No Good Deeds Go Unpunished

I returned a few days ago from eight days in Pass Christian, Mississippi, helping clean up and remove the slimiest, smelliest debris you can possibly imagine from black families homes that were completely submerged by the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina. And the first thing I see in the news when I get back is another million man march on Washington organized by Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

I cannot speak for what happened or is still happening in New Orleans or any other town hit by Katrina. I can only address what I witnessed. The eye of the storm did not hit New Orleans. It hit just west of Pass Christian along the Louisiana - Mississippi border. The town is a scene of total devastation. It is like Hiroshima without the radiation. The eastern part of the town contains the remains of homes that were ripped apart by the winds and flooded by the storm surge. There is not a house without major damage. The western part of town is just gone - nothing but a pile of rubble. Less than ten miles to the west was the town of Waveland, which I understand no longer exists.

Our volunteer group consisted of 13 members of our church, all white, and we were the third of four groups the church has sent to the area from our home in Texas. Throughout the area many more Christian groups of all denominations were doing the same thing we were (didn't see any muslim groups), as were several groups of kids from colleges from as far away as South Carolina. All of us were volunteers, gladly doing the work for free, one house at a time. Except for a few of the college kids, we were all white.

We went into houses that had been sitting untouched for 6 weeks, with black and green mold covering the walls and still wet furniture. Every room was nothing but a 3 to 4 foot deep mess of damp displaced and upside down furniture, fallen sheetrock, insulation, clothing, mud and backed up sewage. The smell was indescribable. It took two days at each house to remove the debris, tear down the remaining saturated ceilings and walls, haul it all out to within ten feet of the street so the trucks could scoop it up with their huge shovels, and powerwash the whole inside of the house to restore the interior to something that could be rebuilt. All that was left when we were done was brick on the outside and studs on the inside.

We completely gutted two houses during the week. One was for a black family that had come back once since the hurricane, looked inside and turned around and went back to Texas to stay with relatives a while longer. The second was owned by a black family that had just paid off their mortgage after 28 years. The lady of the house was raising 3 of her grandchildren following the death of her daughter, and was obviously still in a state of shock. That was certainly understandable as I don't think any human being could look at the rubble of their home and know where to begin the recovery. When we were done, she gratefully told us we had restored hope that life could go on.

None of us volunteers in Pass Christian are here for the big pat on the back. We are here gladly doing what human beings should be doing for each other. The point of this narrative is that the devastation and destruction from Katrina is beyond comprehension, and after viewing it first hand you realize there is no way to adequately prepare for or plan for recovery from such a natural disaster. Whole cities cannot be rebuilt overnight. Relief workers can only do so much to help shelter, clothe and feed the victims. Government agencies are doing as much as they can given the limitations of functioning within a bureaucracy, but if not for the volunteer work of the mostly white church groups, the gulf coast would never recover. Everything that is humanly possible is being done, but that evidently does not seem to be enough for Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

I am a white male. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and in fact the house I grew up in was smaller than the two we cleaned out in Pass Christian. The vast majority of white people are not handed the key to the good life on a silver platter, and most of us have to overcome a lot of obstacles to earn a decent living. I am not a racist, and neither are the people doing the relief work as most of the work is being done by white people while a large portion of the victims are black.

Personally, I know many couples where one is white and one is black, and I could care less. Every black man I have ever gotten to know is an outstanding person with the same goals in life as me, to do your best to successfully raise your family and instill within them the qualities of honesty, high character and respect for every human being. Most of them are much smarter and more accomplished than I am.

Black men have been integral to the successful development of the United States of America for generations - from well before social giant Frederick Douglas and scientist George Washington Carver to Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell and beyond. Today black men are CEO's of major corporatations, Nobel prize laureates, successful doctors, engineers, inventors and astronauts. Every black athlete and entertainer is obviously someone who has worked very hard to get where he is.

But there is something very wrong with a large segment of black American men. Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have for decades sustained and capitalized on the issue of race to maintain their status in the limelight. They have created a whole class of parasites on society, who sit on their asses, won't get a job, live off of government welfare, and then protest that America is not doing enough for them. These supposed "black leaders" are destroying any chance the people who are deceived by their divisive lies have of ever becoming real members of a society that has achieved the highest living standards mankind has ever known.

Of course there is a small segment of weak-minded, irrelevant white Americans who are racists. They no longer have any influence whatsoever on American public policy or culture. The America denounced by the "Reverends" Farrakhan, Jackson and Sharpton has not existed for quite some time, and its memory is only prolonged by the absurd actions these men undertake. They continue to create and capitalize on the false images of America because they know that if the issue of race disappears they have no relevance to anyone, and their days in the spotlight are over. They have done nothing more than create and perpetuate a culture of victimhood, dependency and expectations of entitlement. And no matter how much anyone does for this minority of black citizens that fall within their web, it is never enough.