May 04, 2015

Baltimore, Marland

Baltimore, Marland

Source: Jim Goad

But we seem to be increasingly living in a culture where the factual narrative gets trampled beneath the emotional fairy tale. And early last week, that perfect storm of post-Ferguson myopia that obsessively focuses on the relatively few black lives that are lost at the hands of police compared to those who perish at the hands of other blacks used Gray’s death as excuse to throw another wide-scale emotional tantrum that only sends capital and jobs and small businesses fleeing as far away as possible from such urban nightmare zones.

A generation or two ago when a black family would move into a non-black neighborhood, the common refrain was “€œthere goes the neighborhood.”€ But when large masses of black rioters”€”sprinkled, of course, with a handful of the usual benighted white “€œradical”€ morons”€”torch large swaths of their own stomping grounds, it might be more accurate to say “€œthere goes the city.”€ Newark never recovered from the 60s riots. Neither did Detroit. Baltimore seems well on its way to never recovering.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake reportedly told the city’s police to stand down and let Charm City burn.

During a press conference, she also said the following:

I”€™ve made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech. It’s a very delicate balancing act, because while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.

Blake later said her words were taken out of context and misinterpreted. But if she told the police to back off and let the rioters run loose, she indeed created a safe space for those who wished to destroy.

Like an autistic Nero, I fiddle with logic while the country burns. Only someone immune to logic would claim that the situation in Baltimore has nothing to do with race. Perhaps it’s oversimplifying things, but the main culprit here would either have to be what the city does to black people…or the very presence of black people. As it stands, the general public has been brainwashed and terror-zapped away from even daring to consider the latter option as a possibility.

For decades now, I”€™ve been begging the world to provide me with evidence of any place on Earth where basic living conditions”€”i.e., longevity, income, education, safety”€”improved rather than deteriorated subsequent to a large influx of blacks. Hell, I”€™d be satisfied to see a place where conditions even remained steady. I”€™m not saying such a place doesn”€™t exist, only that no one yet has been willing (or able?) to cough up evidence of such a place. Why does the general pattern”€”especially in Africa after the white colonialists are sent packing”€”seem to be destruction rather than creation? And why do I instantly become Evil Incarnate for asking that question? When people resort to calling you dirty names merely for asking honest questions, one starts to suspect that they don’t have an honest answer.

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