Because I’m a reasonable guy, I try to understand the wokes, I really do. Maybe they have a point, I tell myself. Maybe the “root cause of crime” really is racism.
But then I read something like what Carroll Fife just tweeted, and I’m like, “No, Steven, they really are as oblivious as you thought they were.”
Here’s Fife’s tweet: “For the remainder of Black History Month, I will identify how unreconciled discriminatory practices of the past have contributed to present day outcomes.”
My immediate thought was, “There goes Fife again, airing her grievances.” And then I read a reply to her tweet, from someone I don’t know: “Is this some way to justify the crime rate....?”
That’s exactly what it is.
Yes, this country has inflicted a lot of harm upon its Black citizens. I needn’t go through the list. On the other hand, this country has tried over and over to make amends. It has invested probably trillions of dollars since LBJ’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, and continues today to pour vast quantities of money into the Community. (If you add all the money going into homelessness, the amount is even greater.) As a gay person whose own Community has suffered from discrimination (and still does), I can perhaps only begin to understand the misery index that many Black people experience, and also, to some extent I can relate to the anger of people like Carroll Fife, who calls herself a “freedom fighter” and maybe even believes it.
But that’s as close as I can get to understanding her. The disconnect, for me, occurs when she steadfastly, stubbornly refuses to criticize crime. Instead, she talks about “root causes,” as if crime were a disease, like malaria, caused by something external, in that case by a parasite. Yes, it’s true that when someone is stricken by a disease caused by a pathogen, we can’t blame them because any one of us could have been the victim. Free will was not involved; no one chooses to get sick. But I, and many others like me, cannot accept the notion that criminality has an external cause. There’s no germ, bacteria or virus that causes criminality. Every crime begins with the desire to commit the crime, which is then followed up by acting out that desire.
I like to think that all of us have the ability to control our behavior. Maybe we can’t fully control our thoughts—I certainly can’t—but we can make sure that we don’t act on them. It’s called self-control, and is the basis of every moral code, in every philosophical or religious system that’s ever been devised by the mind of humankind.
But for Carroll Fife, “unreconciled discriminatory practices of the past” have been reified into causative agents. It’s like they’re flying around in the air, like Anopheles mosquitos carrying malaria parasites, and if they bite you, look out! You’re going to commit a criminal act, and you’ll have no more control over that than you would have if an actual malaria parasite entered your bloodstream and invaded your red blood cells.
I cannot accept the premise of this line of thinking. I just can’t. If humans aren’t free agents, able to choose between right and wrong, then what are we? I thought that morality was what lifts us above the beasts into the divine. Everyone I’ve ever admired has held that truth to be self-evident. And yet we have Carroll Fife claiming that criminals are compelled into their criminality by “unreconciled discriminatory practices of the past.”
What an insult to humankind! What a pathetic loss of reasoning! It’s so simple: The Golden Rule. It’s still valid. Treat others as you would have them treat you. If you don’t want others to make you suffer, then don’t make others suffer at your hands. Live your life in peaceful co-existence with your neighbors. Don’t try to “get even” or indulge in self-destructive vengeance. Live by this code, and make sure your children have it drummed into them. Stop blaming others for the failures in your life. Stand on your own two feet, square your shoulders, look up to the sky and know that you are a creature of God, charged with the simple task of not hurting your neighbors. Imagine if Carroll Fife or Cat Brooks or Nikki Bas or Pamela Price understood this truth. But they don’t.
Steve Heimoff