Poor Minorities
A Collective Moral Responsibility?
By Daniel Muniz

My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.

Jesse Jackson’s Apology to Barack Obama

According to civil rights activists, such as Jesse Jackson, the primary reason why poor minorities use bad judgment and make the awful decisions that ruin their lives, like drug abuse, dropping out of high school, having children out of wedlock, and going to prison, etc., is because it is the government’s fault.
 

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So what kind of “collective moral responsibility” is our federal government supposed to have to prevent impoverished people from making the horrible personal decisions that will forever alter their lives in the worst possible ways? But the real question to ask is just far can the government really go with implementing such “corrective actions” that will protect people from themselves? And is it really possible?

Poverty warriors and racial arsonists like to pay lip service in that everybody, including the poor, should take personal responsibility for their actions. Unfortunately, that is far as it goes because in their viewpoint, the violent criminal, the drug abuser, the absent father, the slacker, the high school dropout, and all the other minorities who exhibit the detestable behavior that shatters their future is not to blame for their inexcusable decisions and lousy judgment.

I am just so grateful that my parents never subscribed to that philosophy.

Although I am not black, I am Hispanic and I grew up poor and in the barrio. When my little sister was born, there were four kids and my mom and dad living in a two bedroom house with no air conditioning. In south Texas, the brutal humid heat can make life miserable, especially during the summer.

So I happen to know a little bit about being a minority living in poverty.

But I also happen to know a little bit about getting out of poverty because my parents were eventually able to leave the barrio and move into the suburbs of a city. They were even able to buy a big 3000 square foot house on a huge lot.

However, my parents never waited for the government to implement any “corrective action” to lift their family out of poverty. They just went ahead and figured out a way to do it themselves.

The next important thing they did was not to rely on the government to ensure that their children also had a bright future. They just went ahead and implemented their own style of “corrective action” on us during our youth in the form of corporal punishment, requiring all of us to turn in our homework and to study for tests, never allowing us to stay out very late at night or go to wild parties, and keeping us out of trouble.

My folks had very strict rules for us to follow and explicitly defined boundaries that we had to stay inside of.

In contrast, there were plenty of kids who were my neighbors in the same barrio who had no rules and no boundaries. They could get drunk, use drugs, stay out for all hours of the night, get pregnant or father children, drop out of school, or spend the night in jail. Needless to say, the neighborhood was violent and drug infested so I just cannot fathom what kind of government program was going to change such reckless and irresponsible behavior.

But as far as my parents were concerned, it wasn’t the “the lack of good choices” that their children had to base their decisions on because they vividly put our options on the table of how we were to behave. It was in this framework that we had to live our lives in since our parents wouldn’t tolerate anything else.

Consequently, the results were exactly what they were expecting.

All of their children earned college degrees and they all have professional careers. And most importantly, none of them live in the barrio.

My parents didn’t wait for the federal government to solve all of their problems. On their own initiative, they found creative ways to step into the great middle class. And amazingly, their ticket out of the barrio was really fairly basic. It involved a serious work ethic (sometimes having two jobs), being very frugal with all of their spending, never having trouble with the law, and staying away from drugs. But most importantly, it also involved exercising sound judgment and making good decisions for all the actions in the lives. They never made any excuses about anything.

So from my own experience, it is the lack of personal responsibility that irrevocably ruins lives and keeps generations of people trapped in the ghettos and barrios.

It is time for poverty warriors and community activists to accept the harsh reality that no amount of government funding is ever going to overcome the breakdown of the family and the lack of true parenting. Until these activists are willing to address the collapse of our social fabric in honest and blunt dialogue, they will continue to be blinded to the real problems that confront the poor.

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