America’s iconic athlete-turned-actor-turned-writer (and not
a bad one at that) says that his older relatives had a bleak view of voting.
They called it “selecting the lesser of two evils” and sometimes I’m inclined
to agree. When you can’t stand either candidate, you end up voting for any con
man, huckster, poverty pimp, or generally corrupt, power hungry jerk. I agree with
the author, because the Republicans have a rich clown with a campaign that
rivals Britain’s Monster Raving Loonies (look them up if you don’t know.) As
for the Democrats, their prime candidate is a power-hungry carpetbagger. Both
have big stupid egos and limited accomplishment.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar observes how the conservatives want the
small town ideal to come back, but it can never happen. He quotes Bob Dylan’s
song The Times They Are A-Changing,
with the words “better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone,” because it
happened 50 years ago and it’s happening now. The Republicans want back the old
Mayberry stereotype, but it’s unrealistic. I’ve seen firsthand how many of
these quaint small towns are now infested with drugs, ruined by teenage
pregnancies and prescription pill addiction, and families have broken up.
Ironically, Jabbar spends much of his first chapter, called The Broom of the Nation, trying to get
everyone’s head out of the clouds and wake them up from the Mayberry dream. I
say it’s ironic, because Ron Howard, who played little Opie Cunningham, grew up
to direct anti-establishment films. As for Andy Griffith, he played a nasty,
foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, womanizing drifter turned media star in A Face In the Crowd. He sings “I’ll be a
free man in the morning” while in the drunk tank at the jail, and sings it
again when he hears that the TV sponsor is mad at him. I guess you’re only
truly free if you’re homeless.
I disagree, however, with his claims that white people are
using Obama to say “I’m not racist.” True, however, is that a lot of whites,
both conservative and liberal, think that Obama’s lack of take-charge attitude
has created an excuse for black criminals. Never mind Collin Flaherty or Thomas
Sowell, I’m talking about the average white worker that nobody knows about.
People who have no power (except for the ballot box) are more than happy to
have a president who takes command, but as with any business, an executive who
can’t manage brings no hope and no change.
Jabbar says he still gets called a nigger, but would it make
him happier if someone said “you wrote a book, I didn’t know you were educated?”
Then he says that blacks who get to “climb the mountain” are mostly in
entertainment and sports, but then he ignores blacks in law, science, and the
military. I can guarantee, there are black men and women in astronomy, biology,
engineering, and forensic science. There are black physicians in the USA, but
they don’t get as much attention as womanizing athletes or rappers with
tattooed faces. Maybe the real problem is the schools, putting the ball before
the book, giving the athletes all the attention while the scholar gets ignored
(or worse, bullied)?
Next comes a complaint about the Confederate flag. I agree
with Jabbar, it doesn’t belong outside the state capitol building, but do you
really have to remove it from everything else? Is it fair to deny white
southerners their heritage? Does Jabbar believe that the average Confederate
fighter, a 17 year old backwoodsman, could’ve owned slaves? He compares having
a statue of a slave owning southerner or Confederate General to having a “Hitler
Hall” on campus, and that’s an unfair analogy. You can’t expect a nation to
whitewash and rewrite history just because your ancestors were effected
differently. Sorry Kareem, life is unfair. Keep in mind, when the Civil War
ended, the whites were poor as well.
More untrue claims follow. Jabbar says that Blacks are
suffering more than white from foreclosure, and I promise you I can find whole
towns of white people losing their homes. Then he cries “we’re the majority
victims” in turns of lead paint poisoning and prisons. Well let’s see, were there
any black families living in Love Canal or Times Beach? How many black people
have their water polluted thanks to mountaintop removal? As for the prisons,
the victims of the “kids for cash” scandal were mostly white, and in states
with few black residents, the jails are full of white kids, with the same
family problems-alcohol, drugs, welfare, child abuse, sexual abuse-that occur
in black families. Read the recent book Hillbilly
Elegy (or The Glass Castle, or All Souls, or Townie and see what I mean.)
As for the media, why doesn’t Jabbar rave and rant at the
sitcoms that make black people look stupid? Did he protest to get Good Times off the air? That program had
a stupid, unmasculine, unemployed, 20-something black character who shucked
& jived, wore a chicken hat, and pushed the stereotype of the black
American as a lazy, stupid, ragdoll of a man. Didn’t John Amos say that he quit
the show because of the shucking & jiving, and that the producers used it
to avoid having to write dialogue?
Jabbar admits that athletes like Lance Armstrong (cheater),
Mike Tyson (rapist), Ray Rice (wife beater), and Aaron Hernandez (murderer) are
bad role models. Here we are on the argument that school sports have lost their
way, veering from its health and civics purpose to being a ticket out of
poverty, eventually becoming a ticket TO poverty. He also discusses how nobody
loses an academic scholarship because of an injury, but a dislocated knee or
torn ACL will cost you an athletic scholarship. But the problem is that for as
long as colleges give athletic scholarships, poor kids will put the ball before
the book. As for Jabbar, I wonder how he (back when his name was Lew Alcindor)
got into Power Memorial High School and UCLA? He couldn’t have paid full
tuition, and he wasn’t an academic genius. I doubt that a college scout came to
his school looking for black kids who were talented scientists. Without
athletic scholarships, he’d have gone nowhere. White America didn’t love him
for his mind.
If Kareem Abdul Jabbar thinks that white guys like me are
going to feel guilty for what a few whites said and/or did, he is mistaken.
I’ll never feel guilty, because I’m too busy with something called SURVIVAL.
For me it’s all about paying the bills, making sure I have food to eat, and
paying my taxes. Come to think of it, the fact that I pay my taxes absolves me
from having to feel guilty for anything. My taxes are paying for government
charity that feeds both black and white people.
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