Justice Or Just Cash?

http://www.newsweek.com/black-lives-matter-slavery-reparations-criminal-justice-reform-policy-hillary-486198

As strongly as I support the Black Lives Matter movement this is a foolish, divisive, evan a self-destructive concept. It can only cause resentment and exacerbate racial divisions. Black people don't need special help. They need justice and a fair chance like every other American.

Consider the possible ramifications. If a person is half Black and half White, it can be argued that they should receive no reparations since 50% of their genetic ancestry cancels out the other 50%. Also, how would a possible recipient prove that their ancestors were here in America held in slavery as opposed to having come to America at a later time or under different circumstances? Shouldn't a White person who could prove that their ancestors were abolitionists be exempt from the reparations? Maybe they should even receive some reparations themselves.

And if we grant reparations to slave descendants, what about American Indians? What about French and Spanish individuals who had their land stolen by American settlers without any compensation? And so on, ad finitum.

Reparations? Of course, for anyone who was held in bondage. Not for their descendants.

Note: There are living individuals who suffered under Jim Crow laws...

Idle Thoughts -- Scrooge's Ghost Haunts the GOP

Dickens' A Christmas Carol is a story of redemption. Remember that Scrooge had a lot of bad things happen when he was young, so we can understand how he became a miser who only cared about money. Scrooge didn't even care about his own comfort. He lived in old almost abandoned house, ate bad food, and did not live well, even though he was rich.

Money for him was about power and control. It meant he was safe. Safe from all the bad things that had happened when he was younger.

His old partner, who was just as bad as he, comes to visit him as a ghost because he says his hurt himself through greed when he was alive and even though he was a miser, he cares about his old friend and partner and wants to help him.

So when the ghosts come to talk to Scrooge, they're all coming to help him. For him this is a very strange thing. The only people he really cared about or trusted were his deceased sister and his fiancée, who he abandoned because money was more important to him than love.

Scrooge had a very modern Republican Party attitude toward poor people. If you are poor, it must be your fault. The ghosts show him that this isn't true and he begins to realize that the poor aren't things, they are people. Maybe the most important moment is when he remembers the party his old employer gave to his workers every Christmas. It didn't cost much but it made everybody so very happy. That's when Scrooge realizes that you can have money and be powerful and cut yourself off from everyone or you can use your money to make everyone, including yourself, happier.

The best real world example of a Scrooge is Howard Hughes. Fabulously wealthy, perhaps the wealthiest man in the world, he ended his life hiding in a hotel room in Las Vegas, shuffling around using empty Kleenex boxes for slippers, terrified people were out to get him. He was mentally ill, but human relationships could have helped him find stability.

In other words, whatever it is which makes people insane, you can help it destroy you by becoming greedy and cutting yourself off from the humanity of everyone else. We need to remember we are all one family. When you make someone else happy, it makes you happy. Recent experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging show that the pleasure centers of the brain light up when we do kind things for other people. It's a real thing and cannot be ignored.

I also want to mention the moral belief system currently very popular among many elected officials. Ayn Rand says selfishness is everything. Greed is good. You should care about no one but yourself. Many people call her a philosopher, which is ridiculous. Philosophers think things through an attempt to understand life through the understanding which grows from the development of their ideas . All she ever did was scream and hiss about how evil collectivism was.

She never thought anything through, she just hysterically reacted. She also got everything wrong. Modern science has shown in many ways that man is a social animal and that we naturally work together. We are a species which practices reciprocity by nature. She is wrong sociologically. She is wrong psychologically. She is wrong in primatology, and so on. The reason people love her so much is that she gives excuses them to do doing horrible things and makes them feel good about it.

From a couple of weeks ago

So studies now show that the wealthy tend to be more selfish and greedy than the non-wealthy. It is also shown that this tends to apply even when people who were poor suddenly become wealthy, for example by winning the lottery. Those of us who have worked in poverty-stricken neighborhoods are not surprised by this discovery. When we used to work with the Salvation Army collecting food baskets for Christmas and Thanksgiving, representatives of the charity always informed us that they got better food items, and more of them, from Adelanto, the poor city, than from other areas of the High Desert. Those who could least afford it, were those who gave the most. Items donated in areas which were better off economically tended toward obvious throwaways from their pantries which were not being used by their own families.

All of which makes you wonder about the details of human nature. We can be a very puzzling species. I don't do very well in this area myself. Clearly, I and others who call ourselves Christians, are obligated to take good care of the poor. All I can say that I do is provide a meal for those of ask when I'm out shopping. This happened yesterday. A couple of young men and a very beautiful dog asked for a meal; so of course I bought them a couple of meals at Del Taco and provided five dollars to purchase a can opener, since the dog's owner said he had the dog food, but was ruining his knife opening the cans the hard way.

For this I was thanked and praised, but I should have been criticized.  Like so many who are doing better than others, I give sporadically and give less than I should.  Humans, got to love us, but we don't make it easy, do we?