<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Danusha V. Goska</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/danusha-v-goska/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:56:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>American Tragedies and American Dreams</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/american-tragedies-and-american-dreams/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=american-tragedies-and-american-dreams</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/american-tragedies-and-american-dreams/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:10:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Danusha V. Goska]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[african americans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Garner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protests]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247892</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Michael Brown and Eric Garner verdicts and the future of African-American youth.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Garner.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247905" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Garner-450x300.jpg" alt="Garner" width="257" height="171" /></a>Decades ago, I taught at a community college. The bunch of us treated our shared office as if it were the neighborhood bar. We&#8217;d hang out for hours. That beat going home to our cheap apartments or our parents&#8217; basements and watching TV, which was all we could afford on the pittance adjunct professors are paid. James was a jazz musician. Mo&#8217;s nose was always to the grindstone. Patrick was enthralling. I wish I had had a video camera recording our every conversation. His words glittered.</p>
<p>Melvyn was only a teenager. He was a new kind of person – a computer nerd – on the cusp of a revolution that would enrich many. Education was just beginning heavy reliance on computers. We profs were luddites. We would fumble with the computers – accidentally unplug them with our feet – and squeal that this was a sign of the end times. Young Melvyn to the rescue. Melvyn had a bouncy step, a perpetual smile, and a know-it-all air: that combination of goofy youthfulness and superior impatience exhibited by a hundred other computer geeks on a hundred other campuses. Melvyn&#8217;s hours seemed to be pre-dawn through midnight. Young Melvyn was the computer demigod.</p>
<p>Now, decades later, James is near retirement as the president of a better community college. Mo is still plugging away, at a higher-paying university. Patrick, brilliant Patrick, never landed the tenure-track, Ivy League position that could match his outsize intellect. He drank. He was homeless. He died.</p>
<p>The last anyone had heard of Melvyn, he was in jail. He had been stealing computers. Melvyn was the one member of our group who was born at the right place and the right time to parlay his freakish natural gifts into the best-paying job and the cushiest future. He destroyed all that with stupid, unprofitable, recklessness.</p>
<p>Melvyn was black. The scuttlebutt was that Melvyn had felt uncomfortable being the computer demigod of an academic setting, accepted by whites. Stealing computers restored his sense that he was authentic. He was in solid with his homies. He was sticking it to the man. The man who liked, trusted, and relied on him.</p>
<p>James is just as black as Melvyn. Mo is an immigrant with the kind of facial hair seen on many an FBI wanted poster, a foreign accent and a name that sets off alarms – Mohammed. James and Mo were able to build comfortable lives in America. Melvyn could not. But then neither could Patrick, a tall, handsome, heterosexual, Irish-American.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about American tragedies and American Dreams in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury verdicts. I&#8217;ve also been thinking about my current young students&#8217; futures.</p>
<p>I walk to work through Paterson, NJ, a post-industrial, high-crime, majority-minority city. My commute helped change me from someone who once voted communist to someone who now shocks herself every time she pulls the lever for a Republican.</p>
<p>As I walk, I pass healthy African American men in the prime of life who spend their days smoking joints and gossiping on streets littered with trash that no one but the rain ever removes. The day of the Trayvon Martin verdict, I was stopped by police cars, flashing lights, and yellow tape. I actually hoped for civil unrest. Something to show that Paterson still had a pulse. In fact one of Paterson&#8217;s former silk mills, a three-story brick structure, had completely collapsed. The bricks that sprawled chaotically, good only for blocking traffic, once surrounded industry founded by Alexander Hamilton and workers that gave Paterson an international reputation as &#8220;Silk City.&#8221;</p>
<p>There are facts, and there are stories. Impersonal forces like gravity, chemical bonds and time create facts. Humans create stories. Facts are objective. Stories are subjective.</p>
<p>It is a fact that police kill a disproportionate number of black males. What is the story one builds around those facts? For me, the pressing question is: what story is most likely to condemn my students to jail terms alternating with de facto incarceration on garbage-strewn street corners? What story will empower my students to become like James, an African American college president?</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the story Della Kurzer-Zlotnick is telling. In December, 2014, Kurzer-Zlotnick, an Oberlin student, posted a letter to her professor on her Facebook page. In her letter, Kurzer-Zlotnick asked that her final examination in statistics be delayed.</p>
