By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
Every year, we’re chastized by the media/entertainment/government cultural cabal to make Martin Luther King, Jr. Day an annual “day on” instead of a “day off,” Save Jerseyans.
Many of us don’t exactly have a choice in the matter! You and I are working today to pay for a welfare state that’s ballooned under President Obama. In other news, African American unemployment reached 14% last month, nearly double the national average, and there isn’t much good news on the minority employment horizon.
Is this the future for which Dr. King and his courageous contemporaries battled fire hoses, vile clansmen and police dogs in the streets?
I seriously doubt it.
And the devastation wrought on African American communities over the last 50 years by liberalism’s failed social experiments goes well beyond mere economic dislocation…
As Lee Habeeb articulately pointed out this morning over at NRO.com, Dr. King’s complete legacy has been systematically obscured by the Left in a crass attempt to manipulate his memory for political gain. King was hardly a “tea partier,” granted! But many of the modern Democrat Party’s morally relativistic positions would’ve horrified the Baptist minister and Civil Rights icon. King was Kennedy Democrat (the modern equivalent of a conservative Democrat). He believed that government had a role to play in addressing inequality, but he also never would’ve supported a government responsible for supplanting God, family and community as the animating, organizing force in citizens’ lives. The current plight of the black American family would, again, horrify Dr. King were he alive to see it.
JFK’s “[a]sk not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” admonishment could’ve easily been an MLK quote.
President Obama is a different kind of leader. He’ll take his second oath of office on this cold but sunny MLK Day, standing on the Capitol Building’s west steps facing the monument of the great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, the site of Dr. King’s legendary 1963 “I have a dream” speech… and call for an even greater expansion of government’s role in our lives. In 2009, he stood on those same steps and told us “[t]he question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”
If he really believed that, folks, then why has President Obama spent the past four years doing nothing but growing the size and scope of government? And why is American life no less “decent” or “dignified” for the struggling American family than four years ago?
More to the point, would the man who said THIS fifty years before have approved of a contraception mandate, a disgusting high black abortion rate, rampant unchecked corruption, a failing urban school system that is more de facto segregated now than during legal segregation, and an inaugural ball starring Lady Gaga?
Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing. Right and wrong are relative to likes and dislikes and the customs of a particular community. We have unconsciously applied Einstein’s theory of relativity, which properly described the physical universe, to the moral and ethical realm. […] This mentality has brought a tragic breakdown of moral standards, and the midnight of moral degeneration deepens.”
I doubt it!
So here’s a new idea for MLK Day 2013 and forward, Save Jerseyans. If you’re lucky enough to have a “day off” for MLK Day, then instead of picking up highway litter or painting a house for three hours, patting yourself on the back and heading home to watch Netflix for the remainder of the afternoon, how about turning the third Monday of January into an opportunity to publicly acknowledge the extent to which liberalism has failed the African American community?
And after the acknowledgment is made — a big first step for many people — setting some time aside to consider how we, as a people, might do better for our fellow Americans? Contemplating specifically what liberty might have to offer those among us who haven’t experienced the full American Dream owing to the excesses of the nanny state? Rather than settling for another 50 years of dehumanizing entitlement and dependency on a government that’s failed to engender either true equality or shared economic prosperity?
Now that’d be something worth celebrating every January.
to answer the question as to why Obama on one hand states whether the question is not whether government is too big or small, but whether it works is simply bs and a way to camouflage his far left, government-centric worldview. This continued strategy of the left positioning themselves as reasonable and moderate is laughable.