In an editorial published Saturday in the Washington Post, Colbert King criticized Mayor Anthony William’s recent assertion that Washington, D.C. is “stronger than ever”. King interpreted the Mayor’s comments as meaning that, “The city's treasury is in the black, the financial control board is gone, the Washington real estate market is hot, hot, hot and the people who live off our town are making money once again.” Taking the Mayor to task, King wrote of recent and much-publicized instances of gun violence and family abuse including a fourteen year old boy stopped by police while driving a car in possession of a semiautomatic handgun and a submachine gun, and six children abandoned to conditions of squalor and starvation by their mother.
Reading King, one might conclude that his black and white portrait adequately captures the current state of Washington, D.C. It does not.
Washington today is a better place to live than at any point in the past fifteen years. For the first time in my memory, street sweepers clean neighborhoods twice weekly, streets and sidewalks are repaired, trees are replaced, parks are refurbished and made both safe and accessible… in short the government is responding to broad citizen needs.
This does not detract from the human tragedies to which King calls attention. He is correct in asserting that the “…collapsed state of black family life in our city..” correlates with “dysfunctional homes and the chaos in our public schools and on our streets”. The collapse in black family life, however, is not a new phenomenon in Washington, or elsewhere.
King neglected to mention that frequent violence in Washington occurs in spite of strict gun control laws; that poor black families subsist in servitude to welfare programs; and that school reform has been on the agenda of every city council in recent memory. He implies that the interests of business and development are juxtaposed to those of the black family; but he does not connect the liberal plantation run by the Democrat party to the collapsed state of the black family.
Almost to a man, black and Democrat leaders have opposed the most important effort to improve chances for upward mobility amongst black people in Washington. Al Sharpton, Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton worked to defeat the city's recently passed school voucher program. A program that empowers parents to seek education for their children beyond the confines of the liberal plantation.
Mayor William's support was critical to passage of the school voucher program.
Posted by publius at February 9, 2004 03:47 PM