<p>&#8220;Students of color, particularly Black students, have suffered significant trauma,&#8221; she wrote, &#8220;due to the Grand Jury decisions&#8221; and thus they &#8220;are not at all in a place to take their final exams right now.&#8221; &#8220;Black students&#8221; are &#8220;struggling and feel traumatized because of the recent and day-to-day acts of racism in this country. Black students and other students of color have to focus on their survival.&#8221; Kurzer-Zlotnick herself identifies as &#8220;a white, middle-class person&#8221; who has &#8220;to [sic] privilege of being able to step away from these events and put enough energy into schoolwork and finals to assure that I will pass my classes.&#8221; But, she says, &#8220;Just because the murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown do not seem to threaten the survival or safety of white people does not mean that they are not severely affecting students on our campus.&#8221; Those students, she reports, &#8220;are tired, they are hurting beyond belief.&#8221;</p>
<p>Kurzer-Zlotnick describes herself thus,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;I&#8217;m 18. My biggest passion is social justice and community organizing…At my synagogue, Shir Tikvah. I had the social action position when I was 15, and I didn&#8217;t really know what that meant – I just knew I cared about social change and progress.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>According to Forbes, the total annual cost for a student to attend Oberlin is $62,000. Five percent of Oberlin&#8217;s student body is black. Thirteen percent of the overall American population is black.</p>
<p>Is Kurzer-Zlotnick&#8217;s letter telling a true story? Are African Americans so burdened by murderous police that they can&#8217;t function, and do they need rich, white liberals, who publicly admit to their own cluelessness, and who live in white enclaves, to make excuses for them and to lower standards for them? And is this the route to a better tomorrow for all?</p>
<p>Here are some more facts, and a different story told by a different teller. One of my students, Terry, is an African American. Terry had a difficult semester, too. Terry was traumatized by life events too personal and too crushing to recount here, but please imagine the worst. Terry never asked for special treatment; in fact Terry never initiated disclosure. I noticed that Terry was depressed and I asked why. Terry never missed a class. Terry produced work so far superior to that of others that I asked to display it as an exemplary model.</p>
<p>And here is yet another story. After the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury verdicts were announced, a concerned friend emailed me. &#8220;Be careful,&#8221; he warned. &#8220;They are predicting black rage.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the days subsequent to the Brown and Garner verdicts, my black neighbors are saying to me what they usually say. &#8220;Good morning … nice weather … my kid is giving me a hard time … my dog wants to go for a walk.&#8221; Al Sharpton called for protests in Paterson. I saw no protests in Paterson.</p>
<p>Other news is claiming our attention in Paterson in December, 2014. There are, of course, the usual drive-by shootings, heroin busts, and deadly fires. But lately we&#8217;ve learned that in the entire city, only nineteen students scored high enough on the SAT to be deemed &#8220;college ready.&#8221; This while sixty-six employees in Paterson schools earn at least $125,000 annually. Paterson teacher Lee McNutly went public to allege that his school was nothing but a chaotic &#8220;indoor street corner&#8221; where teachers were coerced into falsifying records in order to ensure six-figure bonuses to administrators. Paterson school #20 displayed a large sign for a week that contained multiple misspellings, in spite of parental complaints. All these local stories demanded more attention than alleged &#8220;black rage&#8221; over the Garner verdict.</p>
<p>And yet Jesse Jackson insists that it is inevitable that black people &#8220;explode&#8221; in riots. In late November, 2014, after riots in Ferguson, Missouri, CNN&#8217;s Don Lemon interviewed Jesse Jackson. Lemon, who is black, said that &#8220;Lawlessness and violence should not have happened and there should be no excuses made for it.&#8221; &#8220;If people need jobs,&#8221; Lemon asked, &#8220;why would you burn down a store where you could possibly get work? What does one have to do with the other? What does lawlessness have to do with lack of jobs?&#8221;</p>
<p>Jackson responded. &#8220;There is a body of people who after a long train of abuses simply explode…Pain can lead to irrational conclusions. To be locked out of police departments, fire departments, contracts and schools. Those factors matter.&#8221;</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s another story. A youtube poster calling herself Honestly Speaking posted a video entitled &#8220;The Mike Brown Fiasco&#8221; on December 2, 2014. Two weeks later, it had over a million views and seven thousand up votes. Honestly Speaking looks into the camera and shouts. She shouts that Mike Brown was a &#8220;disrespectful&#8221; thief, &#8220;asshole&#8221; and someone who &#8220;don&#8217;t contribute nothing to society&#8221; &#8220;who started the trail that lead him to his death. Just because he is black does not change the fact that he committed a crime.&#8221; She denounces protests as &#8220;bleeding heart bullshit.&#8221; Honestly Speaking is a black woman.</p>
<p>I am a former leftist and I know how facts are spun. &#8220;Truth is that which serves the party.&#8221; Ideologues will insist that black people like James, who became a community college president, are statistical anomalies, that black people like Don Lemon who push back against Jesse Jackson are sellouts or self-hating blacks, &#8220;house niggers&#8221; or Uncle Toms. Ideologues will insist that my black neighbors who did not riot after the Eric Garner verdict suffer from &#8220;false consciousness.&#8221; Ideologues will insist that African American students like Terry who do well within existing institutions are pawns whom The Man allows to succeed at the expense of their oppressed brethren – it&#8217;s all a conspiracy. In this spinning of Terry&#8217;s story, Terry&#8217;s success only delays the inevitable and necessary revolution. Ideologues reserve their most toxic vitriol for outspoken and admired black women like youtube poster Honestly Speaking. She&#8217;s already responded in a youtube video to being called a &#8220;race traitor.&#8221;</p>
