Thus far, we have been pointing out the weaknesses before we go to the strengths. But it gets worse.
Let’s discuss the matter of “displacement” again from a wider perspective. Is displacement a cultural or an economic conversion? Good or bad? Necessary? Weeds in your garden need displacement. But you don’t want to displace the goose that lays the golden egg.
The desirability of displacement often depends on which side you are.
And as an outsider, where was I? Neutral? What business did I have to interfere with the flow, one way or another, other than “I think, therefore I am.” Thinking and acting can be controversial.
My own entry was a trickle in a process soon to become an avalanche. Those before me had more right, those after had less right to be there. Says who?
Then I remember what Ray had said, “Before the Europeans came, land control in the American continent, was the result of constant warfare between the different Indian tribes, the stronger would displace, annihilate and enslave the weaker. Peaceful clans didn’t last long. Aztecs, Mayas and the mystical Aztlan, as well as the Sioux and the Apache, competed for supremacy including using slavery and cruelty to overpower.
It is no different with the Barrio, just at a smaller scale.
Historically, displacement means losing freedom for some, and a new beginning for others. Athens and Sparta fought to displace cruelly and through slavery. Then Phillip from Macedonia came and conquered Greece, leading to Alexander the Great, who conquered Persia, Syria, and India with battles in which 50,000 people would die in half a day. How free were people when one single king decided war and peace of entire nations, racially or not.
Empires like the Roman, took over everything they could, obliterating entire civilizations by the will of only one or a few powerful individuals in control, implicating millions despite their will, where poverty is the norm. Socialism and communism are no different, mostly communism. “Kill the nonconformists.”
Europe itself was formed by displacement from the attacking Celts, Vikings, and the Norms and those who survived the Black Plague. England rebounded from this killing disease, which eliminated equally nobles and serfs, stronger than before. If they did, so could Indians in the American continent. Throughout came the Mongols and then Muslims imposing Sharia Law on the world. Followed by the Turks, and then the Christian Crusades trying to restore and impose Christianity spiced by everyone’s persecution and displacement of Jews. More recently, Russia’s failed ideology across a continent in which millions were executed. In India, you still have casts. Today, in places in the Middle East, according to Sharia law, women are third class citizens and homosexuality carry the death sentence. In Africa, we see, even after Mandela, a drastic return to the dark, very dark ages where in parts of Africa, Africans are still enslaving and massacring each other with ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with killing whites. In Ireland, Protestant and Catholics, both Christians, shoot at each other. What is behind most displacement? Economics.
In the Barrio, displacement is gentler, the liberal youth displaces the conservative family quietly, but effectively, with help from the City. But here we in the Barrio are about to prove that with fair competition, we all can also work for the longtime residents in a very positive way, as well as new families. Is this a reflection of what could be happening elsewhere in the world?
In theory, the United States differs from the old ways of empire building by following the intent of a unique Constitution, the United States gains from fair trade with free nations, not by the plunder of others. Although not always true to its principles, in theory and practice, America believes that each independent country must aspire to be free and take good care of itself. For each to do well benefits all. But there are those who don’t like it. We are criticized for what we are doing best, maybe for not doing it better, by those pushing for conflict by highlighting the adversities to gain control. Why can’t we/they learn?
The misguided Elite of today take the progress made throughout civilizations and kidnap it and falsely claim they can move it forward by their shaping social norms, scientific engineering, socialism, towards their imaginary utopia. To do this reshaping, they must undo the key elements in the weaving that made America what it is, otherwise they can’t. In this retrogressive intent, a few of them may be sincere… maybe. Most just want the power of control. The failure of this effort rests in their lack of a well-established plan that includes law, physics, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, weaved together to produce a cultural tapestry with moral and ethical common sense. Allowing the freedom of the individual to flourish.
Broader history is loaded with one culture pushing another for over 100,000 years. Nothing new. Today a new globalization displacement of the American culture is slowly taking place intentionally to be just as devastating as the displacement of the American Indian culture.
