Most of us have heard
about Ben Carson Sr., a 64 year-old black physician who first achieved national
prominence in 1987 by being principal neurosurgeon of the first medical team to
successfully separate Siamese twins joined at the skull. Fast forward to
February 7, 2013, at which time Dr. Carson, keynote speaker at the National Prayer
Breakfast and positioned on a dais with Barack Obama, says
We’ve already started down the path to solving
one of the other big problems, health care. We need to have good health care
for everybody. It’s the most important thing that a person can have. Money
means nothing, titles mean nothing when you don’t have your health, but we’ve
got to figure out efficient ways to do it. We spend a lot of money on health
care, twice as much per capita as anybody in else in the world, and yet not
very efficient. What can we do?
Here’s my solution. When a person is born, give
him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record and a health savings
account [HSA], to which money can be contributed, pre-tax from the time you are
born, to the time you die. When you die, you can pass it on to your family
members so that when you’re 85 years old and you’ve got 6 diseases, you’re not
trying to spend up everything. You’re happy to pass it on and nobody is talking
about death panels. That’s number one. Also –
For the people who are indigent, who don’t have
any money, we can make contributions to their HSA each month because we already
have this huge pot of money instead of sending it to bureaucracy – let’s put it
into HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care and what do
you think they’re going to do? They’re going to learn very quickly how to be
responsible. When Mr. Jones gets that diabetic foot ulcer, he’s not going to
the Emergency Room and blowing a big chunk of it. He’s going to go to the
Clinic. He learns that very quickly – gets the same treatment. In the Emergency
Room they send him out. In the Clinic they say, now let’s get your diabetes
under control so that you’re not back here in three weeks with another problem.
That’s how we begin to solve these kinds of problems. It’s much more complex
than that, and I don’t have time to go into it all, but we can do all these
things because we are smart people.
What do you think?
Does the speech offend your sensibilities? Well, you obviously are
not a United States President. Dr. Carson wrote that “… within a matter
of minutes after the conclusion of the program, I received a call from some of
the prayer breakfast organizers saying that theWhite House was upset and
requesting that I call the president and apologize for offending him. I said
that I did not think that he was offended and that I didn’t think that such a
call was warranted.”
“The White House was
upset.” Hell, I didn’t know a house, even a White House, could be
upset. I thought only a person could be upset. Maybe Ben should
apologize to the House. Doesn’t the President’s complaining
representative have the integrity and temerity simply to say that Obama,
himself, was mad?
The White House
representative was playing “silence the opposition while ensuring that the
President is not implicated in the silencing” game. Nothing ruffles
Barack and his race mongering friends more than having a black man speak his
mind in a public forum when his remarks are at odds with racial orthodoxy—a
racial orthodoxy that, among other things, demands that black men unwaveringly
support or make excuses about anything that the half-black, child of white
privilege President who pretends to be all black says.
On the other hand,
Carson, all-black and presumably proud of it, who was raised by a black mother
in an impoverished black neighborhood and who fought tooth and nail for
everything that he has accomplished, is maligned for speaking his heart. For instance, in “Ben Carson Was a Role Model
for Black Teens Until He Sold Out to the Right” Joshua Dubois (U.S. NEWS March 16, 2014) cites the doctor’s National
Prayer Breakfast speech and then concludes, “For us, Dr. Ben Carson's story has
become an American tragedy. We can only pray that he reclaims his narrative in
a way that still will offer others hope.”
Just one race-based slip of the tongue and an esteemed man becomes a derided
one.
A somewhat related
situation occurred after white Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in an
interview at Inc. magazine’s convention (May 23, 2014) stated, “I know I'm
prejudiced, and I know I'm bigoted in a lot of different ways… “If I see a
black kid in a hoodie on my side of the street, I'll move to the other side of
the street. If I see a white guy with a shaved head and tattoos (on the side he
now is on), I'll move back to the other side of the street. None of us have
pure thoughts; we all live in glass houses." [see "Niggas vs. Black People, " a
famous Chris Rock stand-up comedy
routine whose remarks were very similar to Cuban’s.]
When Mark Cuban suffered
inevitable character assassination for an honest race-oriented, politically
incorrect statement, Stephen A. Smith, a black sports commentator, sprang to
his defense: “We want to pounce on him making this statement and alluding that
black folks are talking about somebody in a hoodie that happens to be black… He
talked about the prejudices that exist in all spectrums by all of us. Are we
going to sit here and literally act like we don’t have any prejudices?”
What next? You guessed it. Smith told ESPN’s “First Take” that after his Mark
Cuban-supportive remarks had percolated through the communities he started
hearing: “Stephen A. Smith is a sellout; Stephen A. Smith is an Uncle Tom; Stephen
A. Smith ain’t black; You ain’t one of us.”
The courageous Smith then added: “But when I say I don’t give a damn, I
can’t even emphasize, that does it no justice. I don’t care who in the black
community disagrees with me. I’m not interested in their disagreement on this
particular issue because they are not looking at the bigger picture.”
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