Our brave new world: The ‘brother’s keeper’ plantation state

Around every sin that our nation has committed — sins we are committing now and will commit in the future — will be found bad people posing as good, knowingly twisting the plain meaning of widely held values to cover and excuse the ugliest of ends and means.

The best example of this newspeak on stilts is Barack Obama’s use and abuse of the book of Genesis to fundamentally transform the great American experiment in self-government.

Americans need to wake up to this leveling con and reject it root and branch. We are not the keepers of our brothers. We are our own keepers.

He did it with two words: “brother’s keeper.” And he got a political amen!

For the unchurched, I can tell the story quickly. In Genesis, Adam and Eve had two kids: Cain and Abel. At least for a while.

One day, Cain, in an act of sibling rivalry, crushed his brother’s skull with a rock. Shortly afterward, Cain encountered God walking outside the Garden, and God asked him where his brother Abel was. To which Cain replied, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Which is a pretty good, textbook answer, unless you know exactly where your brother is because you killed him.

Obama takes a solid answer that was used to cover up a crime against man and God and then uses Cain’s lie to introduce a new understanding of man that is neither faithful to God nor America nor mankind.

Cain’s answer to God captures the truth of a brother’s relationship with his brother, man to man, and a government to its citizens. We are not the keepers of our brothers. We are neither created nor intended to be one another’s keeper. Abel was supposed to be his own man and his own keeper. And the same goes for the rest of us.

Of course, a brother in need deserves our help, but this assistance — under normal circumstances — should be temporary, not a way of life. The exception has become the rule and the new purpose of the keeper state.

Obviously, not everyone can be kept. A brother’s keeper state requires a sizable keeper class — a new administrative aristocracy — whose claim for the privileged status of keeper is rooted in its deep concern and service to the least of its brothers.

The keepers of our brother’s state have grown powerful by pouring new meaning into our shared language that defines us as a people. The Bible — the great liberator of man — has been and continues to be used and abused against its plain intent. The same with our Declaration of Independence and its “all men are created equal.” The keepers purposefully leave it all vague and rhetorical, casting it as a struggle between good and evil.

Once upon a time, we all knew what “equality” meant and didn’t mean. Appealing to it and living up to it are what fueled our country’s upward arc.

Today, “equality” and the new holy keeper trinity of diversity, equality, inclusion is indistinguishable from an angry, leveling, racist egalitarianism. The brother’s keeper state is, in reality, a plantation state. Intergenerational dependency is the soil the brother’s keeper plantation cultivates.

Keeper plantation equality requires turning social safety nets into a hammock that creates dependency by design. The goal is not to get you off it but to keep you on it — and voting for it.

You never hear Obama or any keeper quote St. Paul’s admonition that “a man who will not work, will not eat.”

And let’s not forget the signal it sends to those who are working hard and honestly for what welfare gives to others without condition or effort. Acting white, chumps.

Keeper plantation equality means depriving black and Latino children the possibility of achieving a decent education by protecting failing tax-funded schools and foreclosing any means of escape.

Keeper plantation equality means eliminating “gifted and talented” programs in schools because not every child is gifted and talented.

Keeper plantation equality also means not prosecuting crimes because doing so would have a “disparate impact” on “communities of color.” Never mind that the victims of these crimes tend to be overwhelmingly black and brown.

Adding further insult to injury, this anti-American vision of America is justified in the name of black America, and yet in the end, it hurts its “beneficiaries” the most. To point this out, however, is to be deemed racist, or worse, an Uncle Tom or Aunt Tammy.

Everything this party of slick talkers says is a falsehood dressed up as truth and held up as gospel. It hurts the head to follow their inverted, anti-American, and anti-common sense reasoning. But once you think through it, it all starts making sense.

The conditions that sustain a free people are obstacles to their brother’s keeper purpose. As we are seeing unfold in real time — and as we have seen long before now — progressive keeper dreams, put into action, are black, brown, and middle-class nightmares. Continue to vote for it, and the rich will get still richer, the middle class will shrink, and those who are black and brown will drown.

Americans need to wake up to this leveling con and reject it root and branch. We are not the keepers of our brothers. We are our own keepers.