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Pursuing Compassion While Avoiding Insanity
One of my favorite patients is “Esther,” a short Jewish woman from New York City. She’s always smiling, her accent is wonderful, and we always have a wonderful time together. She’s one of those people who is just impossible to dislike. She is also a Democrat, although part of the reason that she moved down here to Hilton Head recently was the disintegration of her beloved NYC under DeBlasio.
She mentioned how it was really very safe to walk around New York City, even at night, just a few years ago. But not now. She then said something like, “But I can see why the blacks are upset, since white people enslaved them right here in America. No wonder they don’t trust whites. I really think that whites should be more understanding of the difficulties faced by today’s blacks.”
Despite my French nom-de-plume on this site, my real name is very German. I’m only 25% German, but my name makes it sound like I’m right off the boat from Frankfurt. Which made me wonder, “Tell me Esther, did you have relatives that died in the Holocaust?”
She said, “My father’s family is from eastern Europe, and they got to the states in the early 1900s, so they were spared. But my mother’s family was German, and she lost seven relatives in the camps. Her mother got her to the states after the war, and she met my Dad in Brooklyn after that. Very fortunate for her. Why do you ask?”
Me: “Well, I just wondered if I had any ancestors that were Nazis when your ancestors were being wiped out?”
She asked, “Do you know? Were any of your ancestors Nazis?”
Me: “My German ancestors left Germany in the 1880s. But perhaps some of the family that they left behind went on to have kids who had kids who had kids who then went on to be Nazis. Could very well have happened, I guess. I don’t know – that would be difficult to track down. What would they be? Third cousins four times removed? No idea. But yeah, that’s entirely possible. And yet, here I am, as your friend, and your physician. Weird, huh?”
She could sort of see where I was going with this, but asked, “Well, no, it’s not weird. You didn’t know any of those people. You’re not responsible for their behavior, decades before you were born. I mean, you weren’t even there, right?”
Me: “That’s true. But I’m supposed to feel guilty about slavery, which ended in this country over 150 years ago? I don’t think I had ancestors who owned slaves, but I really don’t know, and it would be impossible to track that down at that point. It’s possible, I suppose. But how does any of that mean that I should be more understanding when a black kid in New York flunks a math test? I just don’t quite get my involvement in that situation…”
Esther was really trying to hang on to her perspective on things, understandably. “But don’t you want to help?”
Me: “Of course, I do. Last year I stopped alongside the road – a lady’s car had broken down. I gave her a ride to the next exit, so she could wait in a restaurant to get her car fixed instead of sitting by the interstate. But I didn’t do that because she was black, or because I felt guilty about something that might possibly have happened between our ancestors 200 years ago. I just did it because I’m a normal human being. I’m happy to help people with their problems, but I don’t feel that I am responsible for them. And I’m not angry about being accused of crimes that I didn’t commit. I just don’t understand the logic here. And thankfully, neither do you. Which means you and I can be close friends regardless of what happened in Germany 80 years ago.”
Esther brightened up at the out I was offering her. “Absolutely! Even if you don’t appreciate good latkes! I still can’t believe you didn’t like them – I make them all the time, and everybody loves them!”
Me: “Dislike of fried zucchini and potatoes does not reflect poorly on my character.”
Esther gave me a disapproving look. “Yes, it does. Hmph.”
Martin Luther King had a very good point. Black Americans are obviously just as American as any other type of American, and they should enjoy the full benefits of American citizenship.
He dreamt of a world in which his children would be judged for the content of their character, not the color of their skin. They should be given the same opportunity to succeed as anybody else. Which means, of course, that they would then have the same opportunity to fail as anybody else. But their destiny should be up to them, and no one else. If whites are capable of such things, then why would we deny the same opportunities to blacks, or anybody else?
I don’t see how one could possibly argue with his logic. But his ideas were considered to be radical and dangerous, to the Democratic Party at that time.
Strangely, the Democratic Party of today also finds his ideas to be radical and dangerous.
The Black Lives Matter movement, the Critical Race Theory movement, and most of the Democrat party today find Dr. King’s straightforward logic to be problematic. The color of someone’s skin is an essential part of who they are, and the content of their character is not relevant. In fact, it is racist to comment on their character, or to expect them to make good decisions. This means that an American citizen is no longer responsible for his mistakes. If he is black. Which means that he is no longer responsible for his successes, either.
I think this is critical to the Democrat party platform in today’s America, and not just on matters of race.
“You didn’t build that” is simply an extension of our refusal to acknowledge individual agency. Some lady in Indiana starts a company selling window treatments out of her home. Twenty years later she has 15 employees and two storefront locations. But she didn’t build that.
Meanwhile, some kid in Chicago steals hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise from a Target. But we don’t prosecute him for his crimes, because after all, he’s black. He’s not responsible for his actions, any more than the lady with the curtains is responsible for hers.
This sort of ‘logic’ gets even more complex when they point out that white Americans are responsible for the actions of people they’ve never met, 200 years ago. So I’m not responsible for the success of my medical practice, but I am responsible for somebody’s actions in Alabama in 1835. I get a headache just thinking about it.
Esther is very intelligent. It must be difficult for her to maintain a belief system based on such ‘logic’. But really, she’s just trying to be compassionate and helpful. Which is admirable.
