Verdict in Florida, Violence in Oakland, Insanity in Media, Ignorance Everywhere

Will the Zimmerman Trial Verdict
Spark L.A.-Style Riots?
— Philadelphia Magazine, June 25

Marxist protesters in California display posters bearing
the logo of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

“History interests the radical elite only as it can be used to foment anti-capitalist passions, and they cherry-pick history to fit their own leftist interpretations, so that the past means exactly what they say it means and nothing else. . . .
“Schools today teach history mainly as a relentless harangue about how oppressively evil America has always been. Such tendentious sermonizing is boring, and young people respond by learning only enough history to ace their dumbed-down coursework.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Not Afraid to Fight,” The American Spectator, April 12, 2011

Anarchist smashes Oakland window after anti-Zimmerman protest.

Frankly, after all the media hype about the potential of nationwide rioting if George Zimmerman wasn’t convicted — and all the protesters chanting “No Justice! No Peace!” — I was surprised the Baltimore Bolsheviks didn’t get their dream of a Marxist revolution. But that hasn’t happened yet and the only violence Saturday night was in Oakland:

Protesters angered by the acquittal of George Zimmerman held largely peaceful demonstrations in three California cities, but broke windows and started small street fires Oakland, police said. . . .
The Oakland police dispatch office said about 100 people protested, with some in the crowd breaking windows on businesses and starting small fires in the streets. . . .
Local media reports said some Oakland marchers vandalized a police squad car . . .
The Oakland Tribune said some windows on the newspaper’s downtown offices were broken, and footage from a television helicopter show people attempting to start fires in the street and spray painting anti-police graffiti.
Protesters also reportedly burned an American and a California state flag and spray painted Alameda County’s Davidson courthouse.

Question: What kind of person believes that “anti-police graffiti” in Oakland is justified by the result of a murder trial in Florida?

Answer: A typical Democrat voter.

Ignorance proliferates, weak-minded people embrace irrational folly and this explains why Harry Reid is Senate Majority Leader.

Meanwhile, media malpractice continues. Patterico had to explain that the trial was not about whether Trayvon Martin “deserved to die” — which no intelligent or sane person ever argued. But intelligent and sane people aren’t employed at the Tampa Bay Times, and the proliferation of kooks and zanies is becoming a serious social problem in America. I blame the media, and also an education system that fails to teach young people the most important lesson of youth: You’re ignorant.

All young people are ignorant, in comparison to educated adults, but some of us were fortunate enough to have teachers who explained to us how ignorant we were. Our teachers taught us we had an obligation — if we did not want to grow up to be complete fools — to educate ourselves, and otherwise to shut up about things we didn’t know anything about. And today’s lesson, children, is Basit Kassim:

You never picked cotton, young man, and I never made anybody pick cotton.  One hundred fifty years ago, there was a war.

Six hundred thousand men died in that war.

My great-great grandfather Winston Wood Bolt was a private in the 13th Alabama Infantry Regiment. He was captured on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, along with Brig. Gen. James Archer, and Private Bolt spent the rest of the war imprisoned at Fort Delaware.

He was fortunate, really, because  two days after he was captured, his regiment was in the vanguard of Pickett’s Charge, where their colonel, Birkett Davenport Fry, was seriously wounded and many of those Alabama boys were hastened to eternity by the cannons blasting double loads of canister and by volleys of Yankee rifle fire.

Students of history would be hard-pressed to argue that the deaths of 600,000 men were an insufficient sum to do justice to whatever anyone may suggest led America to that war.  Nor was the death toll the entirety of the price paid. We must add to the balance the men horribly maimed who somehow survived, including Winston Bolt’s brother, a corporal who managed to escape capture or death at Gettysburg, only to lose an arm at the Wilderness in 1864.

“Y’all people made us pick cotton?”

Who is this “y’all,” and who is “us”? You never picked any cotton, Basit, and I never made you pick it. Whence this idea that there is some sort of permanent system of collective guilt and collective victimhood, where people who never once in their own lives suffered injustice can claim an eternal cause of grievance against people they don’t even know?

My great-grandfather died long before I was ever born, but I knew his daughter — my grandmother, who lived past 90 — and she lived in a farmhouse on the red clay hills of Randolph County, Alabama, near the Little Tallapoosa River. There was no indoor plumbing. She drew her water from a well and cooked on a wood stove.