<p>The left claims women and minorities. When women and minorities resist the left&#8217;s lure, we receive the harshest punishment. Witness what the left does to Sarah Palin, Deneen Borelli, or even Juan Williams.</p>
<p>Here are some facts. My coworkers describe hiring committees that decide that only African American candidates will be considered, even though that policy is not stated in the job description. Whites will apply, but will not be considered. My students and coworkers, who often are members of minority groups themselves, gossip angrily of others, including family members, who slack or claim preferential treatment because of their skin color. Maureen describes to me her volunteer work as a mentor for African American interns at a Fortune Five Hundred company. It maddens her that these interns need to be trained in basics like arriving on time, dress and comportment. I see monies, positions, programs, scholarships, that have been designated for African Americans, go begging, because they lack appropriate applicants. I see extended hands that reach out to emptiness. I see highways to success with no traffic on them. I see, in short, many Melvyns.</p>
<p>The past is prelude. We&#8217;ve seen these riots before. Jesse Jackson excuses them; implies that they are the way that African Americans can get jobs they would not otherwise get. Is that true?</p>
<p>The National Bureau of Economic Research is the largest economics research association in the United States. It is notable for the number of its research associates who are also winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. The NBER published two papers in 2004, &#8220;The Economic Aftermath of the 1960s Riots: Evidence from Property Values&#8221; and &#8220;The Labor Market Effects of the 1960s Riots.&#8221; These papers indicate that the race riots of the 1960s &#8220;had economically significant negative effects on blacks&#8217; income and employment.&#8221; It&#8217;s not just that cities affected by riots, like Newark, became dysfunctional and welfare-dependent ghost towns in the immediate aftermath of rioting. These riots had longer term, insidious, and all but invisible impact. Before the riots, the difference between what white workers earned and what black workers earned was becoming smaller. Black workers began to earn more. The narrowing of the gap between black workers&#8217; wages and white workers&#8217; wages accelerated during the 1940s – <em>before </em>the Civil Rights Movement. The riots reversed this trend. Researchers concluded that the black workers who suffered the greatest economic blows in the 1970s and beyond lived in cities where rioting was most severe. Riots were also found to depress the value of black-owned property. Rioting hurt black income and black assets.</p>
<p>Yes, white supremacy still exists. That&#8217;s a fact. What do we do with that fact? What story do we tell? What story will help my students and my city?</p>
<p>There are lots of statistics that could be used in any number of ways. It is a fact that if a woman was overweight in high school, she is statistically likely to earn less than her slender peers for her entire working life, even if she loses weight. It is a fact – one that many leftists would like to bury – that children who grow up in the same home with their biological mother and biological father do better on a slew of life measures, from incarceration rates to lifetime earnings. It is a fact that poor, white Christians are significantly underrepresented on the campuses of elite universities among both students and faculty. It is a fact that recent immigrants from Africa, who are themselves mostly black, are a &#8220;model minority&#8221; with above-average incomes and education.</p>
<p>What do we do with these statistics? How do we cherry pick among them to weave a story that justifies a riot or encourages a young person to plug away at a secure but unglamorous job?</p>
<p>Jesse Jackson insists that suffering people must explode. But not all suffering people do explode, and not all those who explode are suffering. Terry suffered and did not explode – Terry excelled. Della Kurzer-Zlotnick acknowledges that she is a rich white girl, and yet she is exploding – and urging others to join her.</p>
<p>I would like to assign reading to these activists, specifically Shelby Steele&#8217;s book &#8220;White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.&#8221;</p>
<p>Shelby Steele is a black man born in 1946; he knew, and suffered under, Jim Crow. In spite of this, he accomplished much. He lived to see his former white, liberal allies insist that he owed them his &#8220;gratitude&#8221; because their bleeding hearts, not his hard work, were responsible for his success. In response to their condescension, he says, he felt a murderous rage even more intense than that he had felt under Jim Crow. Steele says that the bleeding heart narrative erased his achievements.</p>
<p>African Americans confronted the Ku Klux Klan. They risked Freedom Rides that ended in beatings and arson. They remained calm as lunch counter patrons poured sugar over their heads. But somehow these same black people are so delicate they need a confused 18-year-old girl to protect them from final examinations in statistics. Kurzer-Zlotnick&#8217;s enthusiasm for &#8220;social justice&#8221; must erase the considerable accomplishment of African American students like Terry, who soldier on in spite of personal hardship, and earn A grades. High achieving blacks become some kind of race traitors or freaks, anomalies who can&#8217;t be acknowledged because their existence threatens the story Kurzer-Zlotnick is telling about white liberal guilt and noblesse oblige.</p>
