Today\’s quote comes to us from Juan Williams, who – having read Jack Coleman\’s blog at newsbusters.com – I now know to have said this on Fox New Sunday:
“I mean, let\’s cut to the chase here. The reality is that you have concentrated areas of poverty in this country, extreme poverty, you\’ve put up some of the numbers before about how impoverished that neighborhood is in Baltimore, school dropout rates, unemployment and the like, and then we ask police to go in there and deal with the chaos, the disorder, the extreme violence that\’s part of those communities and it\’s very difficult to put police in that position.
“But once you do, the question is then, is it fair for police to, well, be abusive, be brutal in treating those people and of course the political structure that George was talking about just a moment ago has often said they are our blue line against that chaos spreading, affecting downtown business districts and middle-class neighborhoods.
“But the reality is, you go back to the Moynihan Report, Chris, you know, almost 50 years ago now, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had it right — the breakdown of the family, high single-parent families — that\’s who those kids were that were rioting in Baltimore this week who set that city on fire.
Juan Williams wins Quote Of The Day honors partly because he so well described the horrific situation in Baltimore – a situation that is found in many other urban centers throughout the United States as well.
But mostly Mr. Williams wins because he cited Daniel Patrick Moynihan\’s prophetic words, written to then-President Nixon on January 16, 1970 – when he forever made himself a racist (to people who care more about symbolic name-calling than reality) for advocating “benign neglect”: i.e. his view that governmental attempts to manage issues in the Black community would be detrimental, not beneficial. His exact words (using the language of that era):
The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of “benign neglect”. The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.
I have called Daniel Patrick Moynihan the American Cassandra – and not just for his views on race either.
Moynihan was born in Oklahoma, but the family moved to New York when he was 6. He grew up dirt-poor in the Hell\’s Kitchen district of Manhattan, but raised himself to the highest echelons of education, government and international diplomacy…without ever forgetting where he came from.
Remember that old threat: “Ignore me at your own risk”? Well, we took the risk and ignored Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
How\’d that work out?
