Gary Wisenbaker, Valdosta Today Editorial Director
In the wee hours of the morning, around 2:00 a.m. to be exact, on Sunday, June 28, a horde of punks entered a Walmart store in Macon, Georgia. And they didn’t come to shop.
According to Kharron Green, the 17 year old leader of the pack of what appears to be mostly black teenagers, they came to “see how much damage they could cause”, according to newspaper reports. Green was one of the first to enter the store and videos show him flashing “gang signs” and leading 40 to 50 others through the front doors. He and four others 20 years old and younger were arrested.
Surveillance cameras chronicled the damage spree which included pulling a man from an electric wheelchair and throwing him to the ground. They went down the main aisle pulling, throwing and smashing merchandize as they went from front to back. Before it was over, more than $2,000 worth of damage had been inflicted. Pretty hard to spend $2,000 at a Walmart so one can image the chaos at the scene.
One of the first policemen to arrive in answer to the 911 call said the large crowd “scattered” and left in a several vehicles. “Scattered”, as in what cockroaches do when you flip a light switch on in some sleazy hotel room.
In the days prior to the Sunday Walmart marauding, Macon hadn’t experienced any peculiar or shocking events.
No one, white or black, had been shot in the back by a cop, white or black. No one, white or black, had inexplicably died while in police custody. No one, white or black, had entered a white or black church and slaughtered innocent church-goers for any racially motivated reason. There were no allegations that any of Walmart’s local management, white or black, had mistreated one of its employees, white or black. And nobody’s yet mentioned “the flag”.
Such are the factors apologists for “community organized rioters” often cite to explain or excuse random acts of violence. You’ve heard it before, “It wouldn’t have happened but for all the social injustice or ‘white privilege’ running so rampant in our sick society.” Nope. Not present this time.
Then there’s the target: Walmart.
Walmart is huge. A $2,000 kick in the teeth is nothing. In fact, Walmart’s worldwide economic engine would place it in 19th place in the world economy if it were a country. Here it employs over 1.8 million Americans and pays more than the minimum wage in almost every category. And 40 percent of Walmart’s workforce is non-white.
Again, doesn’t seem to be much “social injustice” present with regard to Walmart, either. Heck, they even just banned Confederate memorabilia from their stores.
So, how come?
Here’s how come: “We just wanted to see how much damage we could cause.”
One might think, “That’s just crazy.” Maybe it is. But it might not be such a crazy way for 40 or more kids to think when, at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, they’re not at their homes or with their parents. Perhaps there’s no homes with parents to go home to.
And maybe it’s not such a crazy way for a high school kid or recent graduate, to think at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning when they’ve got no summer job to go to on Monday. They don’t have a shot at even part time work due to suffocating government regulations and requirements making it nearly impossible for small businesses to take on someone under 21 in the workplace.
The government will, however, fund “Midnight Basketball” programs, as they do in Macon, to keep kids occupied between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. at designated community centers. Perhaps this gang met up at such a center.
Inevitably, the local NAACP chapter got involved after the arrests.
“Their bonds are too high….just because more than three people are together doesn’t mean they’re in a gang”, opined Gwenette Westbrook of the NAACP.
Well, maybe so, but when the leader of a herd of 40 or so thugs ravaging a store makes gang signs when it starts, it might be a pretty clear indication of their self-identification. And, sadly, it is with gangs, perpetrated by gangsta rap, that these kids identify, not any family unit.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, liberal Democrat and sociologist, warned of this as far back as 1965, “[A] community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder — most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure — that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.”
Rather than help the black community repair its social and familial fabric, our leaders worry about where to place a Confederate battle flag and what to do with other cultural relics from a bygone era.
Our president lights up the White House with the LGBT multicolors to celebrate a Supreme Court ruling that sticks a dagger in the very heart of a key element of family stability that has been held sacred for millennia, traditional marriage.
We have an administration obsessed with providing Midnight Basketball and with telling employers what they must pay employees and when those employees can and cannot work rather than letting them create jobs for our youth.
And we have a Department of Health and Human Services far more concerned about telling you what doctor you can see and when than trying to cure an unchecked epidemic in our inner cities: fatherless homes.
We are led by a cabal that, at times, seeks to see how much damage it can cause.
And children absorb their surroundings.
Gary Wisenbaker, B.A., J.D. is a native of South Georgia where he practiced law in Valdosta and Savannah for 31 years. He has served as state chairman of the Georgia Young Republicans and Chairman of the Chatham County (Savannah) Republican Party. Gary is a past GOP nominee for State Senate, past delegate to the Republican National Convention and has consulted on numerous local Republican campaigns as well as chaired or co-chaired campaigns for President and US Senate on the county and district level. He is the principal and founder of Blackstone, LLC, a corporate communications and public relations concern as well as Wiregrass Mediation Services, LLC, a general civil litigation mediation firm
Gary hosts his own blog at www.garywisenbaker.com and recently published his first fictional work, “How Great is His Mercy: The Plea”, on Amazon.com. His opinions are regularly published on ValdostaToday.com.