<p>The harm white liberals do is not limited to their need to erase African American achievement. Kurzer-Zlotnick is a powerful audience. The performance she applauds is explosive black rage. She would probably applaud Melvyn&#8217;s fencing stolen computers.</p>
<p>In 2006, in the <em>New York Times</em>, Harvard scholar Orlando Patterson, a Jamaican-born black man, wrote that one explanation for young black men&#8217;s criminal behavior was the applause antisocial behavior earned black men from white youths. Young black men have the highest self-esteem of all ethnic groups, he says, and that self-esteem is not lowered by what many would assess as failure, for example out-of-wedlock births and poor grades. Not only young whites applaud criminality among black men. Corporate America does so, as well, making millions from hip-hop and ghetto fashions. Young whites, Patterson says, know when to turn off rage chic. The young black males who have been duped into providing this performance may not know when it is time to leave the stage. The whites move on. The blacks are trapped.</p>
<p>I would like to invite Della Kurzer-Zlotnick to walk to work with me through Paterson. I would like her to step over broken glass and past shuttered factories. I would like her, simply, to listen to conversations on buses. My neighbors want their kids to do well, and are proud of them when they do. They work difficult jobs; I see them in nurse&#8217;s aide and McDonald&#8217;s uniforms, day after day, year after year. Injustices of many kinds are a given; that&#8217;s a fact. The key is what story one tells about injustice. It might be exciting for an 18-year-old girl to urge protest on one day when she feels worked up. I would like to invite Kurzer-Zlotnick and others to live in cities like Paterson after the protest is over, to see which approach has long-term, beneficial effects.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/american-tragedies-and-american-dreams/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>39</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Point in Time</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/a-point-in-time-4/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-point-in-time-4</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/a-point-in-time-4/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Danusha V. Goska]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[a point in time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dostoevsky]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[redemption]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245826</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz's search for redemption in this life and the next.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/pint.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-245829" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/pint.jpg" alt="pint" width="225" height="346" /></a><strong>[To order <em>A Point in Time</em>, <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/books/products/newleviathan-signed">click here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>Reading David Horowitz&#8217;s &#8220;A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next&#8221; is like taking an autumn stroll with a gray-haired elder encountered at a family reunion. You were expecting his usual social, political, and economic rants that sometimes alienated you, and sometimes frightened you. Sometimes you saw some shaft of insight in his words, an insight you defiantly resisted because his worldview was so different from your own. You see the world through rose-colored glasses of universal brotherhood and a brighter tomorrow. This guy insistently reminded you of failed utopias.</p>
<p>Before you set out on your stroll, though, he made sure to bring his three pooches along. The tenderness he showed the dogs gives you pause. You realized that as different as you are in age and worldview, you both love dogs.</p>
<p>As you step out into the gray light, suddenly crepuscular so early in the afternoon, the elder speaks. You&#8217;re accustomed to clipped who-what-when-where-why-style headlines. Today the rhythm and care of poetry shimmers just under the surface of his prose.</p>
<p>He&#8217;s talking about death. Well, yes, that would make sense; he is a septuagenarian. He has had a cancer scare and one of his children has pre-deceased him.</p>
<p>You slow your steps and listen. His words seem, like the moldering leaves, fading light, and the migrating geese overhead, to be arising organically out of the autumnal scene. You&#8217;ll be pondering what you hear today for a long time.</p>
<p>&#8220;A Point in Time&#8221; is a meditation on death and mortality, morality, religious faith, and the Utopian urge. Horowitz uses Marcus Aurelius&#8217; and Fyodor Dostoyevsky&#8217;s works as touchstones.</p>
<p>Horowitz&#8217;s parents had been members of the American Communist Party. Horowitz himself was close to the Black Panthers. In 1974 their bookkeeper, Betty Van Patter, was murdered. Horowitz was convinced that the Panthers were responsible. In 1985, Horowitz publicly broke with the left. My former comrades spoke of Horowitz as if he were the devil incarnate.</p>
<p>I went to heckle Horowitz ten years ago. He said something that silenced me, and that I pondered repeatedly: Camden, Newark, and Paterson have had Democratic leadership for decades. I grew up among people who vividly remember Newark and Paterson as thriving, even enviable cities. That they are now slums breaks many New Jerseyians hearts. Horowitz&#8217;s comment was a significant paving stone in my own turn away from the left.</p>
<p>Even so I did not expect a book like &#8220;A Point in Time&#8221; from Horowitz. It is meditative, serene, and stoic. It is not a Christian book, but it treats Christianity and its impact with respect.</p>
