Street crimes

In his own mind, Philadelphia Democrat Mayor John Street may have been correct in his offensive colloquialism that “The brothers are running the city.” But when I exam the Street administration, I see the same lubricious rapscallions and philistines that looted, raped, pillaged and plundered Philadelphia voters and businesses for personal gain, administration after administration.

Philadelphia, the “city of brotherly love,” has the most racially polarized voters in the nation. The reasons for this are an absence of true leadership, ignorance and the press.

John Street should comport himself as the mayor of all the people, yet he blatantly and unambiguously gravitates to racial politics. This isn’t leading; it is pandering to the lowest common denominator.

As a leader, Street should show forth himself as same by refusing to allow his campaign to make gain of such divisiveness. But in the absence of any real plan for the city and/or the absence of true leadership character, Street has harnessed his donkeys to the race wagon and away they go.

There’s an investigation going on involving the mayor’s office; and Street has been identified as a “subject” in the probe. This may qualify him as a victim of his own making, but not as the victim of some nefarious plot by white people or the evil Republicans.

As the would-be leader of the city, Street engages in the worst kind of racial politics, as he not only abides such rhetoric, but augments it with his own.

This is a shameless encouragement of ignorance by those who would count their votes based on the scapegoating of whites. The reverse was wrong in the “Jim Crow” South, and this is wrong today.

It is wrong because we are supposed to have moved beyond it. It is wrong because it immiserates a people who willingly buy into the racially divisive language of those who make gain at their expense. It is wrong because those that are the ill-informed (or more accurately put uninformed) never get to actually sit at the big table. They too blindly work the fields with the misguided thought that somehow “we’ll be better off because we got him (a brother) elected.”

Street may visit black churches; he certainly attends one. He may euphemistically “juke and jibe” with the “brothers” on the corner – but what has he done for their skewed view of others who happen to be of a different color?

The painful truth is that all too often misinformed misoneistic blacks harbor resentment toward whites that is undeserved. Yet they go unchallenged for racist rhetoric and behavior that would never be abided were it coming from whites.

Anyone can affix political motives to the listening devices found in Street’s office. But it takes the disingenuous and the uninformed to attribute their presence as an attempt to thwart a black man’s re-election. This mindset is foolish on its face, and Street with his cronies knows this.

One doesn’t just walk in and place a bug in the mayor’s office, not in 2003. What the FBI did or did not do pursuant to planting such devices in attempts to smear Martin Luther King or indict former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young notwithstanding – it doesn’t happen to a sitting mayor, especially a black one, in 2003, unless there is a bevy of evidence for same.

Yet, here again we see and hear people invoking the mantra of “it happened long ago in history” and voicing distrust of Republicans (not that they could readily identify one).

As an aside, one could be forgiven for wondering just how it is, with the abysmal state of Philadelphia schools, so many are able to recite instances of historical racism.

Could it be the press? It is reasonable to lay blame where blame is due, and the media is not without guilt when it comes to fanning the flames of racial demagoguery. They do it with their leading questions; they do it by suggestion. They breathlessly bang the drum of divisiveness; yet they hold themselves as innocent arbiters of fact/truth. In reality, they stir the caldron because racially contentious anything, much less elections, sell ads and newspapers.

Philadelphia is not without its share of snakes and weasels, but the stripes on the skunk at this picnic are John Street, ignorance and the media.