When I was growing up in the ‘60s Martin Luther King, like Frederick Douglass, used the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt as a metaphor for legitimate grievances against slavery and segregation in America.
Back then, progress meant that the journey from slavery, through the wilderness, to the “Promised Land” was achievable. The journey ended at some point.
Today, the journey is unachievable, never-ending and by design.
After decades of realizing MLK’s color-blind vision, black and white elites now fixate on manufactured grievances in an imaginary wilderness where complaints and protests are profitable and permanent.
I call it the “Wilderness Industry.”
Black progress is no longer the point. Real progress would kill the business. The Wildness Industry is not about color, but power. Race is a tool. Never-ending grievances and protests are tactics – critical components structured into the industry’s value proposition.
The Wilderness Industry was a start-up during the civil rights era. Over the years, a pirate ship of groups partnered with duplicitous black elites to grow the business: Democrats, feminists, Marxists/communists/socialists, Islamists, LGBTQIA groups, climate activists, Palestinian sympathizers, China, nefarious billionaires, global “human rights” organizations, illegal immigrants, anarchists, Hollywood, the NBA and the NFL.
It’s now a global, multi-trillion dollar “oppression” mega-business. And it’s growing.
What’s really rotten is that truly powerless people, believing that the industry looks out for them, are being used, Hamas-like, as human fodder to keep the business thriving.
If blacks thrive, the industry dies. If blacks lag, the industry thrives.
The most vulnerable are being misled. It’s ruining their lives. It’s ruining America by planting fresh seeds of “racism” after the power of legal racial hatred has been dead for decades.
Which brings me back to the wilderness saga in the Exodus metaphor. Being stuck unnecessarily in a wilderness applies more to blacks today than MLK’s Promised Land vision.
Lagging blacks have been conditioned into a slave mentality inside a self-imposed wilderness, to protest endlessly against unsolvable imaginary grievances, while living smack-dab in a “land flowing with milk and honey.”
And most tragically, like the incessant complaining of the “murmuring” Hebrews, the greatest danger to discouraged blacks is not their protests against the Moses/Pharoah-types, or “whiteness,” but against God.
As the story goes, Moses was famous for his headaches while leading “stiff-necked” ex-slaves to Canaan (the Promised Land) after centuries of captivity. The wilderness experience was so excruciating that freed slaves longed to go back to Egypt.
“If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt,” they complained. “There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted [free], but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death” (Exodus 16:3).
Fixating on the hardships, they were blind to what God was doing and complained non-stop for decades. Instead of allowing hardship to mold them into what they needed to be once inside the Promised Land, they saw hardship as “death.”
Once on the outskirts of the Promised Land, Moses sent spies to check it out and report back (Numbers 13:21). After seeing the gargantuan challenges, discouraged spies brought back an “evil report” – fake news from the Canaan News Network (CNN).
“We be not able to go up against the people,” they said. “For they are stronger than we.” The people of that land are giants and “we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so were we in their sight.”
Joshua and Caleb disagreed. They trusted God.
“Let us go up at once, and possess it,” said Caleb, “for we are well able to overcome it.”
But the people, now blinded by doubt, surrendered to discouragement. So the “we be not able” crowd split from the “we are well able” few.
They complained against Moses and picketed for the Hebrews to pick an Al Sharpton-type who could lead them back to the government that enslaved them.
That never happened. The “we be not able” crowd died in the wilderness. Thanks to their incessant complaining, a journey that would’ve taken 11 days took 40 years.
Something similar has happened to the children ex-slaves wandering in America’s economic wilderness. The loud and violent “we be not able” crowd has picked leaders to take them back to dependency.
They have no incentive to give up the victim mentality because, rather than being punished, resentment and bickering are rewarded. The real causes of disparity are obvious, hard and ignored.
For real progress, America’s colossal Wilderness edifice must be hammered to dust. If there must be some lasting symbol, let it be Obama’s monstrosity of an unfinished library, representing an era when the deceptive “Yes we can” always meant “We be not able.”
Let Obama’s squandered legacy be the last monument to manufactured, unfixable problems created by devious overseers who butchered words and the meaning of things to build towers of racial babel that cast shadows over the real mess.
Then let’s go back to the foundation of what Frederick Douglass said should be done with blacks after the Civil War.
“Do nothing with us!” Douglass said. “… If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs. Let him alone!”
If a former slave could say that, so could anyone nearly two centuries removed.
It’s a very American attitude and tracks with what Shelby Steele once said:
“… freedom says, ‘You’re responsible for your own underdevelopment; you fix it or you don’t, it’s up to you.’ … Freedom is saying, ‘You can’t use oppression as an excuse anymore. If you’re not doing well, it’s on you.’”
In a nutshell, we’re not grasshoppers.
Slavery is dead. Jim Crow is a corpse. If American blacks can kill this last beast – the victim mentality – it would not only bring real progress but strangle the behemoth that gives life to a Medusa of identity groups that keep pushing America to national suicide.