Fred Reed was a police reporter for one of the large Washington newspapers. He now writes a column which can be googled ~ "Fred on Everything."

Fred published a weekly online column in which he got to say the things his editors would never, ever have let him write in the paper. His stuff is iconoclastic and various articles have probably offended everyone...regardless of political orientation. So, with the warning that "This is definitely not politically correct," here comes Fred.....

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The following is an essay regarding the failings of a system and a culture. Please note that he elegantly describes the mood of many Americans and he does so without prejudice.

Slavery Reparations ..........by Fred Reed!

On the Web I find that Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, is demanding that whites pay reparations to blacks. It's because of slavery, see. He is joined in this endeavor by a gaggle of other professional blacks. I guess he'll send me a bill, huh?

I feel like saying, "Let me get this straight, Hank. I'm slow. Be patient. You want free money because of slavery, right? I don't blame you." I'd like free money too. Tell you what. I believe in justice. I'll give you a million dollars for every slave I own, and another million for every year you were a slave. Fair enough? But tell me, how many slaves do you suppose I have? In round numbers, I mean...say to the nearest dozen. And how long were you a slave?

Oh. In other words, I owe you reparations for something that I didn't do and didn't happen to you. That makes sense. Like lug nuts on a birthday cake.

Personally, I think you owe me reparations for things you didn't do and never happened to me. I've never been coated in Dutch chocolate and thrown from the Eiffel Tower. I'll bet you've never done it to anyone. I want reparations. Kind of silly, isn't it?

But if we're going to talk about reparations, that's a street that runs in two directions. You want money from me for what some other whites did to some other blacks in another century?

How about you guys paying whites reparations for current expenses caused by blacks? Not long ago blacks burned down half of Los Angeles, a city in my country. Cities are expensive, Hank. Build one sometime and you'll see what I mean. Whites had to pay taxes to repair Los Angeles for you. You can send me a check.

Now, yes, I know you burned LA because you didn't like the verdict in the trial of those police officers. Well, I didn't like the verdict in the Simpson trial. But I didn't burn my house and loot Korean grocers, or burn down a city.

Over the years blacks have burned a lot of American cities: Newark, Detroit, Watts, on and on. Now add in the fantastic cost over the years of welfare in all its forms, the cost of all of those police calls people had to make, for cells and jails and security systems in department stores.

I can't live in the capital city of my own country because of crime committed by blacks. Toss in the cultural cost of lowering standards in everything for the benefit of blacks. See what I mean?

Now, I'd view things differently if you said to me, "Fred, blacks can't get anywhere in a modern country without education. We know that. We need better schools, smarter teachers, harder courses, books with smaller pictures and bigger words. Can you help us?"

I'd say, "Hallelujah! Hoo-ahh! Not just yes, but hell yes. Let's sell an aircraft carrier and get these folks some real schools and get them into the economic main-stream." I'd say it partly because it would be the right thing to do, and partly, because I'd like to add you guys to the tax base.

The current custodial state is expensive. I'd just love for blacks to study and learn to compete and stop burning places. But is it going to happen? You may not believe it, but I, and most whites, don't like seeing blacks as miserable and screwed up as they are.

I spend a fair amount of time in the projects. Those places are ugly. It's no fun watching perfectly good kids turn into semi-literate dope dealers who barely speak English. It just plain ain't right. But, Hank, what am I supposed to do about it? I can't do your children's homework. At some point, people have to do things for themselves, or they don't get done. Maybe it's time.

I'll tell you what I see out in the world, Hank... I think blacks are too accustomed to getting anything they want by just demanding it. True, it has worked for over half a century. Get a few hundred people in the street, implicitly threaten to loot and burn, holler about slavery, and sadly, the Great White Cash Spigot turns on.

Thing is, whites don't much buy it any longer. Most recognize that what once was a civil-rights movement has become a shakedown game. Few people still feel responsible for the failings and inadequacies of blacks. Political correctness keeps the lid on -- but everyone knows the score. Which scares me, Hank.

