Where Are The White People With Good Sense?

"Most little white children come from families powerful enough to shut out reality."

Jonathan Schwarz
"Four People Turned Stupid By Power"
A Tiny Revolution

I don't know if I agree with the modifier "most" that Schwarz uses here, but I can certainly see the point Schwarz is trying to make. And if there ever was a moment in time that this quote summarizes, it is today, Tuesday, September 8th, when a certain frenzied subset of our paler population will withdraw their budding genuises from school so that Little Johnny will not have to be subjected to listening to that bad, bad man, Mr. Barack Obama himself, otherwise known to us real Americans as the president of the United States.

"I am not going to give him unfiltered access to my kids."

I imagine HBO will see a drop in its subscriber base soon. I expect sales of the video game Grand Theft Auto will tail off into nothingness. And IPod's will litter landfills across the country. These predictions would make sense if these parents were telling the truth - that anything untoward should never come within a hundred yards of little Johnny's pristine ears unless it has been filtered.

What planet are these people raising their kids to live in? Johnny can't stay on the curb of his cul-de-sacs for the rest of his life.

Since our TV producers can't seem to come up with any other creative ways to get you to watch their news product this week, all we will be seeing is these people who will be snarling and howling and shrieking and yes, CRYING, as if Beelzebub himself is going to whisper his evil thoughts - study hard, read more, make goals for yourself - into little Johnny's ears.

So what I want to know is...

...where are all the white people with good sense these days?

Are they still on vacation?

Have they left the country?

Or are they just so ashamed of these people who look like them, who may be their cousins, or their coworkers, or their in-laws, that they don't want to be mentioned in the same sentence with them?

I've been thinking about these irrational parents that have been featured rather prominently on TV lately. You know who I'm talking about. They are wild eyed, or teary eyed, and sanctimonious, and all of them are white, and they swear that if President Barack Obama so much as breathes in Johnny's direction during the school day, he will have their kids calling each other "comrade" by the time they come home.

Which is interesting, because many of these parents don't even know what socialism really is. Couldn't tell you what the tenets of communism are if a years worth of gas for their SUV was at stake.

I've been thinking about these parents quite a bit lately, because some of them are my neighbors. They are the people who will just about have a stroke if their child's teacher assigns their kid homework on the weekend, that sacrosanct time here in LaLa Land that is mandated to be filled with fun, fun, fun - four wheeling and jet skiing and hunting and fishing and SEC football games and soccer matches and birthday celebrations.

But if Johnny doesn't listen to his parents now, as any outing to a local restaurant will confirm, then what makes these moist eyed mommies think that their "wittle munchkins" are going to listen to the president while he talks on a TV screen in their classroom?

Another phrase, one that I've heard through the years that may hone in a little closer to what I want to say today is this:

"If you want to see where stupid children come from, follow them home."

That point was driven home Saturday night while I was reading an article by a friend of mine:

"Tom Hui is a self-described video game lover. Michelle Liu calls herself a nerd. Marissa Pan simply likes books, and Tanya Nguyen prefers balance in her life.

What do they have in common? All scored 2400 on the SAT, putting them in the elite company of 297 nationwide and 10 in Georgia earning perfect scores last year."

Gracie Bonds Staples
"Four Area Students Score 2400 On SAT — Perfect"
Atlanta Journal Constitution

After reading a story like the one above, why are the white parents that will be paraded across our airwaves today, prattling on about the president's powers of hypnosis, even relevant?

These four real American children in the excerpt above all attended public schools.

I live less than five hundred yards from a public library, which I frequent several times a week. There are so few white children in there at times, you would think you were in a foreign country instead of an Atlanta northern suburb.

What I want to know is what these people are going to do when this brownskinned president stays on their TV year after year? Even if you only watch FOX News, guess what? They don't have a storyline if it doesn't include Obama. When are they going to do when he stays on the front page of their newspaper week after week?

Are they going to lock Johnny in a closet, like the child abductors in the news this week? Are they going to build ideological bunkers behind their houses, and set off air raid signals whenever the stench of liberalism draws near?

The best protection for your child is an appreciation of knowledge for knowledge's sake. An understanding of the basic tenets of critical thinking. And a facility with the English language that includes mastery of a vocabulary large enough to recognize the nuances that differentiate the meaning of one word from the next when someone is speaking to you.

But that, as my mother would say, is too easy. Makes too much sense. Instead, these people will do the thing they always do, the way Rick Pitino did when he went into a rampage a couple of weeks ago at a news conference while discussing the latest allegations from his adulterous sexual dalliance - claim that the truth is what they are telling you, and that everything else is all lies.

Where are the white people with good sense these days?

Are you out there?

Right about now, if the script was flipped, and these were black people doing this, I would have already been approached by someone white by now who would ask me, point blank, "why are they doing this?"

But if they don't want their Johnny listening to the president of ALL of these United States as he gives out the kind of simple advice - study hard, read more, make goals for yourself - that helped to get Obama where he is today, that's fine.

Put President Obama's speech on for the black kids.

Jamal WILL be listening.

Put it on for the Asian kids.

Jiao WILL be listening.

Put it on for the Hispanic kids.

Javier WILL be listening.

Put it on for the Indian kids.

Jharma WILL be listening.

Put it on for the children of all our immigrants, for their parents who have defied every challenge in the book to get to the real America, the one that has "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" tattooed to the base of the Statue of Liberty.

The thing about white people with good sense is...

...they are boring.

The same way black people and Asian people and Hispanic people and Indian people with good sense are boring.

Which is why you won't see them in front of any TV cameras today.

They'll be the ones soberly helping their children to master their A-B-C's and 1-2-3's. Demanding that homework get done before play time begins. Adding enrichment programs and activities on their own to bolster what the school teaches. Helping their children learn, one day at a time, how to navigate this thing we call life without having to depend on slogans and jingles and propaganda of any kind to give them their own sense of personal direction.

Training them, in other words, to deal with the world and its realities rather than look for an excuse to opt out.


I don't know what these people are worried about.

Because if Barack Obama was really the Malcolm X type of political radical they make him out to be...

...he'd schedule a speech to school children every other week to MAKE SURE these people took little Johnny out of class each and every time.