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Symposium—Get off the damn plantation!

Ellis Washington - 10/13/2011

Socrates (470-399 B.C.) – a renowned Greek philosopher from Athens who taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle and Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. Socrates used a method of teaching by asking leading questions. The Greeks called this form dialectic – starting from a thesis or question, then discussing ideas and moving back and forth between points of view to determine how well ideas stand up to critical review with the ultimate principle of the dialogue being Veritas – Truth.

Characters

• Socrates
• Allen West (R-FL)
• Herman Cain (GOP candidate)
• Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s pastor for 20 years)
• Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)
• Barack Obama (44th U.S. President)
• Publius (pseudonym for author)
Socrates: We are gathered here today at this Symposium to discuss the race question and this enduring paradox—How can tens of millions of otherwise rational, educated and morally conservative people ignore the historical blood and sacrifice the Abolitionist movement and the Republican Party has devoted to Black Americans? How can this people for 80 years increasingly voted for the Democratic Party since the election of FDR in 1932—the party that enslaved your ancestors, the party of the KKK, eugenics, abortion, exploding ghettoes, exploding prisons, welfare slavery and the death of the Black family?
Rep. West, how do you see your role as a Black conservative Republican; to convince your people to return to the party who freed them from the ignominious chains of slavery?
Allen West: You have this 21st century plantation that has been out there, when the Democrat Party [the slavemasters] has forever taken the black vote for granted. Black Democrats are merely plantation overseers. You have established certain black leaders who are nothing more than the overseers of that plantation, and now the people on that plantation are upset, because they have been disregarded, disrespected and their concerns are not cared about. So I’m here as the modern-day Harriet Tubman, to lead people on the underground railroad away from that plantation and to a sense of sensibility.
Socrates: Well then, is California Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters a “plantation boss”?
Allen West: Absolutely, what you end up having, I’m going to be brutally honest, is that white liberals have turned over to certain leaders, or “perceived leaders” of the black community — like a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or Maxine Waters or Barbara Lee — and said, “pacify and keep the black community firmly behind us, regardless of the failures of our social welfare policies.”
Socrates: Rep. Waters, can you legitimately refute West’s indictment against the Democratic Party’s 80 year stranglehold of the Black vote which has decimated the Black family with failed liberal welfare programs and through the unconscionable policy of abortion, murdered them by the tens of millions …more than any other racial group?
Rep. Maxine Waters: A spokesman for Waters told the media that the congresswoman will likely ignore West’s comments (because historically they are irrefutable), however, regarding the Tea Party movement, Waters ranted, “The Tea Party can go straight to Hell!”
Rev. Jeremiah Wright: A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years [will]... exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect [those investments]. All of these problems are tied together. What then can I say to Castro... as a faithful minister of [God]? Can I threaten [him] with death or must I not share with [him] my life?
The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme … America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

Socrates: Indeed, Rev. Wright. President Obama, Rev. Jeremiah Wright was you and your wife’s pastor for 20 years. He married you in 1992. He baptized both of your daughters, yet largely protected by the state controlled media, Americans don’t know why you would subject yourself to such hate-filled racist demagoguery where the silence of a future American president demonstrated your cowardly consent.
Obama: Uuuhhh, Socrates, when Rev. Wright made those hateful, anti-American, anti-Christian rants I wasn’t there in church those Sundays. It was like when I was in the Illinois senate, I voted “Present.” I wasn’t there. I’m not a socialist. I love Ronald Reagan and my policies are just like his. Change! Change! Change! ¡Sí, Se Puede! Yes We can! … (ad infinitum)
Herman Cain: The good news is a lot of black Americans are thinking for themselves. Now, there are some that are so brainwashed that they won’t even consider a conservative idea. How will he change their minds? You save the savable, and if they’re not savable because they don’t even want to hear the idea about my 9-9-9 Plan… I tried to give that to some [black] people and they didn’t want it because they saw me as a Republican. They saw me as a conservative. I call that being brainwashed, not being open-minded to another idea.
Publius: In a mock presidential debateI participated in at Savannah State University in 2008, I channeled Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and concluded with this series of Socratic dialectical questions:
What is wrong with you people [Black America]?! How long will you allow your minds to be shackled by Big Government liberalism and the Democratic Party? In the early 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised you a "New Deal" and with the help of W.E.B. Dubois, the NAACP and thousands of Black preachers, got your forefathers hooked on the deadly narcotic of the welfare state and “free” government handouts.
In the 1960s, LBJ, an openly racist demagogue who hated black people, co-opted MLK and the Civil Rights movement, gave you phony Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Acts, gave you the "Great Society" programs, incarcerated your generations in voluntary prisons called “projects” and wasted over $5 trillion dollars in new welfare spending to fight what LBJ called his "War on Poverty," yet poverty over the past 40 years has grown exponentially. Even worse, there is an existential poverty of the spirit that is particularly acute in the black community that remains undiagnosed, unacknowledged, and uncured… even to this day.
My intellectual mentor, Dr. Levon Yuille often says on his radio show: “If black people can forgive President Bill Clinton and the Democrats for shrinking the black middle class, why can't blacks forgive Reagan/Bush for the longest period of economic growth of the black middle class in the history of America?” (See research by Dr. Melisa Harris-Perry.)

Black America, when will you tell yourselves, tell your children, tell your community, tell the Black Caucasian Caucus and tell the white slavemasters of the Democratic Party that We didn't need your welfare slavery in the 1960s and We don't want your Obamacare slavery today. We don’t want government dental care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Solyndra green energy scams, food stamps, and government cheese? We will buy our own cheese.
150 years ago when the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass was asked: What would happen to slaves if they were given freedom? After all, many of them were illiterate, robbed of their savings, and dependent on their masters. Douglass' response in an 1862 speech was authoritative: He said that if we can't stand on our own feet, then let us fall. Freedom was more important to Douglass and his generation than pragmatism or efficiency.
110 years ago Booker T. Washington wrote the decree to the black masses in his autobiography, Up from Slavery! And this day I say to all black America, {slams fist on the table}… GET OFF THE DAMN PLANTATION!