Welcome to the World of Mediocrity
I recently read an editorial written by Cynthia Tucker on the famous Atlanta Journal-Constitution liberal web site. I usually find Ms Tucker to be crying and complaining about how she sees the the nation is such a hotbed of racial discrimination against blacks. Ms. Tucker opens her editorial with, "Another February has come and gone - another Black History Month virtually ended - without any evidence that American citizens, black, white or brown, are more knowledgeable about black history. Indeed, it's not even clear that schools or civic groups make much of an effort during February to present anything other than a superficial accounting of the role of black Americans in the development of this nation." To this I must say, "Welcome to the world of mediocrity." Ms Tucker constantly grumbles about the "government" not spending enough money and time on racial equality programs. February has been historically known as President's Month. In the past our schools would teach about the virtues of Presidents Washington and Lincoln, and the great achievements they accomplished for "all" the people of the United States. As the teachers' unions got more and more control of the government and classrooms, it became the "in thing" to talk about the great accomplishments of Martin Luther King and the racial equality movement in the nation. I grew up in the 1950's and 60's and totally agree that things needed to be changed. Please notice the past tense in "needed." However, now we are in a new century, and black men and women are achieving racial equality, and evidently Ms. Tucker does not like it. She wants the nation to look backwards and refocus on the days of slavery and discrimination. She wants more movies and books about the brutality and poverty of the black in the United States. Ms Tucker would have you think that blacks in this great nation are still walking around in rags for clothing and forced to live in "sharecropper" shacks as second class citizens. Ms. Tucke,r like the Democrat Party, needs to wake up and smell the coffee. Individuals of the black race are now accomplishing many things of greatness that would have been considered impossible in the past. The United States has had two black Secretaries of State. There is a black justice on the Supreme Court. There are black men and women elected to the Congress of the United States. There are black generals and admirals in the military. There are television networks devoted to black entertainment, and black actors are winning academy awards. On local levels, there are very successful black businessmen working as insurance agents, stockbrokers and realtors. There are black doctors, nurses, electricians, dietitians, and contractors, all with white customers freely choosing to use their services because of the quality of their work. Yes, there are pockets of racial discrimination where the KKK continues, as Senator Byrd did earlier, to try to hold onto their myopic view of the world. However the rest of the nation is moving past this type of stupidity. It serves no good for anyone to want to continually rub people's nose into the evils of the past. Look forward to the future, and let each man and woman make his or her own success or failure with out false scaffolding. ©2005 by the author. All rights reserved. |