“Y’all people made us pick cotton?”

You never picked cotton, Basit, but my parents did. My aunts and uncles and grandparents picked cotton. Picked cotton all day long in the Alabama sun until their fingers bled, and took great pride in the fact that they earned a living by their own labor.

When my father was 16, he told my grandmother she would never have to worry about him. He moved to West Point, Georgia, and took a job at a cotton mill to pay his room and board so he could attend West Point High School, where he made the All-Valley football team playing end for the Red Raiders. College recruiters were interested in Bill McCain, but two weeks before his 18th birthday, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He joined the Army and was a sergeant in a forward reconnaissance unit in France when, one morning in 1944, he was cooking breakfast outside a farmhouse when an artillery shell hit. A shard of shrapnel hit him at the base of his neck, and came with a fraction of an inch of killing him. The medic told him, “You got a million-dollar wound, Mack” — not crippled or maimed, but bad enough he’d never have to go back into combat.

My Dad grew up on a Randolph County farm during the Depression, worked his way through high school, earned a Purple Heart fighting the Nazis in France, and attended the University of Alabama on the G.I. Bill. He moved to Atlanta after he graduated from Tuscaloosa, and worked 37 years at the Lockheed aircraft plant in Marietta. “Hold your head up, boy,” he’d say. “Ain’t nobody better than you.”

“Y’all people made us pick cotton?”

Damn, Basit. Just . . . damn.

Knowledge is the only cure for ignorance, and my mother used to tell me, “Son, you can do anything, if you put your mind to it.”

Why not put your mind to the task of curing your own ignorance? My great-grandfather, the one who was captured at Gettysburg, was an illiterate farmboy who signed his name with an “X.” This was perhaps not entirely his own fault, as opportunities for education were not as abundant in antebellum Alabama as they are today, and literacy wasn’t particularly crucial to a life of plowing with mules, chopping firewood, hoeing corn and so forth. My education therefore does not make me superior to my illiterate ancestors, but if I put my mind to it — and worked as hard at learning as my ancestors worked at farming — what limit could there be to what I might achieve?

A knowledge of history — especially the lives and labors of one’s own ancestors — can be a tremendous inspiration, as we strive to live up to our family’s share of an inherited glory, to conduct ourselves so that it may be said we have brought honor to their legacy.

My son serves his nation in the U.S. Army. My daughter, who worked her way through college and graduated summa cum laude, teaches at an elementary school where most of her students are the children of Haitian immigrants. These are just two of my six children, all of whom are equally heirs to an honorable past, with a duty to work hard and make themselves useful to their fellow man.

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”
— Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 (KJV)

What more can we say to Basit Kassim who, thinking he might insult honest people, has brought such shame to himself, exposing his own ignorance, for which he has no excuse? Has he ever read Thomas Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice? Has Basit Kassim ever read The Vision of the Anointed or Shelby Steele’s White Guilt?

Has this young fool ever read any book that might enlighten him or improve his feeble mind? But why should we single out Basit Kassim, except as an example of the immeasurable universe of ignorance that our taxpayer-funded education system has created?

Ignorance has become so pervasive in America that these young fools never meet an educated man, but live in a benighted world where outright lies are accepted as Conventional Wisdom, where professional journalists are paid to write disgraceful falsehoods:

George Zimmerman shot a 17-year-old through the heart on a rainy night in February 2012. Now, finally, nearly 17 months later, a jury will try to decide whether the dead boy deserved it.
Zimmerman contends he did.

Nobody is saying Trayvon Martin “deserved it,” and it is astonishing that the Tampa Bay Times would employ a reporter who would write such a dishonest sentence, or editors who would let that lie appear in print. If this is what the media are telling people — and cable TV news has been crammed full of idiotic nonsense as bad as or even worse than this — are we surprised that rioters in Oakland think a good way to protest the Zimmerman verdict is to smash windows of downtown businesses and spray-paint anti-police graffiti?

I repeat: “Your TV is making you crazy.”

Turn off your TV and read a book, perhaps even The Good Book.

“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
— II Thessalonians 2:11-12 (KJV)

And let all God’s children say, Amen.

 

 

P.S.: You can read more about what my father taught me in my 2009 essay, “Championship Season.” And while my great passion is for teaching history, I occasionally offer lessons in the language arts, beginning with The Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!