Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
SPIRIT OF CRIME BEGETS CRIME
A SPIRIT OF CRIME BEGETS CRIME BY LAW OF GRAVITY
When the 1950’s and 1960’s civil rights movements came to protest in certain cities in the South, some have said that the crime rates among blacks there fell to near zero.
I was encouraged to hear this fact—if indeed it was a fact, not a canard , a lie , false hope.
For, if it were true, then, it may open the possibility of a new remedy for criminal vestiges in those cities as well as in certain others. That ‘remedy’ would be a revival of the spirit of the civil rights movement.
I say “revival of the spirit” because “where there is no [spirit or ] vision the people perish, but he that keeps the law, happy is he. Prov 29:18.
Proverbs 29:18 King James Version (KJV)
18 Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.
Philosopher King, and others, recognized that a system of oblivious criminality had historically hung over the United States of America, dating as far back to its founding in 1789; its device was the use of racially exclusive Constitutional provisions that deftly deified certain“white” people by default, as it vilified the blacks by deceit.
This criminality compounded itself by the legal extension of slavery until 1808, and a (largely uncollected) $10 per head import tax on imported Africans until then; by a full faith and credit clause to promote the return of fugitive African slaves from non-slaveholding states; a commerce clause to promote slavery and its commercial propagation. There were some others like the infamous 3/5’s clause to determine Congressional representatives of states.
For the spirit of enslavement which had pervaded Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the Constitution was hammered out by a series of political compromises, after the “Articles of Confederation” had failed to collect enough revenue or to centralize power in the hands of a very wealthy few.
The ratified Constitution’s principles were at odds with its acclaimed, purportedly historical, revolutionary predecessor , the “Declaration of Independence” of 1776 that was written by Thomas Paine, but was edited by an editing committee of 5 people, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson among 5 editors to tone it down.
Water and waste matter roll downhill and downtown by the law of gravity into the lives of the people in their families, courts, churches, schools, police departments, homes, stores, libraries, armed forces, clubs, arts, crafts businesses , science, trade , taxation, industry, philosophy, commerce, professions, and literature.
Countering the national betrayal spirit of the constitutional oppression of blacks by “whites” by law, was the counterterrorism spirit of liberty and justice for all that was being mainly propagated in the civil rights movement, using America’s own doctrine, avowed philosophy preachments, against
It. These words cut to them to the very quick! And the “white sepulchral” walls of hypocrisy came tumbling down for a time, very briefly, before the sad saga of the assassination of philosophers with King in 1968, Malcolm X in 1965, Medgar Evers in 1963, John F Kennedy in 1963, began.
The nation’s political forces of racist criminality retrenched forcefully with the 1968 election Richard Milhouse Nixon’s crooked “Southern strategy,” wherewithal blacks were again made to be the pivotal pinions in the wobbly philosophical wheel of American law, culture, history, politics, commerce , education, “family values.”
“Made” includes crime, criminal conduct, of blacks against blacks, which became a political buzzword for racial degradation, due to the the miscreant acts of the few, who were consigned to dreary ghettos in where unemployment, welfare subsistence were disproportionately the rule of thumb, as was self-intellectual estrangement too.
“Gravity” affects the human spirit, as its force does matter, seemingly, apparently, to judge by gravity’s visitation of crime on African American people, who bemoan its persistence even though violent crime is in decline now say epidemiological statistics.
In short, spirit begets spirit for good or for evil. The key to eliminating “black” crime is to eliminate overweening “white” crime.