walrus51

Paul Ryan is at it again.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/12/paul-ryan-inner-cities_n_4949165.html

Paul Ryan was born in 1970 in the small city of Janesville, Wisconsin: population 60,000 of whom 95% are white.

He is a product of great intentions gone off course.  Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) was intended to eliminate racial and (by association) economic segregation in public schools across the U.S.

Who could have predicted that post-war U.S. euphoria would bring suburban sprawl, fueled by the automobile and the feverish building of highways which enabled the exodus of primarily white, middle-class families out of central cities into first-ring suburbs.  By 1960, about half of Americans lived in suburbs vs. city centers, a dramatic shift from pre-war demographics.  So, as the population shifted to suburbia, economic and racial segregation became even more pronounced than prior to the Brown decision.

I suspect that when Paul was growing up, attending Parochial Schools in Janesville, he never had a black friend, never spoke with a black person, and was virtually isolated from people who didn’t go to his church and didn’t look like him.

It’s hard to imagine, but I think Paul is probably a decent guy who has been deprived of the opportunity to get to know other people, and to develop an understanding of their culture and the insidious, subtle and generally invisible battles they fight every day.

No excuses here.  Just a dose of reality.

Back where I come from they used to say, “Never criticize a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.”

Despite the grand intentions of the Brown decision, other factors have crept in to render the decision impotent, and Paul Ryan seems to be the poster child for a societal problem we need to fix before the pot boils over and destroys our society.