Asheville’s Community Reparations Commission continues to meet expectations. Failure is assured when a special interest enterprise is set up with an impossible mission.
Following the recent retreat of their second consulting firm in two years, one notes that over $350,000 in taxpayer funding has been invested in outside resources — with no tangible constructive production. That figure does not include the dollars invested in the city’s liberally autocratic bureaucracy devoted to this divisive initiative, nor the participants’ unique status through paid versus volunteer board membership.
There are numerous fatal flaws in this misguided creation, but the big one is that it is running in direct opposition to the hard-won progress of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Good people have worked too hard too long to take discrimination by color out of our cultural equation.
This latest induced exercise in a glorified sympathy by our hyperdominating Democratic Party will serve no purpose than to further unravel our already precarious social unity. That a few people will fill their pockets, secure a platform for personal vanities or justify a position in the bureaucracy does not compensate for the toxic reality of this commission’s motivations, missions and methods.
Shame is due for the elected officials who breathed life into this pretense, those exploiting the opportunity to personal advantage and predictable media outlets declining to attend to this assault on the uplifting potentials of an authentic version of social justice — so strenuously secured in 1964.
— Carl Mumpower
Asheville
