Cani
One rainy morning last spring, Colin Powell went home to Morris High School in the South Bronx. He had been gone for 37 years. Now, thanks to the poise and intelligence he displayed during the Gulf War, Powell was one of the most famous generals in recent American history.
He stepped briskly from a limousine into a tight cocoon of security men and school officials. He smiled. He shook hands. He seemed not to notice the crowd of black and Latino men across the street, huddled in front of a shelter for homeless men.
“What he know about being down?” said one. “I seen him on the TV. Talk so pretty! College boy got everything he want.”
Another joined in, then another, and soon the rap was flowing. They’d drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black, or poor and Hispanic, or poor and luckless, and never had a chance. They’d been locked up by bad cops, flunked out by racist schoolteachers, abused by heartless welfare in vestigators. Look what’s been done to us, they said.
Across the street, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was talking to the kids. The core of his speech, delivered in a gym with a broken roof, was simple: stay in school; don’t take drugs. But such bromides were given renewed power because Powell spoke with the authority of success. And he was a black man who’d come from one of the worst slums in America.
Then he delivered the morning’s most important message. “If you’re black, if you’re Puerto Rican or Hispanic,” he said, “be proud of that. But don’t let it become a problem. Let it become somebody else’s problem.”
Thus spoke a man who has spent his life refusing to become a victim.
To hear Colin Powell was refreshing because we now live in a nation that is sick with what I call “victimism.” Many whites insist they’re innocent victims of vengeful blacks, who are portrayed in their fearful fantasies as marauding bands coming to get them. Many Hispanics claim to be the victims of whites and blacks; while I’ve heard blacks claim that crack cocaine was invented as part of an anti-black conspiracy. All sorts of people say they are victims of Asians. And there are Asians who believe they, too, are victims because someone once called them the model minority. Women claim to be the victims of men, while men cite alimony laws and stake claims to their own status as victims of women.
Victimism has one overriding slogan, the response to almost all questions about the source of one’s misery: It’s not my fault!
Dropped out of high school? Not my fault. Started shooting heroin or smoking crack when others passed up both? Not my fault. Married the wrong person? Not my fault.
Victimism implies that nobody is personally responsible for the living of a life. The defeats, disappointments and failures once thought to be part of each human being’s portion on this earth are now always the fault of somebody else.
I’ve heard the endless complaint on all levels of society. In a ghetto, I see a woman point to a hole in the wall and demand to know why the landlord won’t fix it. Why doesn’t she fix it herself? I ask. What? Are you crazy? It’s not my fault!
This could be explained as the heritage of 50 years of welfare. But I hear the echo from a captain of industry complaining about the Japanese. We shouldn’t even let their cars in hear, because the Japanese are unfair. Why not make better cars, I suggest. He looks at me. Don’t you understand? The Japanese are giving us the shaft! It’s not our fault!
Americans who once worshiped in the church of self-reliance have moved to another house of worship whose propagandists insist upon respect without accomplishment.
All of us, including the most damaged, would be helped by a moratorium on self-pity. We need less adolescent posturing and more stoic maturity; less weeping and gnashing of teeth and more bawdy horse laughing in the face of adversity.
In the cities of America, the young are being introduced to the world through the shaping ideology of victimism. How sad. I wish Colin Powell could talk to all of them, black, white or Latino, male or female, of every class and religion, and tell them: Be proud; live life in your own skin, and whatever is bothering you, hey, man—make it someone else’s problem.
|
