THE LOCAL AREA WATCH

G.R. PRESS BREAKS BIG STORY

In today's edition of the Grand Rapids Press, our newspaper of record broke the following big story on Page 3:

"If you can evenly divide the year by 4, it's a leap year.  We have leap years because the earth's rotation doesn't keep up with the calendar.  We lose a quarter of a day every year, so we add an extra day to the calendar every 4 years to make up for it.  Otherwise, eventually, summer would fall in winter."

I'll let you, dear readers, add the punchline to the joke that the Press has become.

BIG SISTER'S BIG SPOON ...

... to stir the racial pot with.

At least that's how Nick DeLeeuw of RightMichigan.com, our local pundit on Michigan politics, characterizes G.R. Mayor Heartwell's criticism of the city's new chief of police.  Nick got it right, even when he goes as far as to describe Big Sister's bloviating as "racist".  Heartwell is ticked off that City Manager Kurt Kimball chose the white guy instead of the black guy to serve as the next police chief.  Big Sister's reason is that Kimball blew an opportunity to restore racial harmony in River City by not making the politically correct pick for the top cop slot.  Well, I wasn't aware that the city was embroiled in racial strife, unless you count the race-mongering of the professional grievance industry.  I don't.

You see, folks, the lack of racial harmony in Grand Rapids is a phony and pernicious issue.  It is predicated upon the false primacy of race:  We are nothing but creatures of our skin color captive to the accidents of our birth.  Our individuality, the actual source of what unites and divides us, is obliterated in favor of collectivizing each of us into one arbitrarily designated tribe or another.  Our dignity, which wells up from the word written upon all of our hearts, disappears through this dark lens of racial politics which lets the race-mongers strip us of our humanity and force each of us into stereotypes of victim and victimizer that only a Great White Hope like Heartwell -- correction, Heart-less -- can transcend to bring peace to the community.

Meanwhile, all of our government officials have a great excuse for not doing their jobs.  Most recently we have seen this in public education:  Racial discord arising from deep-seated and institutionalized white bigotry against blacks and other minorities becomes the underlying reason why the Grand Rapids Public Schools fail to perform.  Racism is why black and brown students don't learn.  Of course, the real reason is broken families and bad parenting, which can be the ruin of any kid regardless of skin color.  But that's not a problem the government can fix and so take an ever-increasing bite out of our paychecks.  More telling, it leaves no ground upon which a sanctimonious moralizer like Heartwell can proclaim his progressive mutlicultural enlightenment in contrast to us benighted middle-class working-stiff bigots.

So our public servants stick to the racial discord storyline to the exclusion of the truth.  It gets them off the hook for their failures while providing a rationale to make even bigger claims upon our resources.  But it only works if we buy into the canard that our city is a festering pit of bigotry.  Moreover, to believe Heartwell's cant, we have to buy into the genuinely racist idea that whites will respect the law regardless of the skin color of the police chief but blacks will do so only if he is black.  Therefore, as Nick wrote, it is Heartwell who is the racist in playing racial politics over the city's new top cop.

Those of us who are sick and tired of the corrosive politics of race must call out Big Sister on this.