I understand that no one is saying that there should only reparations. I get that. I am looking not at how good the idea by itself. I am looking at the system which would change it from that good idea into the wrong choice.
Do we all agree that our current political economy is extremely corrupt and is more so everyday? That the people actually running this society are doing so for their own interest? That they are using all the nasty, often illegal, tactics that they can and that it’s likely that political assassinations, blackmail, framing, and violence in general will return?
That there is a well functioning system for co-opting social movements and for extracting as much as can be taken from any organization or individual that they can? On all sides? Liberal and conservative? Just what happened to the Tea Party. It was co-opted and neutered by the Republicans. The Democratic Party very first action was doing the same with BLM. When they cannot do that they destroy it like with OWS. I could expand it to cover most of our society like the Red Cross or even the NRA. Organizations that are mainly, although not entirely, grifts today.
So here is this wonderful idea of reparations. Implicitly targeted just at one group. Without a concurrent effort for all the other lost souls? In a political economy that makes Tammany Hall look like amateurs?
I know that it will pork barrel time with the resources used by our corrupt system to break up alliances, to split apart our nation into squabbling factions. Black against White, the poor against the working class against the middle class. Us against them.
No. I am all for beating the ignorance about our past, including racism, out of the thick heads of our fellow Americans. However, any aid, any help must be broadly based, using only current need, not race. And only as part of the campaign of reforms needed for our society survival. If we do not, the powers that be will use targeted anything as a lever, a club, a tool to beat us all down and to keep their own privileged place in society. This has happened before in America and it could happen again so easily.
