WND Weekly: How the Great Society harmed blacks

In 1964, Republicans – led by Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill. – were responsible for the Civil Rights Act, which overturned 80 years of Democratic opposition to ending race-based and gender-based inequality. It was intended to provide all peoples, regardless of race and/or, sex, the right to service in all public facilities, and banned the unequal application of voter requirements insuring all the right to vote. Sexual consideration pursuant to employment could only be considered where sex is a bona fide occupational qualification for the job.

The Act should have ended there – allowing society to advance the conditions on its own – but it didn’t. Reducing the requirements for positions that had been male-dominated circumvented the sexual component of the Act. The end result was/is that we now have women performing certain jobs for which they may have passed an exam only because of relaxed employment qualifications – making it a job for which they are not qualified.

When the bill passed, Dr. Martin Luther King hailed it as one that would “bring practical relief to the Negro in the South, and will give the Negro in the north a psychological boost that he surely needs.” Dr. King’s assessment would have been correct had government not had another more insidious plan.

I argue that the racial discrimination component of the bill wasn’t circumvented by ignorance and intrusion. It wasn’t the best-laid plans of man run amok. It was the further implementation of a Wilsonian-Roosevelt-Kennedy template for socialism, vis-à-vis the Great Society Initiatives.

On one level or another, the Great Society Initiatives were harmful to all, but no group was harmed more than blacks.

The Great Society theme was the foundation of Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign. Republican candidate Barry Goldwater called for reducing the size of government. But Johnson’s not-so-veiled “government will take care of you” agenda cemented the decline of American civilization – especially for blacks and the elderly.

Within the construct was a society provided for by government, as government defined the peoples’ needs. Enter programs such as Head Start, which effectively diminished parental responsibility under the guise of providing parental assistance. Government entitlement programs immediately followed.

As mentioned, what few realized at the time was that Johnson was satisfying that system which had been started by Wilson and Roosevelt. The result was that, today, whites are falsely accused of being disproportionately advantaged – when in fact things are playing out exactly as they had been planned. Blacks are inculcated from the womb with seeds of complaint based on perceived disadvantage.

Looking backward through the looking glass, it is clear to those who are not afraid to see that the “Great Society” was never intended to create a better America as we perceive it – it was intended to enable government to take more from us, polarize us to prevent our uniting, and to have us look to it for everything.

White working-class people gradually came to accept their roles as spoilers and as a superficially superior populace worthy of blame and scorn. They were the foil – the object of consternation – but the system was cruelest to blacks who were stripped of dignity, not by evil white working people (regardless of social-economic strata), but by the federal government.

When Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, 82 percent of blacks lived in married, two-parent households; 40 percent of blacks were small-business owners. In little more than three decades after said signing, blacks went from a legacy of Booker T. Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, to Al Sharpton, Suge Knight, Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters.

Blacks went from being proud of learning and prosperity to high school dropouts, broken homes, abortion, drugs, crime, violence and a degradation of aspiration. Blacks went from Duke Ellington and Motown to gangster rap and rap wars.

Black accountability went out the window. It was replaced with anger, hatred of whites and a refusal to embrace modernity. Then, the cruelest blow of all was, and is, the deliberate destabilization and erosion of everything blacks at one time embraced.

We didn’t need the Great Society to give America music, culture/art, Head Start, a Department of Housing and Urban Development, manpower, or child nutrition – but government needed those programs to enslave us to their system.

It’s late in the game to change everything, but it’s not too late to change some of it. We must change our way of thinking – to realize that government is not our friend.