Frank Beckmann is a radio host at WJR-AM, and a Detroit News columnist.
For anyone from Michigan it was sad to learn that our biggest city, Detroit, is now smaller than Columbus, Ohio.
Columbus? Really?
The reality that the Motor City is now just the 18th largest in the U.S. appears to have set off the proper alarms about how far Detroit has fallen. We know the tri-county area has the population to support a reversal — almost 3.9 million people still live in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties combined — but we don't know if the city has the resolve to rebound.
A reversal of the biggest nonemergency exodus in the history of the census — the 25 percent drop in population since 2000 is only matched by New Orleans after Katrina — won't happen without meeting certain realities.
First must come an admission that Detroit is simply not an attractive place to live right now.
Crime is too high, despite statistics showing its incidence has been dropping; the schools are lousy; too many people are hooked on entitlements; too many neighborhoods look like Kabul; and too many businesses don't want to locate in the city.
All of that is tough to admit, especially in a city as thin-skinned as ours… But if Detroit is going to mount a comeback, it's time those outside assessments are welcomed and seriously considered for the potential they offer in suggesting areas of change.
The most recent example came when Fox News analyst Glenn Beck suggested a parallel between Detroit and Hiroshima, the Japanese city that was destroyed by an atomic bomb during World War II.
Detroit had its typical knee-jerk reaction, even to the point of two pastors seeking a meeting with Fox TV officials to voice their displeasure.
Lost in the emotion was a clear-headed examination of Beck's real points, that Detroit has been destroyed by a half-century-long string of liberal programs and policies beginning with the "Great Society" ideas of social engineering initially proposed by President Lyndon Johnson in a speech at the University of Michigan in 1964….
In 2009, [black conservative Star] Parker wrote that LBJ's war on poverty — the biggest war our country has ever lost — seeded a welfare mentality in black homes that caused a major decline in the number of African-American families with married parents living at home.
Most blacks lived in "nuclear" households when LBJ's effort began, and by 1995 only 1 in 3 black homes had married parents….
Parker points out that the incidence of poverty in black homes is only 10 percent (below the national average) where the parents are married.
The war on poverty, with all its entitlements, caused the collapse of the black community, bringing with it crime, drugs, promiscuity, abortion and worse while it brought politicians the entitlement of guaranteed votes.
The only thing that will permanently change Detroit for the better is the rejection by citizens of any politician who comes with more addictive handouts or any other promises of special favor.
These entitlements have destroyed the self-motivation of Detroiters for over 50 years and the city won't change as long as those programs continue and the politicians who provide them are chased out of office….
[“Handouts are to blame for Detroit's steady slide,” by Frank Beckmann, Detroit News, March 25, 2011.]
Beck’s analogy to Hiroshima is ludicrous. The Japanese didn’t destroy their own city, but they did rebuild it. Conversely, Detroit’s blacks destroyed their own city—literally burned it to the ground—after they had declared war on the whites who had built it, and stolen it from them. And now, blacks expect whites to rebuild it for them, at a cost of countless billions of dollars of the whites’ own money.
Nobody forced welfare on blacks, just as nobody forced illegitimacy, anti-intellectualism, drug abuse and crime on them. They chose their fate, and they gloried in it, when they weren’t complaining that all of the negative consequences of their wicked choices were the fault of (white) “racism.”
“Handouts are to blame for Detroit's steady slide.” No, Mr. Beckmann. Blacks are to blame. They destroyed what in 1950 was America’s wealthiest and most beautiful city. Detroit cannot be saved, as long as it remains “diverse.” Detroit’s black voters repeatedly chose Coleman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick, the former of whom was retired only by old age, and the latter only by a jail cell.
The reader who kindly sent Beckmann’s column remarked,
Detroit sucks.
It has drive-byes.
But not as many pederasts as Kabul.
Thank God for small wonders—if that is indeed the case.
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