<p>Horowitz talks about death using dogs, pet ownership, homes, and writing. Dogs live for about a decade, much shorter than the average human lifespan. We must watch our beloved four-footed friends age and die at a more rapid rate than our own. Homes are our carapace. We experience them almost as extensions of ourselves, renovating them with a sense that our lives might go on forever. Moving into, and then out of a home, also reminds us of mortality.</p>
<p>Horowitz&#8217;s daughter Sarah was a writer who never married. She died relatively young, and having published relatively little. Horowitz contemplates her one bedroom apartment, and her writings, her most significant material legacy. Medical diagnoses, too, remind us of mortality. If we go on living long enough, eventually we will get cancer, or diabetes, or something. We will fight the illness as long as we can. We lose the fight in increments, as Horowitz has in the amount of walking he can do before fatigue reels him back home.</p>
<p>We turn to bookcases. Marcus Aurelius provides a stoic model; Dostoyevsky a Christian one. Horowitz&#8217;s selection of quotes from Dostoyevsky convinces me that I need to read more of him, or at least about him. The quotes Horowitz selects are stunningly apropos to American college campuses today. Horowitz positions Dostoyevsky as the antidote to atheist nihilists and Utopians.</p>
<p>Horowitz considers faith, but acknowledges that he is an agnostic. He briefly describes a few unspeakable crimes from current headlines. With a few spare sentences, he describes the kind of sadism that occurs every day. How do we believe in God in a world in which not just children, but even dogs, are subject to cruel and meaningless tortures? If God is omnipotent, how do we avoid assigning responsibility to God for horrible events?</p>
<p>Rejection of God has been for many a sort of religion of its own. Horowitz&#8217;s father did not believe in God, but he did have a myth and a telos. &#8220;When he read his morning paper it was not to gather tidings of events that actually affected him – prices rising, weather brewing, wars approaching – but to parse the script of a global drama that would one day bring history and its miseries to an end.&#8221;</p>
<p>Similarly, Dostoyevsky&#8217;s fellow conspirator Nikolay Speshnev said that his political hope &#8220;is also a religion only a different one. It makes a divinity out of a new and different object, but there is nothing new about the deification itself.&#8221; The difference between Dostoyevsky and men like Speshnev is acted out on college campuses in America every day, and on the international stage. Dostoyevsky describes how radicals justify &#8220;wading through blood.&#8221; One need only look to the former cradle of civilization to find examples.</p>
<p>The book&#8217;s intimacy is typified by a lovely passage on page 22. Horowitz lays awake at night, &#8220;haunted by reflections of death.&#8221; Kissing his wife, or petting &#8220;the small bodies curled like furry slippers at my feet&#8221; provides him with a reprieve from &#8220;this emptiness.&#8221;</p>
<p>The book&#8217;s cover by Bosch Fawstin depicts the scene at Dostoyevsky&#8217;s mock execution by czarist police: three erect stakes. I cannot help but think of the anachronistic reference to Christ – &#8220;three pale figures led forth and bound to three posts driven upright in the ground&#8221; – in W.H. Auden&#8217;s poem &#8220;Shield of Achilles.&#8221; Horowitz&#8217;s book, like Auden&#8217;s poem, like Marcus Aurelius, recognizes that each generation must confront, struggle with, and then lose, &#8220;The mass and majesty of this world, all that carries weight and always weighs the same,&#8221; whether we live under the House of Atreus, or the Pax Romana, or the reign of Obama.</p>
<p>Death gave us this David Horowitz. If mortality were not knocking on his door, I don&#8217;t think he would have written this book; if it were not knocking on ours, however faint the sound, we could not resonate to it. Death &#8220;focuses the mind&#8221; and awakens the heart. The myth of, or perhaps the evidence for, immortality gives us the determination to apply death&#8217;s lessons.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/a-point-in-time-4/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/ten-reasons-why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ten-reasons-why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/ten-reasons-why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2014 05:06:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Danusha V. Goska]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HATE]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[journey out]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244520</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An account of the milestones in my journey out of the political faith.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Break-Chains.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244528" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Break-Chains-450x337.jpg" alt="Break-Chains" width="310" height="232" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="www.americanthinker.com">The American Thinker</a>.</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying &#8220;Eat the Rich.&#8221; To me it wasn&#8217;t a metaphor.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I voted Republican in the last presidential election.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It&#8217;s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>10) Huffiness</strong>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In the late 1990s I was reading <em>Anatomy of the Spirit</em>, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors&#8217; meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said &#8220;Yes&#8221; or &#8220;No.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to &#8220;Mr. and Mrs. X.&#8221; Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists&#8217; announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can&#8217;t climb stairs.