PrintOctober 12, 2009
Peace, Brother. But what about Chicago?
Yes, yes, peace be upon him, but honestly, did the Nobel folks ever think to check the utter lack of peace in our president's adopted home town, the first place to receive his miracle-touch community organization, aka peace initiatives?
Hmm. Nobel nitwits? Quite possibly.
The Nobel nitwits thought Obama's record of past non-performance was as irrelevant as America's press thought it was during the election. But, of course, it's very relevant. Giving the presidency - and the Nobel Peace Prize -- to a man who pursued peace in Chicago and left it in such a mess is akin to giving the CEO job of a major corporation to the guy who couldn't even fix the mail room where he started. It's a Peter Principle nightmare.
The young vagabond, Barack Obama, went straight from a dorm room at Columbia to his first laboratory, the Southside of Chicago. There, he hooked up with the Alinsky network of community organizers and took his political baby steps. He learned power tactics, tried to help Roseland public-housing residents get their units tested for asbestos and joined a church.
The most puzzling thing about Barack Obama's choice of church was that he sat there, listening to the hate-filled rants of Jeremiah Wright for what would come close to 1,040 Sundays but never saw the obvious connection between all that hate and the young, black male violence right outside the door there.
One of Jeremiah Wright's most passionate and oft-repeated fallacies was one that candidate Obama adopted as his own, until more than a few folks pointed out the sheer dishonesty of it.
Wright was known to bellow these words of James H. Cone's over and over again: "We've got more black men in prison than there are in college." The point of Wright's rant was not that young black men were engaging in reprehensible violent crime and ought to stop it, so they could go to college instead of to prison. No, the point of this whopper was to make sure young black men knew the system was rotten to the core and they were going to end up in prison - unjustly -- no matter what they did.
Now, it doesn't take a genius to also understand that when fiery black preachers and politicians say this over and over and over again to impressionable young people, then those young people are going to conclude that trying hard to stay out of trouble, staying in school and at least trying to go to college is a zero sum game.
It is truly baffling how supposedly smart people can fail to make the simple connection between young men hearing the world-is-out-to-get-you message of these inflammatory preachers and then making the decision that killing is the only answer. Over one Chicago weekend in the spring of 2008, there were 32 shootings and 2 stabbings, which left 6 dead. Most were gang-related; most were young black males. Two of these victims were even shot in front of a Southside church.
But 2008 wasn't even a banner year for Chicago youth violence. According to the Chicago Police Department, as of April, 32 public school students had already been killed this year. Black separatist preachers inciting their flocks to hate naturally promotes a violence-ridden culture. One need not have sociologist creds to see a correlation here.
Interestingly enough, students in Chicago's public schools not only need fear violence from each other, but also at the hands of their own teachers. Between 2003 and 2008, more than 800 student abuse reports were filed with the Chicago public schools. Upon investigation, 568 were substantiated. One little ten-year-old, African-American boy told the media, "I'm thinking that I don't really feel safe." I guess not. This little boy's own teacher was routinely threatening his students and battering them. The boy said of one occasion: ""He holded my arms and he picked my body up, and then he just slammed me on the desk."
According to this report from Chicago's CBS affiliate:
"The 2 Investigators (from the Chicago Board of Aldermen) found reports of students beaten with broomsticks, whipped with belts, yard sticks, struck with staplers, choked, stomped on and pushed down stairs. One substitute teacher even fractured a student's neck."
Now, if that's peace, then I'm Mother Teresa, a claim which would cause a 911-worthy split in my husband's side..
Last week, the brutal-beyond-brutal beating death of Chicago honor student, Derrion Albert, was one of the least peaceful things a human being could even imagine, much less witness. In the wake of Albert's death, what did President Obama do? He sent Arne Duncan and Eric Holder to give speeches. Now this is irony that begs the question, what was Mr. Peacemaker President thinking? Arne Duncan, after all, is the man who presided over the violence-ridden Chicago public schools during the infamous teacher abuse scandals mentioned above. Not only did Mr. Duncan preside, he also failed to adequately discipline the offending employees. Out of the 586 confirmed instances of student abuse, only 24 teachers lost their jobs.
But our Peacemaker in Chief also had his press office also issue this statement: "President Obama is committed to combating violence on our streets and in our schools, both in Chicago -- which has been particularly hard hit -- and around the nation," White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said in a statement. "The administration has focused on the issue of youth violence from the outset."
Well, gee. In 2007, Barack Obama did give a nifty little speech on community violence in a Southside Chicago church, just blocks from where Derrion Albert was beaten to death two years later. In that speech, peacemaker Barack dispassionately summarized, as is his wont. This snippet, as reported by Bloomberg: "'Our playgrounds have become battlegrounds,' he told a standing-room congregation. ‘Our streets have become cemeteries. Our schools have become places to mourn the ones we've lost. The violence is unacceptable.'"
Words without deeds do not a new world make. The Nobel nitwits should have checked the peacemaker's deeds and paid less attention to his bubble-brained, idle rhetoric.
When Barack Obama decided to leave behind legal representation for ACORN and enter the political realm, this sad state in the black community was one of the reasons he said he was running. He told the Chicago Reader in 1995, while prepping his first state senate run that he was "tired of seeing the moral fervor of black folks whipped up--at the speaker's rostrum and from the pulpit--and then allowed to dissipate because there's no agenda, no concrete program for change."
Obama's so-called program for change never provided a single piece of peacemaking fruit, a thoroughly sad fact to which the Chicago Police Department can readily testify. In Barack Obama's entire tenure as a state senator in Illinois, the only "peace" initiative he undertook was his vote for a gun ban so radical that it would have single-handedly gutted the Second Amendment. Would a gun ban have saved Derrion Albert? No. Violence goes a whole lot deeper than a person's weapon of choice.
Now, if what Obama accomplished in his adopted hometown is peace, brother, then I think what we have here is a massive failure to communicate. This peace-be-upon-him President can't even bring a tiny semblance of genuine peace to a single American city. How in the world does a committee of Nobel nitwits think he's going to bring peace to the whole darned world?
My advice to the world at large: if you don't like violence, war and destruction, you'd best invest in blindfolds. ‘Cause if Barack Obama's hometown is any example of his peacemaking skills, then this world is in for one heap of misery, far, far worse than the kind over which any cowboy ever presided.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and a syndicated columnist for Creators. She blogs at kyleanneshiver.com.
