"Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character." —Heraclitus

While it has long been true, there is no longer any doubt.  Our left no longer makes any pretense about the importance of character.  Nothing matters to the left but skin color and sexual orientation.  The more victimized an individual can be seen to be, the better.

Victimhood is the cult leftists have so carefully constructed.  The more criminally inclined those they deem victims, the better.  So of course they defend the rioters, the looters, the vandals and thieves!  The left has created them, and they are proud of their results.

It's taken nearly three generations of infecting all of academia with their anti-American nonsense — America is irredeemably racist, America is white supremacist, white privilege is a thing, etc.

The media have always been mind-melded with the left.

When the rioters of the 1960s became tenured radicals throughout our universities, the writing was on the wall.  For those former members of the SDS and the Black Panthers, critical thinking was no longer the goal of higher ed.  Indoctrination was the new order of the day.  And now, forty years later, we are benighted by the ingrained groupthink that has brought us right back to the senseless rioting of the sixties. 

This time, however, young people have been proselytized for so long that they do not question the validity of all the accusations hurled at all people not of color.  They are nearly all willing to take a knee in repentance.  They do not.  One has only to tune in to CNN or MSNBC for a few minutes to see their glee at all the damage done by the violent hoodlums who are ruining their own communities and any others in which the police have been ordered to "give them space."  The media are cheering them on, happily blaming Trump.

The wholesale lack of character Democrat policies have inculcated all these years has borne very bitter fruit for those least likely to recover from the desecration the left has fostered.  So what?  The Democrats believe that all their carefully orchestrated violence will be the final nail in the Trump presidency.  They think they can hold responsible the guy who has been in office just shy of four years who was elected to take America back from these nation-destroyers. 

Candace Owens has it exactly right in her video pledging not to buy into the media/Democrat phony martyrdom of George Floyd.  The man was a career criminal, and he was high on fentanyl and meth at the time of his untimely death.

The left and the media are now hard at work canonizing Rayshard Brooks, the man killed in Atlanta after resisting arrest and tasering one of the officers.  He too had a long record of law-breaking.  A third DUI would have sent him to prison.

But the lack of these men's character and disrespect for the law is of no relevance to the media or the Democrats.  Both men are perfect examples of what the left hath wrought.  LBJ began the process of sabotaging the black family with his crippling Great Society programs that drove black fathers from their families and set in motion the pattern of out-of-wedlock black babies.  In some communities, there are four generations of children who never knew their fathers; women are grandmothers by age thirty-five. 

Fatherlessness is the single most certain predictor of the violence and lawlessness we are seeing in the streets.  Fatherlessness and Democrat policies — that is what has devastated all the cities so vanquished by the recent riots.  The wisdom of MLK was tossed aside long ago by the left.  His "dream" has been dismissed as antithetical to the current left's agenda of dispensing with our pesky Constitution and the freedoms listed therein. 

Instilling character in children was, since America's founding, a parent's number-one most important job — respect for the law, for those who enforce it, respect for others, and for the property of others.  Children were taught never to steal, to always be kind to others, and to do no harm.  They were taught not to lie.  If lucky, they were taught the value of learning.  "Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education" (MLK).

Little of this is the case any longer.  Such values are now disparaged as effects of white privilege.  For decades, young inner-city blacks have been taught that to perform well in school or to be seen carrying books was "acting white."  This is what the left has done to our minorities as they sought to ensure their permanent support at the ballot box.  They have victimized them as surely as if they put them in concentration camps.

Trump is the first president to try to reach them, to implement programs to directly benefit those trapped in failing schools, Democrat-run cities and states. He has jump-started prison reform and opportunity zones, programs that never occurred to Obama and Biden. 

MLK was of course as right as right can be when he dreamed that one day his children would be judged by their content of their character and not the color of their skin. But for the Democrat party that fanatically opposed ending slavery which led to the Civil War and the southern Democrats who opposed integration for their own bitter ends, most Americans have lived by that tenet since the end of the Civil War. Skin color is wholly irrelevant but character counts above all.

But the Democrats long ago dispensed with any concern or regard for the development of character in favor of the use and abuse of the most vulnerable Americans for their own ends. Their stage-managed "ends" have fomented the violent unrest that is ravaging all the cities now under siege. 

For decades, the left in its determination to gain and retain power over us all, has abrogated America's long-cherished respect for good character. Their programs and policies have gradually undermined what was once inculcated in all children of all colors and creeds.

For fifty years, the Democrats have sought to convince minorities that their circumstances are the causes of their despair but it was Booker T. Washington who said "Character, not circumstances, makes the man." Booker T., like Frederick Douglass then and MLK, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Robert Goodson, Walter Williams, Larry Elder and the countless other fine and great black men of character who have long sought to lift up their brethren are repeatedly foiled by the American left which teaches that any black person who embraces conservative, traditional values is a race traitor, an Uncle Tom. Those who use that as a pejorative never read Stowe's book. Tom was truly a man of character.

Image credit: Needpix public domain.