America will have no respite from evil until those who are real philosophers acquire political power or until, through some miraculous dispensation, those who have political authority acquire the highest level of intellect, wisdom and morality. (From Plato, et al)
People in leadership roles nullify their moral authority when they commit acts of misfeasance or malfeasance; omit actions that are necessary for America to develop into a true democracy; or tolerate wrong-doing by their own peers and colleagues.
When leaders do wrong, ethical decadence spreads like wildfire, and paves the way for increasing transgressions in the populace. The 2016 election is already having a horrible impact on the behavior of America’s school children. (The Southern Poverty Law Center)
American Racism as pertains to the descendants of the Slave-class is an especially virulent and unique form of Evil. After 400 years of cultural development, this evil is now permanently embedded in nearly all our national subsystems, as well as in frames-of-reference of both Blacks’ and whites’ defining frames-of-reference. Even “normal” operations often harm African-Americans disproportionately.
When people have lived long periods with great pain, they are prone to seek any surcease from suffering, often grasping at the illusions of salvation like drowning people reaching for straws. Our hopes for relief from the deplorable conditions that have been killing our bodies and our spirits impel many of us to equate changes in appearances with changes in reality. In recent years, most Americans had learned to refrain from overt racist actions; consequently, many people concluded that a permanent, broad-scale transformation had taken place in the hearts and minds of the American citizenry as pertained to African Americans.
The effusive comments about a Post-Racist society that followed President Obama’s election is a case in point. “My dear brethren, do not ever forget, when you hear the progress of lights praised, that the most effective trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!” (Charles Baudelaire)
Obama’s election rocked the very foundation of America’s racial superiority-inferiority philosophy. In times of great stress and uncertainty, two kinds of leaders from the extreme edges of human value usually come to the fore: the unscrupulous and the genuine.
Unscrupulous leaders deceive vulnerable populations by offering simplistic solutions and offering up targets for their aggrievement and ire. These charlatans lean heavily on crafty hypocrisy with a barrage of inflammatory, rabble-rousing statements. They tell big lies and keep on telling them, because they know people eventually will believe them. Truth, clarity and openness are their greatest foes.
While we cheered Obama’s election, racist leaders used his election to trigger massive increases in hate group membership. Clearly, too many Americans had learned to hold their tongues while harboring evil in their hearts; consequently, when stimulated by unscrupulous leaders, their deplorable actions surged.
Those who are easily deceived by manipulators usually are self-deceived pawns because they think they have arrived at their positions through fact-based thought processes. John Kenneth Galbraith: Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. It is much more difficult to lose a falsehood than to learn a truth; but without the first, the latter is not likely. If an opinion was not formed using reason, rational arguments won’t change it.
Long-suffering people are more apt to resist genuine leadership because real leaders will not pander to them and will demand something substantial from them. Genuine leaders will urge people to face the truth even about themselves and each other; to eliminate erroneous, but comforting constructs; to become more self-reliant; to settle in for the long and arduous endeavor that will solve problems on a permanent basis; and to seek outcomes from which they may not benefit personally. When they resist truth, they become inadvertent co-conspirators in their own demise by allowing tyrannical exter-nal constraints to preserve fallacious in-ternal limitations.
Using the Black cultural power that was evident in 1950 to improve our current plight is the only means to achieve permanent salvation and protection from charlatans of any ilk, including quislings from inside the race. Seeking success through self-reliance does not preclude laying accurate blame for crimes committed against our people; indeed, both are necessary for redemption and vindication.
The difference for progress depends on which factor dominates in the strategies used in the planning and implementation process. When “blame-laying” dominates and is accompanied by “revenge-seeking,” power shifts from abused people to the perpetrators and beneficiaries of harm, giving them power to define means, ends and measures of success. Many of their “solutions” have proved to be valueless, even harmful, either immediately or in short order. Fifty years after the decision, Jack Greenberg, former Head of the NAACP LDEF and a Brown litigator, admitted that Brown had failed poor Black children. Descendants of those failed are paying an inordinately heavy price today – a national disgrace!
