Some time ago I wrote a piece to challenge a blog neighbor's unjustified reliance on expert opinion and centralized social engineering. Today I want to revisit the term that titled that post. If the people are unwilling or unable to learn history and keep up on current events then the culture is doomed to repeat history's mistakes. Thomas Sowell coined the term 'Consequential Knowledge' and defines it; knowledge by virtue of it's presence or absence has serious consequences.
In very recent times and in our own culture we have dramatic evidence of the failures of centralized planning and the charismatic strong man who enforces fairness on everyone else. This is a reprint of an article I found floating around online. There were no sources given except those in the body of the text and I suspect it floated around a lot of email boxes before it landed on the blogs and message boards. I will finish my thoughts after the letter.
(Frosty Wooldridge (born 1947) is a US journalist, writer, environmentalist, traveler)
DETROIT
By Frosty Wooldridge
For 15 years, from the mid 1970's to 1990, I worked in Detroit , Michigan . I watched it descend into the abyss of crime, debauchery, gun play, drugs, school truancy, car-jacking, gangs and human depravity. I watched entire city blocks burned out. I watched graffiti explode on buildings, cars, trucks, buses and school yards. Trash everywhere!
Detroiters walked through it, tossed more into it, and ignored it. Tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands today exist on federal welfare, free housing, and food stamps!
With Aid to Dependent Children, minority women birthed eight to 10, and in one case, one woman birthed 24 children as reported by the Detroit Free Press, all on American taxpayer dollars.
A new child meant a new car payment, new TV, and whatever mom wanted. I saw Lyndon Baines Johnson's 'Great Society' flourish in Detroit . If you give money for doing nothing, you will get more hands out taking money for doing nothing.
Mayor Coleman Young, perhaps the most corrupt mayor in America , outside of Richard Daley in Chicago , rode Detroit down to its knees... He set the benchmark for cronyism, incompetence, and arrogance. As a black man, he said, "I am the MFIC." The IC meant "in charge".
You can figure out the rest Detroit became a majority black city with 67 percent African-Americans.
As a United Van Lines truck driver for my summer job from teaching math and science, I loaded hundreds of American families into my van for a new life in another city or state.
Detroit plummeted from 1.8 million citizens to 912,000 today. At the same time, legal and illegal immigrants converged on the city for the free government hand outs, so much so, that Muslims number over 300,000. Mexicans number 400,000 throughout Michigan , but most work in Detroit . As the whites moved out, the Muslims moved in.
As the crimes became more violent, the whites fled. Finally, unlawful Mexicans moved in at a torrid pace. Detroit suffers so much shoplifting that grocery stores no longer operate in many inner city locations. You could cut the racial tension in the air with a knife! Detroit may be one of our best examples of multiculturalism: pure dislike, and total separation from America ..
Today, you hear Muslim calls to worship over the city like a new American Baghdad with hundreds of Islamic mosques in Michigan , paid for by Saudi Arabia oil money. High school flunk out rates reached 76 percent last June, according to NBC's Brian Williams. Classrooms resemble more foreign countries than America .. English? Few speak it! The city features a 50 percent illiteracy rate and growing.
Unemployment hit 28.9 percent in 2009 as the auto industry vacated the city. In Time Magazine's October 4, 2009, "The Tragedy of Detroit: How a great city fell, and how it can rise again," I choked on the writer's description of what happened. "If Detroit had been ravaged by a hurricane, and submerged by a ravenous flood, we'd know a lot more about it," said Daniel Okrent. "If drought and carelessness had spread brush fires across the city, we'd see it on the evening news every night." Earthquake, tornadoes, you name it, if natural disaster had devastated the city that was once the living proof of American prosperity, the rest of the country might take notice.
But Detroit , once our fourth largest city, now 11th and slipping rapidly, has had no such luck. Its disaster has long been a slow unwinding that seemed to remove it from the rest of the country.
Even the death rattle that in the past year emanated from its signature industry brought more attention to the auto executives than to the people of the city, who had for so long been victimized by their dreadful decision making."