With motivation and determination, in the United States, you are free to improve. If it is made difficult, try harder, or move elsewhere where you can succeed. We will prove you can win. Besides, if you have no enemies, you are not doing much. This freedom is not so in most other countries. How did we get here? Collective Utopia is the wet dream of the far left. Evolving to a better world, where basic needs are universally reached, if ever, will only be when we fully learn to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Let’s back up a bit. After the French Revolution, the French revolutionaries betrayed their principles by cutting people’s heads off. Napoleon destroyed the value of the lessons from the revolutionaries. Liberal figures like John Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Jefferson, etc. were espoused in France as in the American Colonies, but we had no Napoleon here. We had Washington and others fighting for equal rights and freedoms, something unique, like equality, individual human liberty, and separation of powers. As a new territory, birthed struggling for freedom including in religion, self-government, work ethics, and free commerce and trade, successfully raising itself and millions of people worldwide out of poverty. This is what we need in the Barrio. And why, I may add, do some retrogressive people think they are mighty and can do better than what we have historically done, by undoing what works? Why is there today an attempt to denigrate the Founding Father, (the Barrio workers,) very same people who did the most to advance the equal justice cause. If this is done to others, others can do it to us in the Barrio, (the Juanitos and the Williams) and our efforts will disappear in future history in the hands of corrosive historians.
The new United States did not become entrapped in a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation, and injustice, whinnying for restitution. No! With passion, despite personal sins, the framers of the Constitution, individual radicals at the time, made the colonies unite and prosper in the struggle to hold on to freedom. The same positive spirit that will save this Barrio. And any other.
Imperfect humans like us, the Founding Fathers argued with each other, but their results were exceptional. We can do the same today, despite some people insisting on picking them apart for their imperfections dealing with slavery, a critique from people who claim diversity to hide their own failures, badmouthing heroes for selective flaws, as if themselves had none. Racist hypocrite!
England had already prohibited slavery at home but kept a lucrative slave trade outside of England. American slavery was fueled by the many blacks in African nations conquering and enslaving each other, then selling their own enemy countrymen (not because of their race but for been enemies) to outsiders, generating the fragmented African cultures, only similarity in color, as the epicenter of a despicable trade, when they could have continued with their many other natural assets into an economic empire. Even today, many in Africa haven’t learned to utilize the richness that their countries have to offer. They could have done what the colonies did here, work hard. If you are going to point fingers and ask for reparation on slavery in the United States, go to the historic source: Africa! Since whites were slaves in North Africa before blacks were slaves in the New World, then why not demand that Africans pay for what they did and are still doing! This would be similar to complaining about Barrio treatment by setting our buildings on fire.
You don’t correct past wrongs with new wrongs. There is a stupid questionnaire intending to prove that you are racist no matter what you answer, called IAT Test by Project Implicit. However, the stated goal of this organization is to “educate the public about hidden biases and to provide a virtual laboratory for collecting data on the internet.” They proceeded to do this by divisive questions related to differences between what they falsely and misinformed called EUROPEAN AMERICANS and AFRICAN AMERICANS proving their idiotic original bias.
How asinine can an erudite group of people get? Talk about starting off from the wrong premises! These idiots from Yale, Harvard, Virginia, and Washington University and others have their heads stuck in a dark region of their anatomy. As if they are going to enlighten the world with their silly, ignorant questionnaires, or hidden agendas. The administrators who let them publish such garbage should cover their heads in a paper sack and be paraded in public as failed academics, the enemy within. We are the one nation on earth that protects the individual. You don’t obtain equality or prevent displacement by bringing the more successful down to mediocrity. Instead, you raise the downtrodden. Unless, of course, you, as the selfish erudite, with the need to present things in ways to make others feel helpless and dismal to raise your own feeling of inadequate importance. These academics are trying to promote manure in their conceited mentally and decadent ideology. Their behavior is really like those who give free Halloween candy with razor blades inside. (I am following Alinsky’ s preaching here!)
Again. Why is there today an attempt to denigrate the Founding Father, very same people who did the most to advance the equal justice cause?
