Using Reparations to Solve Poverty Instead of Charter and Private Schools Free of Teachers' Unions Is Like Thinking a Lake in Death Valley Without Daily Rain Will Long Last

 

You would have to be a modern day Diogenes with a high powered LED lamp
To find someone in the U.S. in the promoting or reestablishing slavery camp
It has taken over 100 years to purge support of slavery through Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow
Billions of dollars and affirmative action trying to on blacks equal opportunities to bestow
But if one believes the path to success starts in well run schools
One day in an urban school class or walking its halls would expose failure as a prosperity enhancing tool
Among industrialized nations on primary and secondary education only Luxembourg spends more
Here in urban schools students can barely read or compute and decent writing is an impossible chore
The high school degree is handed out to students whose illiteracy doom them to welfare, menial low paying jobs
Or to prison or jails where any chance of prosperity or family stability is usually forever robbed
Now the new movement that is gaining ground is reparations for descendants of slaves
Hoping the billions sought will bring them into the middle class while white guilt over slavery forgave
In Boston, in the Massachusetts free state which raised a black regiment to fight Johnny Rebs,The Boston Task Force on Reparations created in 2022 claiming Boston’s wealth was due to slavery in the city imbedded
Though the 1790 Census found in Massachusetts no slaves
And is demanding reparations of $15 Billion and its churches and white citizen opposing reparations should cave
Punishing a person for his or her ancestors owning slaves prior to 1790 is an outrage
Especially in a state that a crusade and legal action against slavery was waged
If its proponents thought it would bring blacks into the middle class
Look at failures of Johnson’s War on Poverty running into an immovable poverty mass
Better to form charter and private schools free from teachers’ unions’ crippling chains
Rather than individual reparations check that would be like flushing dollars down the drain!

© 3/25/2024 Michael P. Ridley aka The Alaskanpoet