Enabling Victims

I'm thinking my dad has probably seen his fair share of victims in his line of work. But he's probably seen a lot of Victims, too. People who think the world OWES them because someone once Done Them Wrong.
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Unfortunately, there are also people out there who wish they could be a Victim, but life just hasn't handed them a raw deal. There seem to be a lot of these people in Hollywood and government. They become Victim enablers... constantly telling the Victims that they're right, and someone SHOULD have to pay for what's been done so wrong to them.

The way these people see it, nintey-eight percent of the population has been done wrong somehow, and the other two percent should be more compassionate toward them... and they DO NOT accept saying, "I'm sorry that happened, but you're going to have to learn to deal with it," as compassion.

With so many Victims and Victim enablers running around out there, a lot of victims [small v] are paying the price because no one wants to get suckered into another Victim's soap opera, and it would take some time and involvement to be able to tell whether or not that's what will happen. That's a risk a lot of people just aren't willing to take anymore.

I expect all this to offend some people. In fact, I hope it does... that'll just make me feel like I've touched a nerve for a Victim or Victim enabler. Feel free to copy it and send it to anyone you think needs to read it.

Tennie Pierce, a black 19-year veteran firefighter, recently won a $2.7 million settlement from the Los Angeles City Council.

Here's the story. Following a firehouse volleyball game, fellow firefighters laced Pierce's spaghetti with dog food to "humble" him. Pierce, who calls himself "the Big Dog," took a few bites, saw three co-conspirator firefighters -- two whites, one Latino -- laughing, and demanded to know why the chuckling.

Pierce, after learning that the firefighters -- in an undoubtedly good-natured way -- placed dog food in his spaghetti, called the prank "racist"! He hired a lawyer, found an "expert" witness who associated the consumption of dog food with "300 years" of discrimination against blacks, and successfully settled the case with the city.

The perpetuation of the victim mentality... does nothing to further long-term the black cause in this country. Quite the opposite, in fact-- like affirmative action, it perpetuates the stereotype that blacks can't make it on their own, but rather need to tilt the playing field and get help from "big brother", in this case in the form of the legal system in order to get anywhere in our society. These absurd lawsuits only polarize things more and anger whites who might otherwise be sympathetic to the real issues affecting the black community-- lack of education, crime, single parent families, horrible neighborhoods,etc.

Where are the other black leaders in all this? The Jesse Jackson's, Sharpton's and others or their ilk are the worst kind of Quislings-- looking to enrich and empower themselves by encouring blacks to continue their "victim" mentality, at every real or imagined slight.

[T]he inherent costs in classifying children by their skin color and treating them differently on that account are overwhelming, and cannot be eliminated by any amount of so-called narrow tailoring. The high costs of telling schoolchildren that they will or won’t be allowed to attend the school they like, depending on their skin color, include the facts that:

* such preferences are personally unfair;
* they set a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in favor of allowing government discrimination;
* they create resentment;
* they teach racial essentialism--that is, that racial identity is very important and tells us something very significant about a person;
* they encourage the embrace and exaltation of such a racial identity, as well as a victim mindset;
* they get government actors involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic groups should be “counted” and how, and how one determines authentic group membership (note that, in these cases, Seattle decided that the two relevant groups were “white” and “nonwhite,” while Louisville decided that the two groups were “black” and “nonblack,” so Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, Arab Americans, etc. were treated as honorary blacks in Seattle but honorary whites in Louisville);
* and, of course, if race is being used to determine school assignments, then other, neutral, fairer factors are not being weighed, or are being weighed less.