There is no reference to slavery in the Constitution. In fact, it states that all men are created equal. While some people try to use that to argue that because years back, in the south, slave owners were able to utilize provisions in the Constitution to their political advantage, others will argue that those using that line are the same elitist mentality that today pretends to help the downtrodden while in fact are abusing them now. Most of the Founding Fathers followed through and either freed their slaves if any, or left instructions to do so in their wills. However, human behavior been what it is, abusive, thus racial behavior persisted among groups, and it led to a Civil War, which became one more supreme step at dealing with the negative nature of discrimination. Respecting equality was radical behavior then, and an excellent beginning. That is what changing the world all is about! Blacks didn’t fight the Civil War to free the slaves, Americans did it for them.
Once more, why is there today an attempt to denigrate the very same people who did the most to advance the equal justice cause? This question needs to sink in. There is real evil lurking out there known as the enemy within.
Facts proves otherwise, that instead of pro-slavery, Founding Fathers were the opposite. Here is what was been said by most of them even though some historical figures still owed slaves during colonial times: Patrick Henry (January 18, 1773), “I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.” And Thomas Jefferson in his autobiography (1821), “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than these people are to be free,” While James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers No. 42. (Underline and parenthesis is mine,) “It were doubtless to be wished, that the power of prohibiting the importation of slaves had not been postponed until the year 1808,…, …It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy…, …and may be totally abolished, by a concurrence of the few (Democrats) States which continue the unnatural traffic, in the prohibitory example which has been given by most of the Union…”
And to repeat, what Washington wrote in his letter to Robert Morris, “There is no man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.” To argue that the economic contribution made by slavery is what made America what it is, is a wonderful and realistic praise, but as it is made, it is intellectually dishonest because unfortunately it was the initiative of slave owner’s misuse of labor ethics, not the labor, who made for a prosperous economy. Other natural and decent human resources can claim equal credit for national economic success, ingenuity, minerals, aggressive trade, industrialization, technological advances among others.
An evil attempt is to rewrite history and denigrate our best past, ignoring the ugly present. What are we doing about sex-slave across our border with Mexico today? We are doing what we criticize. And we seldom read about the hundreds of thousands of blacks who took control of their lives and made a new and happy future for themselves and their family, don’t they count? We don’t glorify those successes as good examples. Instead, we falsely imply there are few, or none. After the War of Independence, blacks were elected to political positions just as whites because the constitution declared equality, another great beginning! The law had changed, but if we are to read the past carefully, we’ll see that behavior by bad political people on elected in both racial sides was slower to change, as it still happens today. Then the racial tensions deteriorated, especially with the liberal educated elite cotton plantations owners in a Democrat’s South, combining economics with inhuman abusive behavior and forced labor from slaves. A compromise was reached intending to save the-new-to-be union, in allowing for two third citizenship for voting purposes, assuming slavery would dissipate. It didn’t. A combination of bad people and the invention of the cotton gin increasing the value of cotton plantations and related industry, enhancing rather than diminished slavery. The first black slaves in North America colonies were brought by two black owners from French Louisiana. From there it multiplied, including many blacks owning black slaves as well. However, what relevance does any of this has to the Barrio?
We tend to isolate U.S. history from the rest of the world and the Barrio from the rest of the country. But is it? Look at the following for lessons on how we can use Economics to advantage: Before the English came to North America, the Portuguese, looking for new trading opportunities in the 15th century, using the Dutch’s new developed ‘Investment Funds’, a creative, powerful financial tool at the time, that changed the trade networks in West Africa, initiating a trade (including slaves) across the Atlantic Ocean, going west, eclipsing the previous (including slaves) trade across the Sahara Desert, going east. Compare this to the shift in the North-South trade from Mexico to Arizona with the East-West New York to California due to the RR. Prior to that, more White Christian slaves had been taken to Barbary North Africa than black African slaves were taken to the Americas. The Portuguese innovation drastically shifted the power game of African nations, causing the Asante and Dahomey African kingdoms along the coast, among others, to flourish by capturing from neighborhood tribes and selling them as slaves, while in contrast the largest of the African kingdom at the time, the Songhai, collapsed, because they had no clear access to ports. Thanks to the Portuguese, Africa became a continent of opportunity for selling slaves, and it was the black African sea merchants called Fon, who seized a monopoly in the black slave trade. This is one economic example in the wrong direction.
