All over the news this weekend, I have been inundated with the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre.
Left-Wing news agencies?
Tulsa Race Massacre - CNN
Tulsa Race Massacre - NBC News
Tulsa Race Massacre - Washington Post
Tulsa Race Massacre - ABC News
Tulsa Race Massacre - USA Today
Tulsa Race Massacre - New York Times
Tulsa Race Massacre - Slate
Right-Wing news agencies?
Now I have to be honest with you, before this weekend, I was only vaguely aware of the Tulsa Massacre. How so if I wasn't taught about it in school? Because of Howard Zinn.
In the year 1980, Howard Zinn wrote A People's History of the United States. Zinn's angle was a history book that "portrayed a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties." The above screenshot is from the offshoot of that book, The Zinn Education Project.
With that being said, should the Tulsa Massacre be taught in schools? Ahhhh. Now things get complicated.
As you can tell, the Washington Post really, really, wants me to read about the White Mob attacking an All-Black Tulsa Neighborhood. Why does the Washington Post want me to read the Sponsored Story so bad that not only is it not behind a pay wall, but they are paying Facebook to advertise it?
Because the Tulsa Massacre is yet another exhibit in the Left's constant drumbeat that America is Racist. The Tulsa Massacre really is an under reported aspect of American History, but today it is being used to advance a far-left wing agenda, and that's the left's march to socialism. There are important historical lessons to be learned from the Tulsa Massacre, absolutely, yet it is strange that other aspects of history are being erased at the same time.
Howard Zinn was a noted socialist thinker. Socialism does not work. That is my argument with Zinn in a nutshell. It doesn't make the Tulsa Massacre any more or less valid to be taught in schools. But should what's taught in History class be replaced by Zinn's work? Should you teach a week of the Tulsa Massacre instead of World War I and the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson? Uh, no. It should be a supplement to History class. A History taught from many perspectives, not History replaced by a different perspective.
Listen, we are a Libertarian-leaning publication. We advocate a History taught in all its ugly splendor.
Just this week, I read that Lake Mead was at a historically low water level. Not today, not tomorrow, but in a hundred years or so, Lake Mead is going to dry up. When I got married in Vegas 20 years ago, our Hoover Dam Tour Guide warned that aliens were going to come to this planet in a couple of hundred years and wonder why we built a dam with no water in the middle of a desert.
{Side note: Our guide was quite a character. He also gave us a 'how to' guide on how to blow up the Hoover Dam, while he was giving us a tour of the Hoover Dam. My new bride may have seen our trip to the Hoover Dam as a bad omen.]
The point is, the story of the Hoover Dam is History. Now from one perspective, it helped create the modern Vegas. From another perspective, it deprived poor citizens downstream from critical water resources. All perspectives are valid depending on your angle.
[Side note II: Don't blow up the Hoover Dam]
But what the Hoover Dam Tour Guide also said, was that the Hoover Dam was one of the only things that the government did that worked the way it was supposed to, for longer than it was supposed to, within its budgeted costs.
100 years ago, America was a racist nation, but I believe that today America is simply a nation with racists in it. Why is that an important delineation? Because the Left wants an open checkbook to "fix" racist America. Who was in charge when America was a racist nation? The Democrats and Republicans, of course. But now the Democrats have found they can grow government and exert more control by promising to correct the sins of racism.
At some point, the government slowly slides into socialism because they believe that the citizens can't be trusted with their own rights and need control from the nanny state.
You're yelling at me "how do I figure that America isn't racist." Simple. There are no Black Billionaires in a racist nation. LeBron James, Jay-Z, and Oprah became billionaires because of the free market, not due to the government.
Racism isn't the Hoover Dam. There is no dollar amount or timetable, or even a finite measuring stick, to budget a solution. It is an open ended problem with no quantification. In Howard Zinn's America, you band together under the socialist banner and government does the will of the people. That is until you start killing enemies of the state and run out of food, like every other socialist nation in the history of the world.
The solution is to take the power from the federal government and return it to the individual, not give the government more power in the name of the individual. Get out of foreign wars and have the systems of government shifted to the local/state level. There is no systemic racism if you de-centralize the system.
Today, on Memorial Day, Kyrie Irving, who's made over $100,000,000 in salary alone in his career, is trying to tell you America is a racist nation because a fan threw a water bottle at him (after Irving stomped on the Boston Celtics logo.)
Make sure you know what racism means when rich people are selling it to you.
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