The Poor And The Deadly

You know, everywhere I go I witness things that open my mind --- a reality check, so to speak. I work for a company that is located right at the edge of the greater Houston metropolis and not too far away are farming communities and communities of trailer parks.

One day I decided to drive around one of these communities and I saw acres and acres of trailer parks with run-down mobile homes. This is Texas most of which is prone to natural disasters like hurricanes, floods and tornadoes. God forbid we have one in these communities because the destruction would be beyond imagination. Everywhere you go you will see people with faces with deep furrows of poverty. These run-down trailer park settlements are white America�s equivalent of our inner-city ghettos.

Which really had me wondering about the planning of communities in America. It is political. It seems poor blacks are kept in communities that are right in heart of cities, mostly along highways where everyone can witness the poverty and decay. On the other hand, poor whites are found in communities that are strategically located far away from observation. The communities here in Texas and Mississippi, two places I am familiar with, poor-white communities are located off highways with a thicket of bushes between the highways and these communities. They are basically hidden while poor blacks are displayed like relics in the Smithsonian.

There are two significant reasons for that, in my opinion, and they are all political. The poor blacks and poor whites are kept apart from each other so that they will never realize that they have more in common with each other than they have in picograms of melanin differences. If all the poor ever come together, there would be more blood shed than the world witnessed when the French peasants basically wiped out the French aristocracy overnight. Poor people are very dangerous and the only way to control them is to pit them against each other. Organizations such as the NRA can easily tell the poor whites that the government wants to confisticate their hunting guns thereby diverting the poor whites� attention from issues more important to their lives than gun control measures. Poor blacks are simply left at the mercy of equally manipulative and exploitative liberal organizations or black leaders who are basically self-serving at best and sad caricatures at worst --- Jesse Jackson comes to mind.

The other reason is not so hidden. It is easier to tar and feather minorities with no coherent political ideology and the strategic wherewithal to counteract demonization from political power-grabbers. Take the case of welfare reform as a good example: If everyone saw poor whites getting the cheap cheese, eggs, bacon and gallons of Parmalat milk using welfare coupons, Peggy Noonan would not have had the courage to write speeches for Reagan in which black women were basically painted as �welfare queens.� Everything in America always ends up with some racial overtones. Poor whites make up the largest block of welfare recipients but they are never on anyone�s mind whenever the issue of welfare reform is discussed. You would not know the seriousness of poverty in the midst of whites unless you witnessed it at close quarters. It is carefully hidden in trailer park communities lined with huge oak trees, far from the prying public eyes. In the said communities I visited, there are grocery stores with notices like; WE HONOR FOOD STAMPS. They are all in white hoods.

Have you ever wondered why white conservatives speak so passionately about the ravages of welfare dependence? I mean these are folks who will never set a foot in a black neighborhood. They know and understand the malignance of the culture of welfare because they witness it firsthand in the poor whites they meet during ole-boys barbecues in the Appalachian Mountains, the Ozarks or the pinewoods of the south. The same filth and decay you see in black neighborhoods exists in poor white neighborhoods, hence the perjorative adjective "trailer-park trash."

Again, the laziness and slovenliness typically associated with poor blacks is something I have even witnessed first had amongst poor whites. The place I work is expanding and so we have a lot of construction going on. One of the contractors is a local businessman. You see him and his team sweating all day long but when you go and take a look at what they have accomplished you will be shocked by the paltry results. At first I really felt sorry for them because we did not have any air-conditioning system in the plant they were constructing. When we finally installed some in the plant, the profuse sweating continued unabated and the results have been as paltry as ever. The idea that all whites, poor or rich, are hardworking is a myth. Whites, like any ethnic group, are not monolithic in their ways or habits.

Not too long ago this contractor came into the office huffing and puffing and I was afraid he would faint. After he had recovered his breath I asked him why he was in such a hurry. He said he had almost forgotten to submit the correct time sheets for his �boys.� Well, I thought that was understandable because �the boys� had done a lot of sweating for two weeks and deserved their full wages despite the paltry work. To my surprise, he told me the boys had complained that the time sheets had too much time and they wanted the hours reduced. I was shocked. Here were people who had logged in a lot of hours and they were willing to cull most of them off just at the stroke of a pen. I had never heard of such a thing in my life before. He explained to me that if they put in too many hours they might lose �their government checks.� You see, they were on welfare and basically hooked on it much like our own poor blacks in the hood. That is when I remembered Gingrich and his ten-point Contract With America in which he was going to make welfare recipients cry uncle they would look for jobs very quickly. He had blacks and Hispanics on mind as he stood on the steps of the US Capitol but he knew it would hurt �the boys� and the entire farcical contract crumbled like a statue of mud after a heavy thunderstorm. Newtie was not going to hurt �the boys.� Gingrich and his ilk understand that this class of invisible welfare brigades would rebel and so it is important to constantly keep it quiet, supine and politically docile and pliant by feeding it with cheap cheese and bland bread from condemned bleached flour --- you know the cheap BUNNY bread.

The point is that most of the problems we face in black communities are quintessential American problems. They transcend ethnic boundaries and would be solved quickly were it not for the political mileage that can be garnered by lacing them with racial innuendoes. This does not mean we should abdicate our duties of cleaning our communities. As a matter of fact, we should get impetus from it. We know the government would never be able to do anything otherwise they would have helped the trailer-park �trash.� If Gingrich and Lott could not help the poor whites of Georgia and Mississippi why should we expect them to clean South Central or Harlem?

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