It doesn’t excuse slavery. Slavery was not a racial component. It was a tribal component. The scientific community invented the term ‘race’ to justify their behavior, and today in America the Democrat Party continues to waggle in racial distinctions to control and wield power based on racial terminology. If you want to use race, little is mentioned that more than one and a quarter million white European Christians were taken as slaves in North Africa, among other examples, but not because of race. So why does race qualify as a subject for victimization? All whites into guilt and not all blacks -or others- into guilt? Who has been doing the labeling? It’s time we debunk this convenient bias oversimplification. I agree that in the United States, codifying blacks under the color of law introduced it into what is now called systemic racism, but why attack anyone? Be careful not to bundle injustice into a global accusation, simply de-codify, and depoliticize it. Deal with the issue not with the personalities. Here is where actions in the Barrio comes into play, bypass the hyperbolas and resolve the issues; equality, education and economy. Notice how the bad people keep making things into a personality issue arbitrarily accusing others of racism, and embellishing their actions.
If innovating finances changed the course of history, then innovating finances can change the course of the Barrio.
And we did so, now you can see how.
Spain became a world power based on the gold and silver trade, barbaric as it may have been. England shifted their commerce on products such as tea, cotton, textiles and others from the east, now from the Americas. The Netherlands France, and a few more became wealthy by the use of the new ‘investment funds’ in trade, also shifting traffic from east now to the west, with the American continent.
This is the power of understanding the innovative economy.
So much so, that the West Indies Company, a Dutch company with investors and international trade with the new world, acquired more wealth in the 17th. Century than any corporation has done today, by the tools of financing, not slavery.
The point in this context is to teach the Barrio people - and everyone else - that the answers must include understanding economy, not badmouthing the past, or blaming race.
Probably same Blacks who sold black enemies in the past from Africa, are now intending to make money from claiming reparation based on color. The power of an ill economy. Call it double-dipping. Selling their pride and heritage while collecting money twice, now for having been victim. Talent, but greed at its worst.
Capitalism does away with slave labor by turning it into labor for wages, a free contract between a product-builder and a product-maker. If you don’t like your working condition, work elsewhere.
Owning others was to be ended by the believe of “love your neighbor as yourself.” Why no one compares the despicable present day slave trade and sex –slave coming across the Mexican American border? Are we setting ourselves up for future condemnation?
We are all part of it. Republicans are paying no attention to today’s slave industry because money wins. Democrats for political and money points are benefiting from this injustice.
In the Civil War battlefield, Democrats for slavery and Republicans against it, almost destroyed the Union. Today Democrats are at it again.
The nation had the opportunity to eliminate institutional racism, but didn’t, and the blame is on all sides. Africans kept selling slaves. England, Portugal, Denmark, the Netherlands, and others kept trading them, and America kept buying them, until Lincoln, a Republican, put a stop to that, and then John Wilkes Booth, a Democrat, put a stop to Lincoln. Then Andrew Johnson, a Democrat took over and Democrats continued creating the Klux Klux Klan. Had Lincoln survived, we might have had a very different nation today. The quarter million kids who died had just died to help others, not themselves, to be free, and the nation allowed one party to spoil it so thoroughly. We owe our big racial debacle to Africans and Democrats, and to the Republicans who looked the other way. Black groups keep blaming others for not having done enough to stop slavery, while they themselves are not doing anything to stop sex-slavery or murders for the sale of organs today. Their credibility and moral standing are non-existent. Do we have institutionalized racism or is it more inhibiting individual irresponsibility promoted by those with ulterior motives? Then and now, money is behind sex-slaves,
Too many people ignore that the Puritans' love of faith, freedom, and self-government, not slavery, is what gave birth to America, and it is the same spirit that gradually continues to help overcome racial injustices
Has the role of Democrats and Republicans as liberals and conservatives have flipped over the years as some will like to claim? Not so. Thanks to a well-orchestrated PR process, Democrats claim to be for the minorities while they use their propaganda to create division, make money, and further political gains, with no improvement on race relations. Republicans look the other way. Shame on both. Millions of blacks were displaced by the slave trade, many ending in what is now a free country. Their proper use of that freedom can make a big difference.
The lesson to the Barrio: avoid whining and look at where you want to end at.
The question was: Is displacement a cultural or an economic conversion? The answer is ‘Economic’.