Good heavens, everybody is demanding reparations. The State of California; the cities of San Francisco and Oakland; Alameda County, and now, even the Oakland Education Association, the teachers union that is currently on strike.
Reparations has become a mania, a mass hallucination, like the witch hunts of the 1700s, when entire populations succumbed to hysteria and delusional thinking. We look back at that era and wonder, “How could it have happened?” but the exact same thing is happening today, in the guise of reparations. Historians of the future will have to sort this all out, but it’s clear that this reparations thing is going too far. The general public is only picking up bits and pieces in the media, and so has been unable to put it all together and realize what’s going on, which is a massive attempt to transfer wealth in America through means that may well be unconstitutional, not to mention unethical and unfair. When the people do realize this, though, they’re going to be mad as hell, and there will be no stopping their desire for revenge.
That’s not a threat; it’s a guarantee. The vast majority of Americans may agree that Black people were historically mistreated in the U.S. But they do not agree that some kind of generational guilt hangs over our country today and that Americans must fork over billions and billions of dollars to Black citizens. I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, a progressive or a conservative; this reparations chatter is irresponsible, and when it doesn’t happen, Black people are going to feel even more aggrieved than they already do, for they will feel that something that’s been promised to them was yanked suddenly away.
Nothing good can come from this crazy reparations demand. It can only rend Americans further apart from each other and increase the class, ethnic and racial divisions already destroying us. I won’t even bother to explain the intellectual fallacies of reparations because they should be obvious to everyone. But on political grounds alone, reparations should be rejected. It’s like pouring salt onto a wound. Leave the damn thing alone and let it heal on its own, instead of constantly provoking it! Besides, what does reparations have to do with education? My understanding is that the Oakland Unified School District has already offered striking teachers the best salary-and-benefits deal in their history. But it’s not enough! The teachers also want reparations for Black students!
Enough of this madness. Progressives should not try to assuage their own guilt on the backs of the blameless masses who—squeezed by high taxes and uncontrolled inflation—are struggling to get by. Meanwhile, Oakland lacks a Police Chief, a Fire Chief, a City Administrator and a host of other top positions Sheng Thao is unable to fill because, after all, who would want to work in such a dysfunctional city? We could clean this mess up if, in the next few election cycles, we fire the progressives and replace them with common-sense moderates, who will make sane decisions on behalf of all the people and not just selected pressure groups. That may be asking for too much, but I continue to have hope.
Steve Heimoff