>
> Well Jeffrey the question you raise in typically rude fashion is really the
> crux of what has trapped people yourself in a sixties fantasy life all these
> years. It is one thing when you're young to to compare what you see around you
> to some utopian ideal that has never been and will never be a reality as long
> as human beings are what they are (and not say genetically transformed into
> something entirely different). It's quite another to grow old and never
> appreciate what you have (and what you have been given) compared to what other
> people all over the world and all throughout history have been forced to
> endure.
>
> Everybody in America is free to leave. Few do. If America's borders were opened
> tomorrow there would be a flood of brown and black of immigrants to these
> shores. There is no exodus of brown and black people today to any country
> whether Canada, Jamaica, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil or some other place.
> That's because black and brown people (as well as poor people generally) live
> far better in America, have far more justice and freedom in America than they
> do anywhere else in the world. What I mean by this (unlike you) is very
> specific: The average black person in America is 20 to 50 times richer than the
> average black person in Africa. And freer. And more protected in their
> individual rights. This is something all Americans should celebrate while
> working to make things even better. The fact that America is a land whose
> citizens pledge their allegiance to a country which seeks to provide its
> citizens with liberty and justice for all is something to be proud of and to
> teach our children to be proud of. That's the only way that the good that
> America has done for poor people and minorities can be protected and expanded.
>
> Your minority students can be forgiven for not understanding how privileged
> they are to be in a country that teaches its citizens from the early grades
> that discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or race is wrong; that has an
> economy generating more wealth for more people at more levels than any country
> since the beginning of time. Young people think they know better than everyone
> who came before them and they still have the illusion that people (and
> therefore societies) can be remade for the bettter if only they are given the
> right ideas .
>
> You, however, cannot be forgiven for having failed to learn the obvious in the
> decades you have had to think about all this since the 60s. To go on attacking
> this system and working to alienate young people from it (thus denying them
> opportunities they would have if they embraced it), all the while pretending
> that there is some other system that can produce the ideal justice of your
> fantasies is simply destructive and, in the end, pathetic. It's time to give it
> up.
>
> Jeffrey Blankfort wrote:
>
>> A friend forward this piece of jingoism, worthy of Pat Buchanan, to me
>> today, in which David Horowitz accuses me of having "a subversive
>> mission whose agenda is to warn them [my students]against the very
>> society their parents had freely chosen. The students are addressed not
>> as members of a free community freely choosing their futures, but as
>> though they were dragged to these shores (and kept here) in chains."
>>
>> He based this assumption on my questioning of students who stand for the
>> pledge of allegiance "if she or he can tell me of any moment in history
>> where the inhabitants of this land actually enjoyed 'liberty and justice
>> for all,' and beyond the words
>> of the pledge, to show me any proof that such was ever intended."
>>
>> No student was ever able to do so. Now I am making the same challenge
>> to Prof. Horowitz to see, with his apparent profound knowledge and deep
>> respect for American history and its traditions, e.g., slavery and Jim
>> Crow, genocide of the indigenous population, close to 200 interventions
>> on foreign soil, if he can answer the question.
>>
>> Perhaps, Horowitz would like to have a public debate on the question?
>> I'm ready, David. Just name the time and place.
>>
>> Jeff Blankfort
>> salon.com | July 10, 2000
>> URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/dh/dh07-10-00p.htm
>>
>> The Fourth of July Weekend is normally a time for reflection about
>> the American Founding and renewed commitment to its enduring legacy.
>> But in recent
>> years the anniversary of American Independence has also become an
>> occasion to reflect on the way America's heritage is under continuous
>> assault by the
>> determined legions of the political left. This attack has been
>> mounted by an intellectual class based in the media and in America's
>> politically correct
>> educational institutions. Their inspiration is a set of discredited
>> 19th Century dogmas masquerading as "progressive" nostrums, and not
>> even the collapse
>> of Communism has been able to reconcile their alienated psyches with
>> the American cause.
>>
>> These thoughts were brought into focus by three unrelated but
>> thematically coherent incidents that occurred during the holiday
>> respite. They include an
>> Internet post concerning the Pledge of Allegiance as it is taught in
>> our public schools; a dialogue about "patriotism" arranged by the New
>> York Times
>> between neo-conservative Norman Podhoretz and Nation editor Victor
>> Navasky; and the release of Mel Gibson's epic film, "The Patriot,"
>> which is about
>> this history itself.
