Leonard Pitts The Miami Herald

January 31, 2010

Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: Words have consequences – An attempt to find out what you meant in your op-ed in this morning’s Miami Herald.

Mr. Pitts,

“And the Bauers of this world need to know:
Sometimes stray animals bite.”
The Miami Herald
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The “stray animals” are the poor people that South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer referred to by citing a lesson his grandmother taught him. “Don’t feed stray animals. It allows them to reproduce.”

I don’t know how old his grandmother was when she told him that. It is possible that she was influenced by Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of modern American Liberalism, who championed birth control and abortion as a means of culling the herd of undesirables. Hitler was so taken by her works that he used them as the basis for his 1934 Nuremberg Race Laws. Just one more example of the unintended consequences of words carelessly strewn about.

You tell us that they may “bite”.

I paraphrased Richard Weaver. “Ideas Have Consequences”

Do you mean that they will “bite” like the Helots did when they turned on their Spartan masters?

Do you mean that they will “bite” like Spartacus?

Do you mean that the Bastille already having been stormed that the next logical target will be the White House?

Do you mean that there will be a replay of “Ten Days That Shook the World”?

Do you mean that Howard Fast novels and Howard Zinn menaderings will give us lessons on how, when, and who to “bite”?

You say that “they” didn’t get out of New Orleans because “they” had neither cars nor credit cards. [Why New Orleans let 250 buses sit in a compound until they became waterlogged and useless is for a different discussion. The question of why the Mayor went to Houston is still open.] So there is no misunderstanding “they” are the poor urban Blacks that Kanye West told us were not Bush’s best buds.

You make mention of two men fighting each other while they are in a sinking boat. The analogy was first used by Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman to describe the mutual assured destruction of xenophobic trade policies. When ever elephants fight the one sure victim is the grass. Every time any “Buy American” policy gains traction there is one group of people destined to suffer the most. You guessed it. “They” will get still more lashes on their already bashed, bruised, and bloody backsides. Last ones hired; first ones fired.

The best cure, the only cure for, forgive me, “poorness” is a job.

Yet again, as an aside, when was the last time you heard the term “shovel ready” being said without snickering guffaws accompanying it?

Alas, to the consternation of modern American Liberals, the “poor” better their condition when the “rich” hire them. There is no evidence, not even 3rd hand anecdotal hearsay, of anyone being hired by a “poor” person. The only exception would be being recruited for a felony. If you know of any other exceptions please share them with me.

In your penultimate paragraph, the one preceding your reminder that perhaps the feeding hand will be bitten by the fed hand, you exhort the poor “to organize their votes [and] push their issues into the public discourses”.

That sounds like a job for an experienced community organizer. Do you have any candidates in mind?

“How sad of all the things that men endure,
How few laws or kings can cause or cure.”

4 centuries of being true but its lesson must be learned anew every generation.




Kevin Smith