As I watch the world in general fall victim to weirdness at every turn I ask myself, 'what in the hell is going on?'
We see notable (not necessarily great) athletes refusing to stand and show respect for the flag because they say the country is suppressing people of color. Now they are doing this in a country where they are being paid millions of dollars to play a game they love to play, and would play in a vacant lot or a park for free if nobody paid them. This country has a President who is black as well as the last two Attorney Generals, the top law enforcement people in the nation. Many, many city mayors are black. Two sitting Supreme Court Justices are of color. I'm not seeing the country, and thus the flag, holding people of color down.
One could easily make the case that it is the minority communities these folks live in that are holding them back. I believe it was Charles Barkley who recently made this point. He called out the folks who deride black kids who work hard in school and do well. Telling these kids they aren't black enough and they are trying to be white if they try to learn and improve themselves.
I find it hard to hold much sympathy for folks who do not take advantage of opportunities placed before them and then cry because they don't have the things that others have. It isn't the system that holds them back, it's their circle they hang with.
Dr. Carson, Thomas Sowell, Ph. D., and Sheriff David Clarke are all men of color who took advantage of the opportunities that the nation offers to ALL of its citizens and rose to positions of power and influence. If they grew up in areas where the schools may not have had the best facilities or the best teachers, they still made the most of their opportunities, and look how the nation has rewarded their efforts.
They were not rewarded because of their color, just like Colin Kaepernick was not given a $100M contract because he was black. They were rewarded based on their proven abilities.
This country was developed as a meritocracy. That means you are rewarded on merit. What you do, not where you come from or who your parents were or weren't.
It is that meritocracy that allowed this country to develop and become the most wonderful country that history has ever recorded.
Have there been cases where this hasn't worked out perfectly? Of course there are. Certainly some individuals have started out a rung or two higher on the ladder than the rest of us, but merit will still be rewarded in the end. Our history is littered with people who were born to wealth but lost it all because they didn't continue to strive and develop. The same can be said for companies. When was the last time you saw a Studebaker or an AMC driving down the road?
So where do these ideas come from that cause folks to think that they are not being treated fairly and that they need to fight for "social justice"?
My hypothesis is that it comes from our educational system.
As my friend Mary Ruth says, this started many decades ago. Academics developed visions of utopian societies where everyone had everything they needed and then proceeded to dream up systems where by this could take place. Marks and Engles being two of the more influential in this category.
In their utopia, it was "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". In this system everybody produced and their product went into a central repository that all would draw upon to meet their needs. The problem being, this didn't account for human nature and the basic laws of behavioralism. People don't like to see their labor be taken without recompense and what is rewarded is repeated. Which is why these systems are always doomed to failure
This fact has never altered an academics views, and they have pushed these ideas, which are an easy sell to those who have less and want more, but are unwilling or unable to develop skills and abilities that would allow them to earn more in a meritocracy. It is these folks that the leftist academics have found as fertile ground from which they can develop their Social Justice Warriors. The Occupy crowd and the BLM folks who want to "redistribute" the wealth. Believing if they just had the wealth all would be fine, without the understanding of what it took to create the wealth. And yes I said create, it was not stolen from the poor, it was created. Low skilled individuals may have participated in the creation but they were paid for their efforts based on the market value of the skills they brought to the job. The higher the skill the higher the recompense.
It seems to me that it is only those who are unwilling to develop marketable skills or put in the requisite effort who are drawn to the social justice sales pitch. The person who goes to school and earns a degree in Graphic Novel Literature or Women's Studies will be easy pickings for SJW recruitment as they have NO marketable skills or knowledge, yet they feel the system OWES them because they fell victim to some professors sales pitch to study this worthless field of endeavor. In reality, the professor just needs to bilk them into studying this field to justify to the administration that they are needed on staff to meet the need to teach this crap. Which, by the way, seems to me to be a tacit recognition of the value of meritocracy. The leftist professor sells his value to the administration by saying look at all the people who want what I'm providing.
Or so it would seem to an old farm boy.
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