But I would argue that one can be compassionate and helpful without being clinically insane.
This is bonkers.
Martin Luther King sounded reasonable and inspiring. Elizabeth Warren (and every other mainstream Democrat today) sounds insane and hostile.
And every election, Democrats win about half the popular vote.
This is bonkers.
Published in General
I have watched liberals assign political viewpoints to friends of mine based on the color of their skin, to my friends’ considerable annoyance. Yet somehow, that is not racist.
No latkes? No Kartoffelpfannkuchen? More for me, then.
The black church needs to spend more time focusing in on forgiveness than fomenting bitterness.
It’s not bonkers. If your goal is to control a population, you give them someone to hate and keep the anger stirred up at all times, by any means necessary. Ignorant people will be angry. Intelligent people who see through the strategy will be afraid of the angry people and will keep quiet.
Yeah, if you want to control someone, you first convince them that they have no control over their own life, so they need powerful friends like you to look after them. It’s an effective strategy, if you can work out the ethics of such things in your head.
I’m not sure about this. Esther is very intelligent, as are many of my Democrat friends.
I don’t get it…
I don’t buy the “slavery causes Black people’s problems” story for one minute. After emancipation and up until the 1960’s, the Black community did not have any of the social ills that they are known for today. They did not kill each other at high rates, committed little violent crime, did not engage in drugs or drug-dealing, mostly married and had few out-of wedlock children, and graduated high-school at a rate closer to Whites. According to Larry Elder, the education gap had been closing to to nearly zero during the 1950’s.
But it all changed in the 1960’s to become what we have in Chicago and other big cities today. This is a phenomenon that is only 60 years old. Lest I paint with too broad a brush, it pretty much only happens in the big cities. Blacks who live outside of big cities generally don’t have the same pathologies. It is similar with Whites but not to such an exaggerated degree.
It has been my experience that Blacks who attend church do not express bitterness or resentment toward Whites or society as a whole. At least where I live, a good number of Black preachers are even staunch conservatives, and that is in the inner city.
Here’s a recent video by Ami Horowitz that demonstrates how liberal White folks often attribute all sorts of Black ills to racism, when even Black people don’t think so.
Lefty whites also think blacks don’t know how to get photo ID, etc.
Esther is entirely correct. And to think I used to you hold you in high regard. Hmph indeed.
Funny you should mention……….
Yes, I’ve come across other videos like that too.
“So, what has changed in ‘just a few years?’ Did We just recently learn of American slavery? If not, then why are those streets dangerous today and not ‘just a few years ago?'”
Nice!
“Martin Luther King sounded reasonable and inspiring. Elizabeth Warren (and every other mainstream Democrat today) sounds insane and hostile.”
There are a lot of people who are *bitter*, about one thing or another, and it seems logical that bitter people are most likely to be attracted to hostile and virtually insane politicans.
Someone one remarked at a blog that: “If you are bitter, then you are basically announcing to the world that you are a failure in your own eyes.”
If that is true…and I think it is…then there are an awful lot of people who are failures in their own eyes these days.
I think the left creates that too, by teaching people to have unreasonable expectations, and if they don’t achieve them, it must be someone else’s fault.
The whites on the Left are the most racist people in the world towards blacks. They take all the responsibility for the outcome of black lives and place that power in the hands of whites.
Many blacks seem to eat this up because it makes them feel less inferior somehow, because they get the special victim status. Win-Win
Except of course, everyone ends up miserable and divided.
Exactly. Somehow the “trauma” of slavery managed to skip a few generations before it reared it’s ugly head?
Indeed, this is a major cause of the bitterness; I think that the excesses of the ‘self-esteem-building’ movement have also played a part.
What a lovely, lovely post. Thank you.
You may discover the teen and 20s church kids have largely adopted CRT.
Not in our church.
Does Germany owe something to Jewish people? Does Turkey owe something to Armenians? My feeling is that they do. Not as individuals but as nations.
Great, you can tell BLM they have no business setting buildings on fire, etc.
But first, pick someone to notify your next of kin.
Owe?
Amen!
Zucchini is meh at best. Throw in some onions, though … maybe a green pepper or two …
This is beautifully put, Doc.
If we all had complete knowledge of who our ancestors were and what they did going back 5 or 10 centuries, I think we would find we all have a lot more in common than we think. I speculate that every last one of us has ancestors who were oppressors and oppressed. Conquerors and the conquered. You might have an individual ancestor that at one time in his or her life was terribly abused and at another time heaped great abuse on others. It’s just ignorant to think that you can look at someone and think you know the moral status of their ancestors.
Even if you do know details about a certain person’s ancestry, so [expletive] what? Even if I were a descendant of Albert Einstein, that would not make me a genius, nor does being the descendant of a pirate make me a murderer.
Context is crucial, and generally ignored in race-baiting. My current book narration is a biography of Kit Carson, who has been both lionized as an explorer and demonized as a genocidal Indian-killer. The author spends a lot of time on the times in which Carson lived, to put his actions and character in context. It’s one of the things that makes it an excellent book.
Of course, we’re both talking about things that are irrelevant to Progressive race-hustlers. If history doesn’t suit their purpose, they’ll just make some up. All that matters is finding a reason to accuse the rest of us of being fascist bigots.