Might benign neglect help America’s ‘underclass’?
When #45 talked about “[hell]hole countries,” he had places like Haiti in mind. The poorest nation in the western hemisphere is a nightmarish dystopia. Denuded, eroded, uneducated, disease-ridden, defeated, and riven by superstition.
Now its president is shot dead (but none of the palace guards received so much as a scratch) and who knows who is running the place. Not that anyone runs this smoldering trash bin of a country since the Duvaliers — “Doc” and “Baby Doc” and their brutal enforcers, the Tonton Macoutes.
From time to time, former Wall Street Journal scribbler Bret Stephens makes some sense, even in the New York Times. After delineating the failures of the Clinton Foundation, he prescribes today:
‘To help Haiti, stop trying to save it.’
The greatest gift the Biden administration can give the people of Haiti is to stop trying to save them. Aid to Haiti fosters dependence, invites embezzlement, enervates the institutions of state and civil society, discourages local initiatives, misdirects capital to donor-favored schemes, enriches the well connected, and enrages everyone else.
The unassisted success of the Haitian diaspora shows how talented, enterprising, creative and resourceful ordinary Haitians are when left to their own initiative. What Haitians at home need is the faith that they, too, can be successful captains of their fate, when freed from the clutches of those who would kill them with kindness.
Creating dependency
Is Bret Stephens’ prescription any less apt for this country’s perpetual underclass?
Isn’t Critical Race Theory how progressives account for the 50-year failure of their Big Gummint schemes? The trillions of dollars in Great Society giveaways, set-asides, quotas, forced school busing, midnight basketball, etc. Result: only 10% of black kids in Madison’s public schools can read at grade. Fire white administrators who discipline black kids (as at Whitehorse middle school)? Teenagers in Madison WI, Milwaukee, and Chicago are shooting each other to death. How to spin?
Cult of victimhood
Blame “institutional racism,” “white privilege,” “unconscious bias.” Set up the re-education camps, demand reparations, send federal money to black farmers but not white. Defund the police, quit prosecuting crimes “disproportionately” involving favored classes, ignore “over-policed” neighborhoods. Teach victimhood, blame the past, devise an enemies list.
Victims are not causative agents. Victims rely on The Other to enact this or that program, spend X amount of dollars, admit their guilt, etc. But the victim remains a victim, dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: The more progressives “help,” the worse it gets.
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
I’ve thought for years that the best solution to Haiti is to dissolve it as a nation, i.e., to distribute its small population among the more prosperous nations of the earth, declare its territory a world wildlife refuge and forbid any human being except for research scientists from setting foot there. Problem solved. But of course guilty white liberals would squeal about the sovereignty of the Western hemisphere’s only black democracy (no matter how dysfunctional) and insist on continuing to pour billions of dollars of “foreign aid” into yet another bottomless rathole.
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Yet ironically leftists seem to be against our own country maintaining sovereignty.
Only people who hate this country, hate us, and hate themselves think like this.
“But of course guilty white liberals would squeal about the sovereignty of the Western hemisphere’s only black democracy (no matter how dysfunctional) and insist on continuing to pour billions of dollars of “foreign aid” into yet another.”
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hmm, could you say this about the many, many entitlements here in the good ole U.S.S.A.
Aid to “fill in the blank name of aggrieved american group” fosters dependence, invites embezzlement, enervates the institutions of state and civil society, discourages local initiatives, misdirects capital to donor-favored schemes, enriches the well connected
Again, if this is true for Haiti, why is not true here!!!
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“Fill in the blank”. You bet. Bail out the banks, the car industry, housing market, oil companies, etc. Then make sure they never pay any taxes. It’s not just the libs who are at fault. Plus; how did we get get from Haiti to CRT in one sentence? How about sending trump down there with a box of paper towels.
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Richard, AKA the tiny appendaged commenter, Dick:
What a fragile raft you cling to. It’s a huge ocean and, “When a man does not know what harbor he is bound for, no wind is the right wind.”
Just what part of “Victims are not causative agents. Victims rely on The Other to enact this or that program, spend X amount of dollars, admit their guilt, etc. But the victim remains a victim, dependent on the kindness of strangers” went screamin’ over top yer head?
“Bail-outs” are not gratuitous, tho sometimes necessary to keep worse things from happenin’. BLM, Reparations, CRT are all destined to help NO ONE. Feel free to expand/correct on what positives they have provided.
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