Please Leave Your comment
Come meet the writer
Or just call me at
310-618-8107
Confidential for you to get the 250,000 Free Advertising Credits
For you Enjoy this article.
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
January 25, 2011 ought to have been a red letter day in the black community of Boston, Massachusetts. That, after all, is the day former 6 term Boston city councillor Chuck Turner was sentenced to three years in prison for accepting a $1,000 bribe. He's joined in the pokey by another well- known black politician, Dianne Wilkerson, ex-state senator, representing roughly the same area in the state senate Turner represented in the city council. Wilkerson's sentence, 3 1/2 years.
Sadly, the black community has not only not been grateful to have such blatant, shameless cons removed from positions of power and authority they occupied... there is strong, residual grumbling that "the man" has clipped the wings of two positively angelic spokespeople for the community. Sure they were guilty... but they were good people who worked for the community; thus all their numerous, documented infractions should and needed to be forgiven.
Let's see how this ironic development came about; what it tells us about leadership in the black community, and the need to put the race card to bed, as inimical to that community and its members.
Here are the facts:
June 2007. Wilkerson, one of the best known members of the Massachusetts State Senate, is videotaped accepting cash pay-offs, including $1,000 that she stuffed into her bra, in exchange for help with a liquor license and assistance to a developer who wanted to build on state land.
August 3, 2007. Turner is videotaped by an FBI informant accepting a $1,000 bribe also for help getting a liquor license.
October 28, 2008. Wilkerson is arrested on FBI charges of public corruption and accused of eight counts of accepting bribes worth $23,500.
November 21, 2008. Turner is arrested on charges of taking a bribe and then lying to federal agents about it.
Thanks to the videotapes and other corroborating evidence, surely this, of all cases, was open and shut. Think again!
Both Wilkerson and even more so Turner were wise in the ways of provocateurs everywhere. Demagoguery? Distortions? Lies? They were all in a day's work for this hyper-active duo. Too, they knew one of Adolph Hitler's most insightful observations: that if you say a thing often, over and over again, that thing, no matter how unsound, untrue, unlikely, becomes the truth.
And so, because the charges were serious, amply documented, and because the FBI was determined that such a culture of crime be rooted out... the matter escalated at once into a food fight that fascinated and repelled a great city.
In short order, both Turner and Wilkerson had turned the matter of their guilt or innocence into nothing less than an assault by every level of authority against their people, black people.... using tactics not unworthy of the Grand Old Army as it waved the bloody shirt in the days of reconstruction.
Was Chuck Turner, born with a sneer on his lips, a torrent of vituperative hate language always at the ready, was Turner to blame? Certainly not.
George W. Bush and his Administration was to blame.
The FBI and law enforcement authorities were to blame.
Mr. and Mrs. White America and all the ships at sea were to blame... anyone and every one but the man actually videotaped taking the piddly amount of one thousand dollars.
Wilkerson went for cheap, too, though she went cheap more often than Turner, a thousand dollars here, a thousand dollars there.
That was fact... but these masters of distortion with graduate degrees in race baiting... sought to manipulate public opinion by first, endlessly harping on all the "good" they had done for the minority neighborhoods which had elected them again and again to their public offices, and second turning the matter of their personal guilt into an episode in the great enduring struggle for civil rights.
Chuck Turner couldn't conceivably be guilty... because he was on the right side of "We shall overcome".
Both Turner and Wilkerson littered the landscape with their rallies, their statements, their media appearances... all to persuade the public, not merely gullible but mesmerized by these deft practitioners of mayhem and rage, that they were not merely innocent... they were the very heart and soul of the best of the black tradition. They were being cast down, they said and said again, because they had helped raise up the downtrodden.
It was magnificent, it was riveting, it was one lie after another. But good people of the neighborhoods bought the fiction, embraced the rhetoric, and saw conspiracies where there was in fact nothing more than law enforcements officials doing their job without the support of the people victimized by the accused and blatantly self serving Turner and Wilkerson.
Right up to and including their respective days in court neither Wilkerson nor (even more so) Turner seemed to have any idea that they were misleading, distorting, evading, much less that they had any responsibility for what they had done and which could readily be seen on the incriminating videotapes.
They told their supporters, who were legion, that it was all a misunderstanding, that it was all a conspiracy against them because of their important work. They had been sinned against, no question, but they had never, ever sinned.
These fiery arguments, all froth, no facts, did not work for Wilkerson. She missed the point until the very end, January 6, 2010, when she was well and truly sentenced.
Then came the shrieking, race baiting, responsibility evading Turner... who finally met his match, and more, in U.S. District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock.
In his remarks, Woodlock, with cool elegance, never raising his voice, unlike Turner, who always did, hit the nail on the head, saying Turner's blatant perjury was "surreal", "ludicrous." And,most pointedly, that if Turner hadn't continuously and outrageously lied to the federal authorities he would not have received the sentence of.... three years.
Within moments the egregious Turner was outside the courthouse doing what he does best: spewing poison and malice and, with a touch of his demented genius, making it clear that he expects to become the next civil rights martyr, certain to die (in glory) in the big house, snuffed by "the man". The gall of the man is unending.
However, in the final analysis, this is not a story about 2 cons from politics. It is, rather, about the people of the neighborhoods, the people who not only elected them again and again... but, more strange to us, continued to applaud the now convicted felons, who had had their day in court.... and lost.
Why had these good people allowed themselves to be so mislead, so abused, so used? Did the need to support the black face so trump all other considerations that any outrage would be tolerated and forgiven, any outrage at all?
So, it seems. Which is why in every black neighborhood in the land, the good people, the hard working people, the Church attending, law abiding people elect and re-elect one scoundrel after another -- until finally these fine folks realize the conundrum of their situation and elect good people, not just black people and never, ever black politicians who harp on civil rights to excuse civic wrongs.
About The Author
Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., where small and home-based businesses learn how to profit online. Dr. Lant is also a recognized American and British historian and author of 18 best-selling business books. Republished with author's permission by Lawrence Rinke
http://ActionEqualsProfit.com.
What’s your opinion on this?
Leave Your comment
I hope you Enjoyed this article.
Lawrence Rinke
Or just call me at
310-618-8107
http://ActionEqualsProfit.com..
For Leaving a comment you will get
if you click and fill the form on the next page.
250,000 Free Advertising Credits for you
http://www.ActionEqualsProfit.com/?rd=jm1VLH9d..
No comments:
Post a Comment