Remembering Our Creditors--An Entry for La Shawn Barber

La Shawn Barber has been talking up the coming transition to her new blog format, which will, unfortunately, dispense with posted reader comments. This is, I suppose, a sign that La Shawn is moving up in the Blogosphere. She certainly seems to think so:

"Look where I am in the Ecosystem. In the top 50. I think my real rank is more like 60, so I expect the number to change in the next few days. What does this mean? That my URL and individual posts are widely linked. What's the significance of a black blogger being so high up? Most of the high ranked bloggers are white and male. I'm not sure about the ethnicity or sex of a few up there (with the exception of Michelle Malkin), but it looks like I'm the only black (correct me if I'm wrong). I'll spend time this year thinking about what this all means and how/if I can/should capitalize on it."

I must say that I will miss the fun I have had making a nuisance of myself over on her blog, but then it is my understanding that, when the NFL owners meet after the Super Bowl, there will be a rule change: using wit and irony on a conservative blogger's comment page will now be grounds for a call of "unsportsmanlike conduct". So I guess I'd better be resigned to hanging up my spikes, being such a devotee of that sort of dirty football.

This, of course, doesn't mean that I won't keep reading her or recommending her to others. It will continue to be my pleasure to do so. She is a definite, and pleasurable, Conservative and Christian voice whom I quote and cite in preference to many more famous bloggers. How could you not when she says things like this:

"You ever notice that when liberals want something, they have to circumvent the people, go around them, if you will, to get what they want? Why is that? Probably because most Americans don't want perversion, crime, a welfare state, social engineering, forced association, etc., in their communities and lives. Liberals have been running to judges to overturn or create law since Roe v. Wade."

Now, actually, Liberals have been doing this far longer than that. They have even been doing it back as far as Brown v. Board of Education, and perhaps even further. La Shawn, of course, is a beautiful and ambitious young lady, and I am a fat and cynical old fart. So I'm sure she doesn't directly remember Brown v. Board of Education, the way I do. She might not even remember the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as I do. This is the reason that Act exists:

"On February 10, 1964, the House of Representatives passed the measure by a lopsided 290-130 vote, but everyone knew that the real battle would be in the Senate, whose rules had allowed southerners in the past to mount filibusters that had effectively killed nearly all civil rights legislation. But Johnson pulled every string he knew, and had the civil rights leaders mount a massive lobbying campaign, including inundating the Capitol with religious leaders of all faiths and colors. The strategy paid off, and in June the Senate voted to close debate; a few weeks later, it passed the most important piece of civil rights legislation in the nation's history, and on July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed it into law."

Johnson, of course, was the biggest tax-and-spend Liberal of us all, but he was also one of the shrewdest and most realistic politicians America has ever known. Immediately after he signed the bill, Johnson remarked, "Do you know what I've done? I've delivered the South to the Republican Party for the next fifty years!" So far he's been right.

The biggest Liberal of us all knew that the probable price of Civil Rights for everybody was the loss of political dominance by the Democratic Party. Yet he still put everything he had on the line for it. Why? Because it was morally right, whatever the ultimate political cost.

How morally right? I am also old enough to remember the Bad Old Days before the Act. Old enough, actually, to remember getting on the bus to go shopping at five years old with my Mother and the five year old girl of our next door neighbor. This little miss was absolutely terrified of the possibility of sitting next to someone black, and told my mother so. So my mother kept her in the seat next to her, while I sat next to the 40 year old black gentleman in the seat across the aisle. Imagine it! Five years old and a hardened and terrified racist already, almost certainly because of her parents. That's the way it was. Everywhere.

So I'll take this space to salute La Shawn on her meteoric rise up the Ecosystem. I'll encourage her to follow her star and do everything she can to take advantage of, and capitalize on, being a broadly feted black blogger, perhaps even the most broadly feted black blogger. I'll even insist that she continue to give us Liberals everything but the benefit of the doubt about our morals, our good intentions for this country, and our capacity to exercise good sense.

But I do think, in the new-found privacy of her commentless blog, that she should take a moment to reflect on what debts we ALL owe in this great country, and what creditors we owe them to.