POC wokesters are snarling at Pete Buttigieg for having said the following eight years ago, during his first mayoral campaign: “Kids need to see evidence that education is going to work for them. You’re motivated because you believe that at the end of your education, there is a reward, there’s a stable life, there’s a job. And there are a lot of kids — especially [in] the lower-income, minority neighborhoods — who literally just haven’t seen it work. There isn’t someone they know personally who testifies to the value of education.”

HE comment: Buttigieg was completely correct when he said that kids need to absorb positive cultural and community values regarding the benefits of higher education. Kids need to see and consider these benefits for themselves, repeatedly, to become believers.

I speak from personal experience because I wasn’t positively imprinted about college, mainly because of the example of my own father.

Going by my dad’s behavior, I had two distinct impressions. One was that higher education resulted in a better job and the ability to earn more money so you could afford to live in a nice home and own a nice TV and go on summer vacations. All of which I took for granted. The other impression was that living this kind of life, “pleasant” and settled as it was, would probably be accompanied by emotionally brusque behavior, acting like a grump half the time, having a stiff drink when you come home on the commuter train, and basically living a glum, sour-faced life.

I consequently felt, by the time I was in my early to mid teens, that living a semi-flush, middle-class, college-educated life wasn’t necessarily a happy, desirable thing.

I would imagine that all kinds of negative, less-than-encouraging messages and indications are fed into the heads of lower-income kids. Some may emerge from a difficult economic family situation with the idea that getting a higher education is a very good thing. Some may also emerge from a difficult upbringing with an idea that there’s probably no way out and that the best you can hope for is occasional relief by way of good music, good laughter, family support and a fun social life.

Guys like Michael Harriot can throw 2019 woke values at something someone said ten or twenty years ago, and call them racist or patronizing. It’s very easy to do this. This kind of sneering SJW condemnation is par for the course in the twitterverse. This is exactly the kind of thing that President Obama lamented a couple of weeks ago.

African-American pissheads like Harriot are just making everything worse. They’re poisoning the well. POCs in general are either going to give us Biden, which is semi-okay but at the same time depressing as fuck. Or they’re going to kill Buttigieg’s chances. Or perhaps both. Over and over they say the same thing — is this or that candidate our kind of person? Is he/she black enough? Because if he or she doesn’t talk our language, we’re giving them the cold shoulder.

The bottom line is that African American Democrats (especially the over-50s) are probably going to fuck things up all around. They’re gonna kill Buttigieg’s campaign and do their level best to make sure that a drooling, totally out-of-time 77 year-old is elected President. Why? Because Barack Obama chose him to be his vp 11 years ago. Said voters might even sit on their hands and give us four more years of Trump.

November 26, 2019by Jeffrey Wells143 Comments