>>
>> The ritual of civic renewal is important to Americans in a way that
>> it is not to the citizens of other nations. Their patria have been
>> created out of common
>> bonds of blood, language and soil. Their national identities are not
>> intrinsic - as America's is -- to a set of abstract principles and
>> ideas. The singularity of
>> the American identity lies in being forged through a conscious
>> commitment to what until recently was still referred to as an
>> "American way of life." The
>> construct "American" was defined by the Founding, beginning with its
>> Declaration that announced the creation of a new nation dedicated to
>> the proposition
>> that all human beings are created equal and that they are endowed
>> with a natural right to pursue life, liberty and happiness. To be
>> anti-American is not only
>> to reject the heritage of this past, but a future that is "American" as well.
>>
>> Until recently, the public schools in America functioned as a
>> crucible of its citizenship. Immigrants who came to America seeking
>> refuge and opportunity
>> were educated in this social contract by their teachers. At the
>> beginning of every school day, students would pledge allegiance to
>> the flag of a multi-ethnic
>> republic that was united into one indivisible nation by the
>> commitment of all its citizens to a common national ideal. For these
>> immigrants, public education
>> was a process of assimilation into an American culture that had
>> pledged itself to liberty and justice for all. But now this contract
>> is under siege by radical
>> multi-culturalists who condemn America and its heritage as
>> oppressive, and valorize instead the culture of the "Other" - of
>> peoples this nation is alleged to
>> oppress. In this perverse -- but now academically normal - view, the
>> world is turned upside down. The nation conceived in liberty is
>> reconceived as the
>> tyrant to be overthrown.
>>
>> Hows effective is this campaign? A Zogby poll, taken in January,
>> showed that nearly a third of America's college students declined to
>> say that they are
>> proud to be Americans. This can be considered a direct result of the
>> fact that their left-wing professors, as a matter of course, teach
>> them to be ashamed of
>> their country's present and its history.
>>
>> The Internet post I came across was from a Sixties list, and it
>> encapsulated the attitude that has caused this to happen. The post
>> was written by Jeffrey
>> Blankfort, a photographer who supplied the media with romantic images
>> of the Black Panthers, during their struggles with law and order in
>> the 1960s.
>> Blankfort is now a public school teacher, and an unreconstructed
>> missionary from the hate-America school of radical thought, perhaps
>> the most enduring
>> legacy of his radical generation to the national debate. This is what
>> Blankfort wrote:
>>
>> "In the schools in which I have subbed and then taught, very few
>> students stand for the pledge of allegiance unless coerced to do so
>> by their teacher. Most
>> of the students have either African, Latin American or Asian
>> ancestry. When an occasional student does stand, I ask, in a friendly
>> manner, if she or he can
>> tell me of any moment in history where the inhabitants of this land
>> actually enjoyed 'liberty and justice for all,' and beyond the words
>> of the pledge, to show
>> me any proof that such was ever intended."
>>
>> In other words, for Jeffrey Blankfort and his comrades, gone is the
>> role of public education as an assimilator of immigrants and
>> minorities into the
>> American culture; gone, too, is the task of integrating them into the
>> opportunities offered under the umbrella of "the American dream." It
>> has been replaced
>> by a subversive mission whose agenda is to warn them against the very
>> society their parents had freely chosen. The students are addressed
>> not as members
>> of a free community freely choosing their futures, but as though they
>> were dragged to these shores (and kept here) in chains. Thirty years
>> ago no teacher
>> would have thought to abuse his authority over school children in
>> this manner. But now educational institutions all the way from
>> university to kindergarten
>> have been thoroughly politicized by a "post-modern" left that
>> respects no institutions and no standards, and for whom everything is
>> political, including the
>> lives of small children.
>>
>> This is an authentic movement of sedition, and it is new as well. In
>> fact, I have a personal way of measuring just how new. My father was
>> a Communist
>> teacher during the Thirties and Forties, unfairly purged in the
>> McCarthy era from the New York City school system. But not for an act
>> like this. For he did
>> not, so far as the record shows, violate his classroom trust; nor did
>> he intrude his personal political agendas into his lessons. Even
>> though my father
>> belonged to a conspiratorial party that took its orders from a
>> foreign power, it would have been absolutely unthinkable for him to
>> attack America in its
>> promise ("show me any proof that such [liberty and justice] was ever
>> intended") as today's leftists reflexively do.
>>
>> My father belonged to a party whose slogan was "Communism is 20th
>> Century Americanism," and he believed it. The socialism of which he
>> and his
>> comrades dreamed was incompatible, of course, with the American
>> founding. But in their minds the future to which they aspired was
>> going to be a
>> completion - not a rejection - of the American idea. Accordingly,
>> they named their organizations after American icons like Lincoln and
>> Jefferson, men now
>> routinely demonized by the left as "racists" and (in Jefferson's
>> case) "rapists." Even though what Communists like my father really
>> wanted was a "Soviet
>> Lincoln
>
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