Only the truly wicked might paint Louis Farrakhan's recent statements as some kind of twisted societal prod.
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan fueled a rumor that explosives, not Hurricane Katrina, broke New Orleans' dikes and flooded poor African American neighborhoods.
"They found two types of explosives used by the military," he said, without naming the source, adding that an eight-meter (25-foot) crater had been blown in the dike.
F arrakhan said his weekend Millions More Movement, already being labeled by critics as a "who's who of racists," was intended to put a stop to
the "lies, to thieves, to murderers in the name of government.
"When you have people who politically feel that they get their advantage by
killing people and blaming it on somebody else, then it makes us wonder what
really happened to the Twin Towers (in New York City)," a reference to the
terrorist strikes against the U.S. four years ago that brought down the World
Trade Center.
"Was the heat from fuel from two airplanes sufficient to compromise the steel in that building? (sic) People had said they heard explosions and the buildings came down like we see old buildings in Vegas or in Florida or in other places, implode," Farrakhan said. "So who was the victor there? Who got the advantage there? It wasn't the American people.
We spit when Farrakhan opens his foul mouth here. Farrakhan's deceit is not mere rabble rousing. This is incitement to self destruction. This the face of evil. He despises his own people and uses them to his own end. He has no respect for the measure of a man' or more specifically a black man's potential, his contribution to society or his building a better life for himself and his family.
As Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton prepare for yet another symbolic and substanceless "Million Man March" in Washington, all three have managed to dodge the joke about the first such rally a decade ago (the one in which Mr. Farrakhan dazzled the world with his knowledge of numerology): namely, that black men in America are the only group ever to march in protest of themselves. I'm guessing that the rationale for this weekend's gathering is identical to that of the initial march. It is a lament we have heard in one guise or another for 3 1/2 decades: Our family is in crisis; black men are an endangered species.
I am quoting Charles Johnson in the Wall Street Opinion Journal. He goes on to say;
we [Black Americans] are CEOs at AOL Time Warner, American Express and Merrill Lynch; we have served as secretary of state and White House national security
adviser; we are mayors, police chiefs, best-selling novelists, MacArthur fellows, Nobel laureates, professors, billionaires, scientists, stockbrokers, engineers, toymakers, inventors, astronauts, chess grandmasters, dot-com millionaires, talk show hosts, actors and film directors; Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists (as is yours truly). We are inescapable in the fabric of America's lived experience and defy easy categorization. The GDP of black America is $631 billion. Homeownership is close to 50%. The number living in poverty is 25%, which is too high, of course, but a vast improvement over indigence of the past.
But there is a second, disturbing profile that reveals too high a percentage of black men being AWOL as fathers and husbands; as disappearing from our colleges (UC Berkeley's 2004-05 freshman class had only 108 African-Americans out of 3,600 students, with less than 40 males, and not one black among the 800 entering students in engineering); as graduating from high school with an eighth-grade level of proficiency in math and reading; in prison, on probation or on parole (a third of black men in their 20s).
It seems that after decades of supporting and building up our daughters, sisters and wives, we are finally willing to acknowledge a national "boy problem".........We have already allowed the talent, resources and genius of two generations of young black men who might have enriched this republic to be squandered by gang violence, by poor academic preparation, by the lack of good parenting and by the celebration of an irresponsible "thug life" that is ethically infantile and, predictably, embraced by a notoriously values-challenged entertainment industry.
Two things could not be more clear in 2005: First, without strong, self-sacrificing, frugal and industrious fathers as role models, our boys go astray, never learn how to be parents (or men), and perpetuate the dismal situation of single-parent homes run by tired and overworked black women.
If, instead of denial and avoidance, our graying leaders and opinion-makers--who have dismally failed to address the serious problem of black male culture for almost half a century because it is so much easier to apologize for black underperformance or arm-wrestle with Mexican president Vicente Fox over a slip during one of his speeches--tell the men in their audience that each and every one of them must become the intellectual and spiritual leader they have been looking for, then perhaps this latest racial spectacle in our nation's capital will not be staged in vain.
So where are the visionary black leaders? Why isn't it Charles Johnson whose name rolls off our tongues instead of Jackson, Sharpton, Farrakhan. These vampires suck the blood of their young in that they exploit their people and remove from the collective conscious the very thing man must have to survive: responsibility. So why these leaders, still? Why do these deleterious clowns get the media's attention and respect?
Note keyword: Media
