08 September 2009

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.










10 comments:

  1. I wonder what the parents who plan on pulling their kids out of school are going to do that day.

    Are they going to take the day off of work (and lose a day's wages) to be with their kids?

    Will they do something constructive with their kids, like go to the park, the library, or the museum?

    Or are the parents going to work, only to leave their kids at home alone all day with the video games, their text phones, and the tv.

    Or, are they just going to give their kids a couple of dollars and drop them off at the mall.

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  2. Okay, I have to respond to this. I am a white male and at every opportunity afforded, I go out of my way to tell these folks how $#%^! stupid they are. We have lost the ability to chat with these folks because they have lost their freaking minds!

    Again, I am a white male, and honestly, these folks have become so stupid, I can only conclude that there is an ulterior motive to their craziness. An underlying condition that helps make sense of their insanity, they are RACIST. Often too stupid or blind to even understand their own motivations beyond an irrational fear that a black man is in charge.

    The real crime is that Fox, and others cut from similar sleazy cloth are making money hand over fist pushing their racist views.

    Peace.
    Rick Beagle

    ReplyDelete
  3. wow, I just reviewed my last rant. My apologies for the lack of, well... pretty much everything.

    I had a conversation with my sister over the weekend, and the vileness of her comments are still ringing in my head (obviously my blood is still boiling). Even my own blood has succumbed to this stupidity, and there is zero doubt in my mind that people this is truly a racial issue. They simply don't trust a man of color.

    The truly sad part, these folks don't even think they are racist. We need to come back to this issue and keep the Right from sluffing this conversation off as some sort of "race card" strategy. It isn't a strategy, it is the truth, and people need to be stared and shamed back into sanity imho.

    My apologies for the double post, and for that first rant. It was as incoherent as anything I have read - my apologies for letting my emotions get ahead of my education.

    peace.
    Rick Beagle

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  4. It did dawn on me that a lot (not all) of the news these days is simple sensationalism with "interesting" people paraded in front of the camera. The "boring" or lack of exciting news are the ones about doing what is expected (school, helping others, innovation, etc.).

    Case in point, these so-called town hall meetings with folks shouting down policy that would actually help people. Does that make sense? The flip side includes the mention of those four academics in this piece or one I saw on NBC about some program that teaches kids how to maintain and utilize gardens for healthy living. HMMM, no sea of media around...

    Yeah, it's time to return to the "boring" side of news. That way you don't have to worry about getting abducted, going into debt, and not understanding what universal health-care is, especially in this "great" land of ours.

    As far as race is concerned, you could take off the color-issue and it still reeks of silliness and ignorance.

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  5. Wondering aloud if all obama can ever do is talk, make speeches, talk, make speeches, talk, make speeches, talk...

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  6. Obama is a good talker...once upon a time talk was cheap, but guess if it sounds soooo pretty it's okay to listen to.

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  7. Sensible people really ARE boring. They're bad for ratings. No one wants to watch people having rational, logical discussions. Well, I kind of do, but most people prefer sensationalism.

    I have never been as aware of racial tensions in the media as I have been since the presidential campaign. I think I lived in a bubble. It seems to be getting worse and worse as time goes on. Parents will let their kids watch stupid crap on YouTube, but not listen to the president because they were scared of a lesson plan. At least that's their story.

    From what I've seen, the children who were in school today not only saw a great speech, but they had good discussions with their teachers and their peers. Although the children who were kept home had the option to watch the video on their own time, they really missed out on something that the other kids are going to remember for a long time.



    (By the way, I'm biracial, like Mr. Obama. I guess that makes me black.)

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  8. I think this whole issue was totally moronic, but the number of people really upset about this speech is a tiny fraction of the white population. I think it's kind of insulting to keep repeating "where are the white people with good sense?" They're all around us. They just don't have news stories about people with good sense.

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  9. The 4 "real" Americans you named above all had what I believe are Asian last names. Their parents probably immigrated here more recently than most Americans and thus haven't lost their ability to emphasize a good education and hard work to their children.

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