Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
I hope for a colorblind meritocracy. I genuinely believe in Martin Luther King’s “Dream”. The best hope of our American Republic is to foster and maintain a society where destiny is shaped more by our choices than by our genes.
The only way that we get from here to there is for all of us to join in with the cultural mainstream, not by conformity but by contribution. To the extent that we generously give of our talents and efforts within the free marketplace of goods, services, and ideas, we shall reap the rewards of success. By disciplining our habits into productivity and by honing our talents into excellence, we can earn a prestige and wealth that graces our lives and the lives of our loved ones with joy, satisfaction, and even a bit of luxury.
By becoming our best selves, we shall also enrich the overall quality of our society. Our indefatigable enterprise constitutes the proverbial high tide that raises all boats.
The Judeo-Christian West is unique in human history in producing such an amazing society of liberty and opportunity. This is because the Jewish and Christian faiths enshrine two realities as being fundamental. The first is that the
Lord God Almighty creates absolutely everything, including each of us. The second is that we are each invited as individuals to fully live in our faith. We are not called as mere members of some larger group.
This focus on the singular person, rather than on any collectively shared identity, is key. By living true to our convictions we can each seize those moments that are pregnant with opportunity as they come to us. We can become better, more joyous, more capable, more useful, just… more… than we otherwise would have been. Freedom is a choice made by each individual, moment-by-moment, to be more than merely mediocre.
Within this Judeo-Christian framework, the Constitution of the United States most fully unshackles the potential within each of us. Individuals who accept this thrilling invitation to, as Army recruiters used to say, “BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE”, can overcome any circumstances of birth. Instead of being the product of one’s parentage, we can each ambitiously determine who and what we should be.
At this moment in history, this uniquely American promise is open to every single one of us. This universality of free opportunity was bought dearly in blood and treasure.
Englishmen fought to become Americans in our Revolutionary War. Men of the Union fought to make all men free in our Civil War, just as many Southerners fought to resist Federal overreach. Men struggled to extend that freedom to
women at the same time we fought our first worldwide war to prevent global tyranny. All of these imperfectly realized hopes were reaffirmed at the height of our nation’s Golden Age, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Far from being “systemically racist”, Americans rejoice when people from all backgrounds achieve the American Dream. Simultaneously, we have determined that overt racialism is the one unforgivable taboo which we will not abide.
Success has never been easy. We all do not begin life with equal benefits. Some of us are prepared for success by our curated childhoods. Others are traumatized while still innocent in a way which will echo through the remainder
of our lives.
All of this inequality is necessary. It is a result of freedom. Any system powerful enough to erase the vagaries of life by imposing someone’s fever-dream of “equity” would squelch our freedom in the process. Freedom is inescapably
messy.
Even with this inequality, not one of us is now barred from pursuing our individual aspirations within the law. Our personal characteristics, not our birth characteristics, determine our life’s trajectory.
This societal fulfillment has driven the Left mad! What really is left for the Left to reform? If their goal was to achieve a colorblind meritocracy rooted in the broadest free choice for each individual, it has already been achieved.
How can a successful reformer remain useful? By redefining their utopian ideal from being a dynamic culture of equality of opportunity into becoming an unchanging perfection of equality of result. Equality becomes equity.
The greatest betrayer of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King’s vaunted “Dream” is the ghettoization (self-isolation) of urban Black people away from mainstream society. They, alongside every other identity politics amalgam,
have been encouraged to reject every quality of mainstream society. Personal responsibility is abandoned in favor of reflexive blame and victimhood. Standards of conduct give way to self-indulgent impulsiveness.
The thrill of possibility devolves into a pervasive sense that the world owes one some form of reparation. Ethical poison has eaten away at the health of the past three generations of ghettoized victims; all after the passing of the Civil Rights act and because of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”.
Fatherless, futureless boys never learn how to become men. Instead, they often become predators who victimize all whom they encounter. Left in free-fall by such males, many young women become desperate to control the uncontrollable. In doing so, too many become so strident that most men cannot live within their matriarchy-of-necessity.
In such a needless ghettoized Hell, families wither, drug dependency surges, and crime blights all. Hopes of escaping this misery for the mainstream and achieving the American Dream become stillborn.
But the activists remain employed, deriving power from perpetuating self isolation, racialist identity politics, and a warped narrative of history focused on the grievance. Inducing guilt among those who are susceptible within the
mainstream for things they’ve never done, these activists critically sing a Siren song of despair to those whom they claim to represent. These parasitical “Poverty Pimps” thrive in precise proportion to the misery they sow in their victimized followers.
Behind all of this is the Democratic Party, the party of slavery North and South, the party of Jim Crow, the party today selling Communism, the party of divide-and-rule. To these Tammany Hall hacks, the individual is a perpetually passive victim ever in need of salvation from their patronage.
The answer to all of this is to encourage every child to fully engage in his or her own education, to stoke the hope needed for self-improvement, and to refuse to debase oneself in service to any form of visceral hatred. Be brave, take heart, be responsible, and pursue your dreams! Young American, be free!
