like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. One the one hand, a man habitually violated PC. On the other hand, the man happens to have been her father. This isn’t as easy and satisfying as snorting at some Republican you’ve just met in a bar.
Personal commitments or allegiance to the multicultural regime? It’s a conundrum of tragic proportions, and Schultz is equal to the task, wailing and beating her chest like a professional mourner.
Does she really have it in her to feel all this emotion just because a family member let fall uncivil remarks? Or is she moaning and invoking Obama to publicly cleanse herself of that darned white guilt? (I keep scrubbing, and the stuff just won’t come off!)
It’s no use attempting to explain why such outpourings are embarrassingly slavish and self-serving. We are an unserious people, as Mr. Buchanan says, an appear content to remain so, as long as they continue delivering Starbucks out in suburban safety.
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Another Gold Medal
In team competition, Congress has earned a medal already. But I was more impressed with Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who truly shone in her individual event. Her performance, … [Read More]
Posted by Evan McLaren on August 03, 2008
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