On one hand, blacks hate whites and incline toward looting and burning. (The whites you hate are the ones who marched in the civil-rights movement. Ever think about that?)

On the other hand, whites quietly grow wearier and wearier of it. Not good Hank.

On the third hand (allow me three hands, for rhetorical convenience), blacks keep demanding things. As I write, you demand reparations for slavery. Blacks in Oklahoma (I think it was) want money for some ancient race riot. Other blacks reject the Declaration of Independence, blacks in New York hint broadly at burning and looting over a trial, yet more demand the elimination of the Confederate flag, and the federal equal opportunity apparatus, which means blacks, want to sue Silicon Valley for not hiring nonexistent black engineers. That's a lot of demanding for one month, Hank.

What happens if whites ever say, "No"?

Now, how about you? You've got a cushy job up there at Harvard, and you can hoot and holler about what swine and bandits whites are. I guess it's lots of fun, and you get a salary for it to boot. But don't you think you might do blacks more good if you told them to complain less and study more?

For example, if you want blacks to work in Silicon Gulch, the best approach might be to find some really smart black guys, and get them to study digital design ~ not Black Studies (as you teach). That's how everybody else does it. It works. Then blacks wouldn't feel left out, and racial tensions would decline. Sound like a plan?

Just out of curiosity, how many hours a week do professors of Afro-American Studies spend in the projects, encouraging poor black kids to study real life sho-nuf subjects?

Some of the examples sound familiar to Dominicans? Sure, we hear them from Haitians all the time. LOL.

Oh yes, all too bloody damn familiar. Although to their credit, haitians haven't threatened to burn down dominican cities, yet...

A Man's Home Is His Constitutional CastleHenry Louis Gates Jr. should have taken his stand on the Bill of Rights, not on his epidermis or that of the arresting officer.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, July 27, 2009, at 1:06 PM ET

.There are the things you can try when confronted by a cop, and there are the things that you can't—or had better not. Last Memorial Day, I was going in a taxi down to Washington, D.C.'s Vietnam Memorial when a police car cut across the traffic and slammed everything to a halt. Opening the window and asking what the problem was and how long it might last, I was screeched at by a stringy-haired, rat-faced blond beast, who acted as if she had been waiting all year for the chance to hurt someone. (She was wearing a uniform that I had helped pay for.) I often have a hard time keeping my trap shut, but I saw at once that this damaged creature was aching for trouble and that it would cost me days rather than hours if I supplied her with any back chat. (I think it was the mad way she yelled, "Because I can!" and "Because I say so!" She was so avid with hatred that I didn't even try to get close enough to ask or see her name or number. The whole thing, especially my own ignoble passivity, gnaws at me still when I reflect upon it. But it didn't, if you understand me, reinforce any humiliating folk memory. Indeed, I had more or less forgotten it until recently.
More recently, I was walking at night in the wooded California suburb where I spend the summer, trying to think about an essay I was writing. Suddenly, a police cruiser was growling quietly next to me and shining a light. "What are you doing?" I don't know quite what it was—I'd been bored and delayed that week at airport security—but I abruptly decided that I was in no mood, so I responded, "Who wants to know?" and continued walking. "Where do you live?" said the voice. "None of your business," said I. "What's under your jacket?" "What's your probable cause for asking?" I was now almost intoxicated by my mere possession of constitutional rights. There was a pause, and then the cop asked almost pleadingly how he was to know if I was an intruder or burglar, or not. "You can't know that," I said. "It's for me to know and for you to find out. I hope you can come up with probable cause." The car gurgled alongside me for a bit and then pulled away. No doubt the driver then ran some sort of check, but he didn't come back.

