January 21, 2016
Source: Shutterstock
In the summer of 2002, a young white woman named Valinda Elliott set out from Phoenix on a business trip with her boss. The two were trying to locate a tiny speck of a town called Young, Ariz., population 666 (talk about a bad omen). They took a wrong turn and became lost in the desert, in a remote location with no cell service. Before long, they ran out of gas. After spending the first night in their vehicle, by the next day, running out of water and rapidly facing dehydration, it was decided that one of them needed to go for help. Elliott, a mother of three, volunteered for the trek.
Two days later, losing the battle against the merciless July Arizona heat, Elliott heard a helicopter in the distance. Desperate, she set a signal fire by lighting a small bush with her cigarette lighter, and the copter”spotting the smoke”swooped in and rescued her (her boss was rescued as well). Unfortunately, Arizona summers being what they are, the signal fire spread, and soon a large brush fire resulted.
Around the same time, on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation (also in Arizona), an Apache named Leonard Gregg who was employed as a seasonal firefighter decided that the best way to get work was to begin setting fires. I mean, you can”t argue with the reasoning. The man’s a part-time firefighter, and dammit, he ain”t gonna get paid if there ain”t no fires. So Gregg, whose Indian name surely should have been Dances with Arson, began setting brush fires, intentionally and maliciously, because he needed booze money.
Tragically, the two fires”the one set with no ill intent by Elliott, and the one set with a hell of a lot of ill intent by Gregg”merged to create the largest wildfire in Arizona history. No lives were lost, but 467 homes were destroyed.
In the aftermath, Arizona authorities, understanding that Elliott’s actions were reasonable and without malice, decided not to prosecute her. Gregg, on the other hand, faced serious charges for felony arson. The local Indian community screamed “racism.” Angry Injuns stormed the press conference where the decision not to charge Elliott was announced, hooting, hollering, and (in one case) tossing a charred log at authorities. Reno Johnson, chief of staff for the chairman of the Apache tribe, demanded that the “white woman” must go to prison if the Indian does.
Because “fairness.”
What might have seemed like an anomaly when Big Chief Head-Up-Ass demanded it in 2002 is now the norm. The new big thing among minority advocates is to judge every crime story involving a minority in terms of “they”da been treated better if they was white,” and every crime story involving a white in terms of “they”da been treated worse if they was a minority.” This new mania is based upon a simpleminded notion of fairness that dismisses as irrelevant the specific details of different cases. All that matters is a one-to-one ratio: a white life for a minority life.
This infantile “fairness” game was all the rage in the leftist press following the Oregon occupation of an empty shack by a bunch of Cletuses earlier this month. When the feds didn”t immediately storm the seized wildlife refuge, guns blazing, the usual suspects brayed and bleated about how “if it had been people of color, the feds would”a shot “em all by now.” The specifics of the case mattered not; black people died during the MOVE raid thirty years earlier, and now there had to be white lives for black ones to make it “fair” (no mention of Ruby Ridge, of course).
There are many examples of incidents that disprove the meme that the Oregon occupiers would have been immediately slaughtered had they been “of color,” and this one’s my personal favorite: In March 1995, a bunch of thugs took over the downtown L.A. office of the L.A. Conservation Corps, a government-funded “community service” nonprofit created by Clinton administration secretary of commerce Mickey Kantor. The LACC paid inner-city youths to “plant trees, remove graffiti, and clean up after disasters.” Naturally, the youths in question decided that those jobs were racist, since none of the available employment opportunities were fit for the descendants of African kings and Aztec emperors.
After one month of trying to wait out the occupiers, you know what the authorities, with the LACC’s blessing, decided to do? They gave the entire building to the protesters. Yep”they just handed it over, and the thugs turned it into a “peace and justice center,” and a performance space for the band they formed during the occupation…a band that is currently signed with ICM, one of the largest and most prestigious talent agencies in the world.
Number of L.A. newspapers that called the thugs “terrorists” during the standoff? Zero. Number of left-wing websites that are calling for blood in Oregon after previously championing the LACC takeover? Plenty.
The Huffington Post’s obligatory Oregon-standoff “it’s not fair” piece focused on the 1973 “Wounded Knee Incident,” in which a band of Indian activists seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee, S.D. In the piece, University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson argues that the Oregon standoff “has not netted anywhere near the same public or governmental hostility that the standoff at Wounded Knee did back in 1973.” Although Thompson concedes that the authorities allowed the Wounded Knee siege to go on for 71 days(!), and she admits that “remarkably, the protest at Wounded Knee did not end in a bloodbath as it well might have,” she nevertheless uses the negative press the occupation received and the fact that federal agents were “heavily armed” as proof that the Indian occupiers were treated unfairly in comparison with the “white ranchers” in Oregon.
What Professor Thompson fails to mention is that during the course of the Wounded Knee siege, the Indian militants murdered”straight out murdered“Ray Robinson, a black civil rights activist who”d braved the barricades to enter the town and join the fight on behalf of the natives. The occupation organizers apparently became upset when Robinson ate all the food supplies, so they shot him as he was mooching a bowl of oatmeal.
May God forgive me for finding that hilarious. All I can think about is the discussion among the Indians when the decision was made to kill the freeloading outsider. “Dude, that pemmican was clearly marked “property of Leaping Fox,” and he ate it anyway.” “I know, right? And he ate all the meat in the bison stew. It’s just lima beans and tap water now.” “Get the rifles!”
