[Rhodes22-list] Political - It is hard to believe he is from NYC - Maybe others should take the 'A' train...

[Tootle]

Political commentary - 

I have sat and listened to politics and commentary for a long time.  After
reading the following commentary I had to stop.  For those who do not know,
a certain member of this forum is from NYC, which borough is not that
important is it.  

There used to be a piece of music, "Take the 'A' train."  The 'A' train
takes you to Harlem, at the time the song was written, a place for American
Jazz.  

Maybe Slim could post a sample of the music?

During this time there was a guy growing up in Harlem.  And he wrote the
following political commentary:
________________________________________________________________________________________

Sometimes unrelated events nevertheless tell a coherent story. 

One newspaper story that caught my eye recently was about two high-powered
schools in South Korea where Korean girls study 15 hours a day, preparing
themselves for tests to get into elite colleges in the United States.
Harvard, Yale and Princeton already have 34 students from those schools. 

When a copy of the 50th anniversary report on members of the Harvard class
of 1958 arrived in the mail recently, I thought back to one of my fellow
students in that class who had worn a hole in the sole of his shoe but put a
folded piece of newspaper in his shoe to cover the hole, rather than tell
his parents. 

He realized that they would buy him a new pair of shoes if they knew— and he
also realized that they could not afford it. 

He went on to become a professor at several well-known medical schools and
to have various achievements and honors over the years. 

>From even further back in time, I received a letter recently from a man who
grew up in my old neighborhood back in Harlem. When he and I were in the
same junior high school, one day a teacher who saw him eating his brown bag
lunch suddenly arranged for him to get a lunch from the school cafeteria
without having to pay for it. 

It happened so fast that my schoolmate had already taken a bite from the
school lunch when he suddenly realized that he had been given charity— and
he wouldn't swallow the food. Instead he went to the toilet and spat it out. 

By now his brown bag lunch had been thrown out, so he just went hungry that
day. He went on to become a very successful psychiatrist. 

Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah
Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20
years. 

Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far
left vision of victimization and grievances— Wright from his pulpit and
Obama as a community organizer for the radical group ACORN, as a
collaborator with former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, and as the member
of the U.S. Senate with the farthest left voting record. 

Later, when the ultimate political prize— the White House— loomed on the
horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer
of divisions. 

The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are
addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those
audiences. 

It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery,
playing the audience for suckers in both cases. 

People on the far left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor
and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty—
telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting the work ethnic
of the Korean girls, the dogged determination of my Harvard classmate with
the newspaper in his shoe, or the self-reliance of my fellow junior high
school student in Harlem who had too much pride to take charity? 

When young people go out into the world, what will they have to offer that
can gain them the rewards they seek from others and the achievements they
need for themselves? 

Will they have the skills of science, technology or medicine? Or will they
have only the resentments that have been whipped up by the likes of Jeremiah
Wright or the sense of entitlement from the government that has been Barack
Obama's stock in trade? 

In the real world, a sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the
mistreatment of your ancestors, is not likely to get you very far with
people who are too busy dealing with current economic realities to spend
much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people's
ancestors. 

Another seemingly unrelated experience was being in a crowd at a graveside
in a Jewish cemetery last week. That crowd included people who were black,
white, Asian, Catholic, Jewish and no doubt others. This country has come a
long way, just in my lifetime. 

We don't need people like either Jeremiah Wright or Barack Obama to take us
backward. The time is long overdue to stop gullibly accepting the left's
vision of itself as idealistic, rather than self-aggrandizing. 

Thomas Sowell

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