Main Street in my 1950s Hometown

Zman listens to David Brooks bloviating about the Baltimore rioting at the Times, and marvels at how much money and liberty was wasted on the effort to make the American underclass equal, how futile it all seems and just how much has been destroyed in the process.

As the Boomers begin falling into the abyss, they have to look around and wonder if it was worth it. If you were born in 1950, for example, you grew up in America that is vastly different than today. It’s one your grandchildren will never enjoy. The trillions spent knocking down what you inherited could maybe have been spent more wisely. …

Put another way, the organic ways in which society managed the unproductive classes were blasted to bits by a bunch of people convinced they knew better than the dozens of generations that came before them. The proposed replacement for those ways have utterly failed, meaning everything guys like Brooks grew up believing was nonsense after all. Meathead is learning that Archie was mostly right.

Read the whole thing.

They’ve devoted the last 50 years to improving the condition of the black underclass, now they’re beginning the project of making being Gay equal, too.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

The Thinking Housewife contemplates the highly profitable and continually popular black grievance industry.

What is the real purpose of “Black History Month”? Apologists for the cultural left (Republicans and Democrats alike) would have us believe that its purpose is entirely-benign – i.e., education, inclusion, diversity of thought, the elevation of a people whose history has in the past been neglected, etc. – the standard rationale offered up by the left for so many of its initiatives and programs. The real purpose of “Black History Month” isn’t racial healing or education; instead, it is to keep the grievances and resentments of black people (and their supporters, whatever their race) simmering and ready at a moment’s notice to come to a boil in places like Ferguson and Baltimore.

There is a vast and profitable racket based upon the narrative that black folks are victims of white oppression – and the continued success/profitability of the racial grievance industry depends on keeping blacks not only angry, but feeling alienated from mainstream culture to the extent possible. Booker T. Washington, himself a black man, foresaw this over a century ago when he said,

“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well.”…

Of course, one of the most-interesting and disturbing aspects of the whole phenomenon is that present-day blacks are angry about injustices committed not against them, but acts which may (or may not) have been committed against their ancestors. Whites and others who aren’t black are expected to feel guilt for acts they did not even commit. Inherited anger and/or guilt for acts in which one did not even participate is obviously a logical fallacy, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the race-hustlers and their enablers. Over the last half-century, the nation has spent billions in taxpayer funds on redressing racial grievances and blacks – as a demographic cohort – have been the beneficiaries of a vast menu of privileges and special programs available to no one else. None of this seems to have mattered – race-relations are at an very low ebb, and militant blacks are angrier than ever.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.