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I appreciate Professor X&#8217;s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others&#8217; pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this &#8212; &#8220;Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.&#8221; But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one&#8217;s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>9) Selective Outrage</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. &#8220;You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture&#8217;s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, &#8220;binders full of women.&#8221; He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart&#8217;s &#8220;Daily Show,&#8221; Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their &#8220;war on women.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I&#8217;m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I&#8217;m saying I never saw it.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">The left&#8217;s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It&#8217;s an &#8220;I hate&#8221; phenomenon, rather than an &#8220;I love&#8221; phenomenon.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times new roman,times,serif;"><strong>8.) It&#8217;s the thought that counts</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: &#8220;Think Globally; Screw up Locally.&#8221; In other words, &#8220;Love Humanity but Hate People.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;If you want your dream to be,</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Build it slow and surely.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Small beginnings greater ends.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Heartfelt work grows purely.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan&#8217;s San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that&#8217;s what we leftists do wrong. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve got to get right.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and &#8220;tolerance,&#8221; not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Peace Corps did not focus on the &#8220;small beginnings&#8221; necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. &#8220;Only intolerant oppressors judge others&#8217; cultures.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people&#8217;s clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, &#8220;Don&#8217;t look for big things, just do small things with great love.&#8221; Delousing homeless people&#8217;s clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state&#8217;s first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she&#8217;d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free.  In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton &#8220;took me through Hell&#8221; and &#8220;lied like a dog.&#8221; &#8220;I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all,&#8221; the woman said. &#8220;If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Hillary&#8217;s chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>7) Leftists hate my people</strong>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I&#8217;m a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Karl Marx promised the workers&#8217; paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class &#8212; think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan&#8217;s 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In the end, though, we didn&#8217;t show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood &#8212; &#8220;Workers of the world, unite!&#8221; But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn&#8217;t adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. &#8220;Property is theft&#8221; is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn&#8217;t just ancient history. In 2004, <em>What&#8217;s the Matter with Kansas?</em> spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what&#8217;s good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, <em>What&#8217;s the Matter with America?</em></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">We became the left&#8217;s boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we&#8217;d been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the &#8220;imperialist&#8221; war in Vietnam. See films like <em>The Deer Hunter</em>. Watch Archie Bunker on &#8220;All in the Family.&#8221; Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Leftists freely label poor whites as &#8220;redneck,&#8221; &#8220;white trash,&#8221; &#8220;trailer trash,&#8221; and &#8220;hillbilly.&#8221; At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton&#8217;s advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, &#8220;Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you&#8217;ll find.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">The left&#8217;s visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a &#8220;major shock&#8221; to discover &#8220;the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people.&#8221; The Reclusive Leftist focuses on <em>Vanity Fair </em>journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists &#8220;hate-fuck conservative women&#8221; and denounces Palin as a &#8220;small town hickoid&#8221; who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald&#8217;s, must accept that he is a recipient of &#8220;white privilege&#8221; – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard&#8217;s George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called &#8220;America’s leading immigration economist.&#8221; Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America&#8217;s working poor.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">It&#8217;s more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>6) I believe in God.</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a &#8220;dead Jew on a stick&#8221; or a &#8220;zombie&#8221; and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented &#8220;flying spaghetti monster.