(More important than) Earth Day ( The Michigan View 04.22.11)

Posted by hpayne on April 22, 2011

Earlier this month, at a town-hall meeting in Pennsylvania, President Obama reflexively shamed a male member of the audience for the sin of owning a sport ute. The president mocked the owner for lacking the foresight to anticipate $4-a-gallon gas.

“I know some of these big guys, they’re all still driving their big SUVs,” needled the president who himself arrived at the meeting in a gas-guzzling armored Caddy (Secret Service codename: The Beast) and a platoon of support SUVs. “You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything. You’re one of them? Well, now, here’s my point. If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon -(laughter) – you may have a big family, but it’s probably not that big. How many you have? Ten kids, you say? Ten kids? (Laughter.) Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then. (Laughter.)”

Behold the scarlet letters S-U-V. This is what passes for shame in the 21st century town square. By contrast, President Obama has never publicly shamed American males for the sin of an 80 percent illegitimacy rate that is destroying inner cities like Detroit.

As America celebrates Earth Day – aka, Global Warming Awareness Day – fighting climate change is good. It is a holy. It is what Obama calls “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation.” And it demonstrates how detached our government has become from its foundation of providing public safety and caring for society’s most vulnerable.

What is the greater moral challenge of our generation? Carbon emissions – or a family implosion that fuels the slaughter of thousands on America’s streets every year? A perceived threat that killed no one in 2010 – or a scourge that resulted in 308 murders in Detroit alone?

On Friday, President Obama will honor Earth Day. He would do better addressing the family crisis on the streets of Detroit.

He could set up his lectern in the middle of Hamilton Avenue., a four-lane broadway in Detroit just three blocks west of Woodward Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare. Like State Street or Wabash is to Chicago’s Miracle Mile, Hamilton was once a bustling merchant’s row serving the lively neighborhoods behind it as well as the larger metro area.

Today it is a flattened war zone. At midday its streets are lifeless — its once bustling storefronts boarded up, burned out, or simply vaporized with nothing but a grassy plot as their tombstone. The neighborhoods behind it look they’ve been through the Blitz, though children stir from the homes in the morning — scurrying across the fearsome landscape to take refuge in a nearby school.

This is a man-made disaster, not a mythical melting of the ice caps.

It is the result of government’s abdication of its basic duty — public protection. But more profoundly, it is the result of short-sighted, immoral Washington welfare polices that paid women to have children out-of-wedlock. Today, in vulnerable lower classes from whites in Appalachia to blacks in inner cities, family culture — the building block of society — is in foreclosure. It is most acute here in Detroit.

This disease, however, is curable — unlike global warming which, even if its shaky science is accepted, would barely slow were man to reduce emissions by Democrats’ desired 80 percent by 2050. If the first black president of the United States — a family man himself — retuned public shame to having children out of wedlock, Detroit would be transformed.

The lack of an engaged father in most inner city homes is the seed of every pathology in this unlivable city: lack of a high school education, adult illiteracy, rampant young male crime, and homicide..

This president could uniquely refocus America’s energy away from the false green crisis to the real crisis running red in America’s streets. This year, America will send $1.7 billion abroad to fight global warming in other countries. Wouldn’t that money be better spent fighting crime on Hamilton Avenue?

 

 

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