In the first instance, I found again what everyone knows, which is that there are a lot of warped misfits and inadequates who are somehow allowed to join the police force. In the second instance, I found that a good cop even at dead of night can and will use his judgment, even if the "suspect" is being a slight pain in the ass. But seriously, do you think I could have pulled the second act, or would even have tried it, or been given the chance to try it, if I had been black? The "Skip" Gates question is determined just as much by what can't and what doesn't happen as it is by what regularly does. (Colbert I. King of the Washington Post once wrote a very telling column about how his parents instilled in him the need for punctuality. The underlining of their everyday lesson was that if you were late, you might have to run, and a young black man racing through the streets could well be detained before he reached his lawful destination.)I can easily see how a black neighbor could have called the police when seeing professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. trying to push open the front door of his own house. And I can equally easily visualize a thuggish or oversensitive black cop answering the call. And I can also see how long it might take the misunderstanding to dawn on both parties. But Gates has a limp that partly accounts for his childhood nickname and is slight and modest in demeanor. Moreover, whatever he said to the cop was in the privacy of his own home. It is monstrous in the extreme that he should in that home be handcuffed, and then taken downtown, after it had been plainly established that he was indeed the householder. The president should certainly have kept his mouth closed about the whole business—he is a senior law officer with a duty of impartiality, not the micro-manager of our domestic disputes—but once he had said that the police conduct was "stupid," he ought to have stuck to it, quite regardless of the rainbow of shades that was so pathetically and opportunistically deployed by the Cambridge Police Department. It is the U.S. Constitution, and not some competitive agglomeration of communities or constituencies, that makes a citizen the sovereign of his own home and privacy. There is absolutely no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right. And such rights cannot be negotiated away over beer.

Race or color are second-order considerations in this, if they are considerations at all. I was once mugged by a white man on the Lower East Side of New York, and then, having given my evidence, was laboriously shown a whole photo album of black "perps" at the local station house. The absurdity of the exercise lay not just in the inability of a half-trained and uncultured force to believe what I was telling them, but in the certainty that their stupidity was helping the guilty party to make a getaway. Professor Gates should have taken his stand on the Bill of Rights and not on his epidermis or that of the arresting officer, and, if he didn't have the presence of mind to do so, that needn't inhibit the rest of us.

LOL. Good post Hump. Nowadays roles have reversed and the color of your epidermis may be a factor in your behalf, or in other words payback time!
I wonder when Latins will get their turn at the racial bat!

Personally, I think that the case of the haitians here is way too similar to the one of the american indians, in the sense that they're not the ones stirring trouble on the international forum, but the white and lefty trash that has taken the task of "fighting for their rights" (by screwing us royally in the process, of course) for their own racist and selfish reasons, read, maintaining the haitians as far away from their countries as possible. Thing is, the morons don't know that with their "crusade" they're only delaying the inevitable, that is, if they accomplish their task, they'd only get both sides of the island on a similar condition, increasing the number of boatpeople heading their way to Florida and PR, respectively.

Racial joke:

Everyone seems to be in a hurry to scream 'racism' these days....
The customer asked, "In what aisle could I find the Polish sausage?"
The clerk looks at him and says, "Are you Polish?"
The guy (clearly offended) says, "Well, yes I am. But let me ask you something. If I had asked for Italian sausage, would you ask me if I was Italian? Or if I had asked for German Bratwurst, would you ask me if I was German? Or if I asked for a kosher hot dog would you ask me if I was Jewish? Or if I had asked for a Taco, would you ask if I was Mexican?' If I asked for some Irish whiskey, would you ask if I was Irish?"
The clerk says, "Well, no, I probably wouldn't!"
With deep self-righteous indignation, the guy says, "Well then, why did you ask me if I'm Polish because I asked for Polish sausage?"

The clerk replied, "Because you're in Home Depot."

Good point Lautaro. When the Haitian invasion has completed and the island will be de-facto unified, by the macabre plans of the unification crusade, then the basic problem will still be here but magnified times two, and the ocean boat exodus will continue, this time with more vigor and assets, as in this side of the island there is plenty wood to make boats.