&#8221; You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>5 &amp; 4) Straw men and &#8220;In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.&#8221;</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;Truth is that which serves the party.&#8221; The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York&#8217;s WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn&#8217;t such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, &#8220;And <em>you</em> support <em>that</em>?&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Well of course THE CALLER did not support <em>that</em>, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">On June 16, 2014, Washington <em>Post</em> columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington<em> Post</em>&#8216;s credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a &#8220;family friend&#8221; of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, &#8220;making stuff up.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents &#8212; including Muslims &#8212; from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>2 &amp; 3) It doesn&#8217;t work.  Other approaches work better</strong>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Ouch.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I grew up among &#8220;Greatest Generation&#8221; Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, &#8220;As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit.&#8221; In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends&#8217; parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state&#8217;s open wound.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don&#8217;t know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don&#8217;t realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don&#8217;t know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">My students do know &#8212; because they have been taught this &#8212; that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know &#8212; because they have been drilled in this &#8212; that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book <em>White Guilt</em>, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In Dominque La Pierre&#8217;s 1985 novel <em>City of Joy</em>, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. &#8220;In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">After I realized that our approaches don&#8217;t work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue&#8217;s castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is &#8220;My God, he&#8217;s right.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>1) Hate.</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">If hate were the only reason, I&#8217;d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Before that I&#8217;d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you&#8217;d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">One topic thread was entitled &#8220;What do you view as disgusting about modern America?&#8221; The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn&#8217;t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn&#8217;t hate Obama.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances &#8212; I had no right-wing friends &#8212; expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I&#8217;m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don&#8217;t know that they were. I&#8217;m speaking here, merely, about language.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn&#8217;t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as &#8220;Bushitler.&#8221; The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it&#8217;s not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would &#8212; car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my &#8220;eat the rich&#8221; lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn&#8217;t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone &#8212; even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health &#8212; meant a great deal to me.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, &#8220;No, I&#8217;m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;Julie,&#8221; I said, &#8220;You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don&#8217;t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something &#8212; capitalism.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;Yes, but I&#8217;m very nice about it,&#8221; she insisted. &#8220;I always protest with a smile.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I&#8217;m sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don&#8217;t know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I&#8217;ve stumbled upon a left-wing website.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being &#8220;sex positive,&#8221; one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like &#8220;fag,&#8221; so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like &#8220;butt hurt.&#8221; Leftists taunt right-wingers as &#8220;tea baggers.&#8221; The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was &#8220;prone.&#8221; Carmichael&#8217;s misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist&#8217;s reply to a woman critic. &#8220;I will make you a rape victim if you don&#8217;t fuck off&#8230; I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I&#8217;m going to rape you with my fist.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC&#8217;s Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment&#8217;s loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won&#8217;t repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir&#8217;s comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I&#8217;ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.</span></span></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/ten-reasons-why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>166</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 447/459 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 07:23:58 by W3 Total Cache -->