Once Again The Difference

Whoopi Goldberg’s racist comments yesterday on ‘The View’ have earned their share of rebuke, (ht WSBTV)
but it is also a helpful illustration of the dilemma faced by Goldberg and her fellow thuggists. It is patently false to claim that dog-fighting is culturally accepted by the majority of people in any part of the United States, and for Ms. Goldberg to offer such a weak argument warns me that there is something far closer to home which she wants to avoid. Goldberg wants to blame a group of her choosing, rather than face up to a serious problem with her lifestyle culture. The ‘Thug Life’ is a stupid, self-destructive one, which offers no real advantages while denying young men and women their very identities in the coming world. A culture which glamorizes violence, selective hatred and racism, vulgarity and promiscuity, the ‘Thug Life’ also cheats young people of opportunity by cutting off access to advancement in business and social communities; while advocates claim small success in niche outlets based on the expression of the cult, the world in general rejects the hatred practiced by this cult and those who express it.

It is normal in human behavior to go through a stage of rebellion, but maturity requires a person to accept reality and address conditions constructively. The way is difficult, but success rewards the individual with stable friendships and marriages, success in financial endeavors and professional growth, and in the additional tool of conflict resolution and negotiation. The ‘Thug Life’ culture, however, which appears to me to be an extension of the ‘I’m a Victim’ culture made prevalent by extensive Welfare and other government programs which subsidize poverty and helplessness, actively discourages reaching out to different cultural groups, and ridicules individuals who seek to better themselves through hard work and education. The sum effect of the ‘Thug Life’ is to invite despair and failure in place of hope and joy, and so the end of Mr. Vick’s career is representative of the culture he embraced, rather than an outlier.

I hasten to emphasize that the ‘Thug Life’ is not restricted to a single demographic group. As we have seen in even recent history, women as well as men engage in it, Whites and Hispanics as well as Blacks, and in all geographic areas. It is not a ‘Southern’ problem, because the behavior is also prevalent in the North and on both coasts. It takes on different aspects according to the selected hatred of choice by the groups which practice it, so that the Crips have much in common with the Aryan Nation, more than either group would like to admit. It is pervasive, in the same way that a particularly vicious variant of a virus strikes the whole country in a wave, and it is just as deadly. I do not find it a coincidence, that the culture which thinks nothing of killing dogs in fights for amusement, loses so many young people to drugs, alcohol, and violence as well. At the risk of sounding like a revival preacher, it also occurs to me that this culture is depressingly void of a spiritual dimension. It is, therefore, no wonder that a culture which mocks God cannot find Him when they finally realize their need for Him.