As Coleman Young's corruption brought the city to its knees, no amount of federal dollars could save the incredible payoffs, kickbacks and illegality permeating his administration. I witnessed the city's death from the seat of my 18-wheeler tractor trailer because I moved people out of every sector of decaying Detroit .
"By any quantifiable standard, the city is on life support. Detroit 's treasury is $300 million short of the funds needed to provide the barest municipal services," Okrent said. "The school system, which six years ago was compelled by the teachers' union to reject a philanthropist's offer of $200 million to build 15 small, independent charter high schools, is in receivership. The murder rate is soaring, and 7 out of 10 remain unsolved. Three years after Katrina devastated New Orleans , unemployment in that city hit a peak of 11%. In Detroit today, the unemployment rate is 28.9%. That's worth spelling out: twenty-eight point nine percent.
At the end of Okrent's report, and he will write a dozen more about Detroit, he said, "That's because the story of Detroit is not simply one of a great city's collapse, it's also about the erosion of the industries that helped build the country we know today. The ultimate fate of Detroit will reveal much about the character of America in the 21st century.
If what was once the most prosperous manufacturing city in the nation has been brought to its knees, what does that say about our recent past? And if it can't find a way to get up, what does that say about America’s future?"
As you read in my book review of Chris Steiner's book,"$20 Per Gallon", the auto industry won't come back. Immigration will keep pouring more and more uneducated third world immigrants from the Middle East into Detroit , thus creating a beachhead for Islamic hegemony in America . If 50 percent illiteracy continues, we will see more homegrown terrorists spawned out of the Muslim ghettos of Detroit . Illiteracy plus Islam equals walking human bombs.
You have already seen it in Madrid , Spain , London , England , and Paris , France with train bombings, subway bombings and riots. As their numbers grow, so will their power to enact their barbaric Sharia Law that negates republican forms of government, first amendment rights, and subjugates women to the lowest rungs on the human ladder. We will see more honor killings by upset husbands, fathers and brothers that demand subjugation by their daughters, sisters and wives. Muslims prefer beheadings of women to scare the hell out of any other members of their sect from straying. Multiculturalism: what a perfect method to kill our language, culture, country and way of life.
I PRAY EVERYONE THAT READS THIS REALIZES THAT IF WE DON'T STAND UP, AND SCREAM AT WASHINGTON , AND OUR STATE, CITY AND LOCAL LEADERS THIS IS WHAT AWAITS THE REST OF AMERICA . IF YOU THINK MEXICANS AND MUSLIMS AND OTHER FORIEGNERS WILL EVENTUALLY FIT RIGHT IN, THEN YOU ARE AS BIG A PART OF THE PROBLEM AS THEY ARE.
IF YOU THINK THIS IS JUST A BUNCH OF HOOEY AND YOU FEEL NO DUTY TO FIGHT FOR THIS COUNTRY, THEN I'M SORRY, I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT WILL TAKE FOR YOU TO STAND AND FIGHT ?
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- Benjamin Franklin
IF YOU LOVE AMERICA , PLEASE PASS THIS ALONG…..
"You cannot help the poor
by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak
by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity
by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up
by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man
by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage
by taking away people's initiative and independence.
You cannot help people permanently
by doing for them, what they could and
should do for themselves."
Abraham Lincoln
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It is incumbent upon each generation to pass on the consequential knowledge they have inherited and picked up along life's journey. It is incumbent upon each generation to seek out the best information available on current events and to require our progeny study history to compare our cultural well being. It is incumbent upon each generaton to inculcate the work ethic, ettiquette, and other values they have learned and inherited from their forebears. Everything Liberalism demands or envisions of/for our culture is anathema to that purpose. The letter above is anecdotal evidence toward that fact. The city and state are not anecdotal and neither are the other Liberal strongholds where the records of long held, long policied, long consequence reveal hampered cultural and economic well-being if not outright civic disaster. I invite you to compare Conservative strongholds and their records on cultural and economic health. Please get this consequential information into as many young minds and hearts as you possibly can.
