printBy Myron Pauli
Twenty years ago, I met a Yugoslavian physicist visiting MIT who assured all that Yugoslavia would not collapse into civil war and that only a few “kooks” were stirring up ethnic antagonism. It turned out he knew his quantum chromodynamics better than his kinsmen. Similarly, when I saw übercynic Fred Reed’s portents of civic collapse. It exceeded even my own pessimism. Next week, of course, was Ferguson, and Fred seems once again prophetic. Fred even specifically mentioned that the pervasive racism is in the “real world” and not in physics departments!
The issue of police militarization, of course, is a legitimate concern, even for Finnish libertarians who do not want to see their local trigger-happy cops armed for the Battle of the Bulge with hypermilitarized SWAT teams knocking down doors at 3:00AM. This is not, per se, a racial issue but a civil liberties issue.
However, when the local cops smash down Grandma O’Leary’s door at 3:00 AM to look for some pot and wind up shooting her dog and tasering granny, it is not likely that white people take to the streets and riot. While the all-pervasive black-on-white violence, like the torture/rape/murder spree of Reginald and Jonathan Carr, might have brought out the local Klan in the bad old days, most people let the criminal justice system, however flawed, take its course. One can certainly spot a white person mouthing racist vitriol but neo-fascist pogroms seem to be passé.
Now, let us switch to black victims of crime. Between the killing of Travon Martin and the exoneration of George Zimmerman, roughly 6,000 black Americans were killed by black Americans – not much protest. In that same interval, 400,000 black babies were aborted – presumably not all suffering from Down’s syndrome, Siamese twins, or major medical abnormalities – but not much protest. In Africa, we have the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Diamond Gangs in Sierra Leone, and other examples of mass rape, mass mutilations, and genocide. Remember Rwanda? Does anyone care about 5,400,000 killed in Civil War in the Congo ?
Perhaps the outrage is only due to cop-on-black violence. The bullet blitzkrieg that struck down 3 blacks leaving a strip club in Queens looked like it might go viral. However, the first cop to start the blitzkrieg against Sean Bell and his drunk pals, Gerald Isnora, was himself black – hence, nothing to get upset over! Would anyone have cared if Travon Martin or Michael Bell were killed by a black drug dealer or a rival boyfriend? However, if the shooter is white, then it is time to take to the streets regardless of whether the facts have been established. Time for Al Sharpton to get on his horse like Paul Revere to shout “the whiteys are coming!”. Death is not required – even beating Rodney King or an auto accident that kills Gavin Cato in Crown Heights is enough to get the riots going and the subsequent looting of plasma TV’s from Costco. As Fred puts it, beneath the surface is a cauldron of hatred – as in the Crown Heights riots.
The relatively irrelevant “facts” that Bell and Martin may not have been saints does not imply that trigger-happy cops and cop-wannabees have some inherent authority to blast petty delinquents at will. Nevertheless, the fact that black racists make these unproven charges and that white racists “justify” them only shows the dreadful abyss into whihc this country has been heading.
I don’t recall the America of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era being so polarized. Electing Obama did not improve harmony and might have made things worse. Nor have 50 years of “Civil Rights Laws” helped the underclass – one mile away, Ballou High School in DC is officially “integrated” but it is over 98 percent black with only 20 percent of kids at grade level and zero students who have ever passed an Advanced Placement Course. The Chamber of Commerce prefers importing illegal aliens to hiring blacks. Anger begets paranoia and paranoia begets anger and guilt-tripped whites encourage more anger, while little gets solved waiting for the next incident and riots.
Yugoslavia?!
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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.