My title for Dennis’ post, not his.
By Dennis Leger
Obviously, you are plagued with “white guilt”, and have bought into all the false “victimhood” cries of our black American brothers and sisters. Perhaps a life of “privilege” has been your life experience. Mine has been a life of struggles, trials and challenges to accumulate what little I have, and after 45 years of hard, diligent work to have a “comfortable” lifestyle; still working on building a comfortable retirement; not there yet. Nobody has given me anything except “opportunities” to do something for myself, and nothing has come easy.I am not a bible scholar, but I notice that some Christian folks like to pick and choose scriptures very carefully to support their argument. You can find scriptures to support just about anything you want – if you’re willing to deny all the rest of them. Yes, we are commanded by God to help those in need if we are able. There are also many scriptures that address laziness and those who will not work and want to depend on others for their existence. The bible says if a man will not work, he should not eat. Check out these scriptures: 2 Thessolonians 3:9-12, Proverbs 21:25, 10:3-5, 1 Timothy 5:8-9.It is interesting that you highlight St. John the Baptist Parish, and Marathon Oil as the culprit. On this point, my uneducated opinion is to agree with you that they should not be allowed to be exempt from paying millions in property taxes. My second thought though is that the leaders of that parish, like many other municipalities have made a “business decision” to do something similar when an entity will locate in their territory and provide lots of jobs; the workers will end up providing lots of tax revenue. I don’t know what the financial trade-off is, but someone much smarter than me has made that decision, and this is surely not the first or only case.Now let’s discuss all the local residents residing near Marathon Oil living in poverty, as you pointed out. If you drive around there and observe you can begin to realize that most of the residents living in poverty are black residents. Realize that this same situation is duplicated up and down the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where opportunities for a pretty good income are plentiful. Why is that? These facilities have been there at least as long as most of these people living in poverty have been alive. Surely, these employers would be glad to hire them if they “wanted” to work. Has anyone thought of this as the potential problem? With the “opportunity” to earn a respectable income right there in your back yard, why would anyone settle for living in poverty? Perhaps because the “victimhood” mentality has been handed down to them from generation-to-generation. They continue to settle for that lifestyle in exchange for not having to work, which the government provides for them. Maintaining the “victimhood” mentality is a CHOICE. This is proven by the many, many black Americans that through lots of hard work and dedication have raised themselves out of poverty to become very successful, some extremely successful. Doesn’t this sort of dispel the myth that (as a whole group) they cannot be successful in this society because of some horrible way of life their ancestors, whom they never even knew experienced? How about a lot of hard work, dedication, and persistence? Yeah, maybe that would work!!I know, this is not POLITICALLY CORRECT, and it surely does not fit the narrative the mainstream media and their partners, the Democrats continue to push – that the black Americans are so disadvantaged and oppressed because their ancestors were slaves, so they need the government’s assistance (our tax $$).