NO MERCY FOR CRACK DEALERS

Crack dealers who are destroying the black community must not be
coddled.

Neither Batman's arch-enemy the Joker nor Superman's nemesis Lex
Luthor could outdo the real life evil genius who created the
bio-chemical super weapon called crack.

It spawns legions of zombie-fied addicts, hordes of gun blazing thugs
and, for extra credit, birth defects, diseases and property crime out
of this world.

Against such a backdrop the Obama Administration wishes to change
federal sentencing guidelines because of the disparate number of Black
men imprisoned for selling this super weapon (mostly to their own people).

The counter argument that White powder cocaine dealers need 100 times
as much of their product to hit the same sentencing thresholds as
captured crack dealers illustrates racial unfairness, to be sure. But
unfairness masks yet another - crack's incredibly destructive,
multi-dimensional impact in so many immediate and long-term ways. It
earns its dealers much harsher penalties.

Here is a law that leapt over the tradition of lesser punishment for
victimizers of Black citizens and is as much civil rights legislation
as federally mandated school desegregation.

Changing its punitive dimension, as liberals so in love with crack
dealers hope to do, tells impacted communities that your right to
life, liberty and pursuit of happiness is once again assigned second
class status.

I fear the ultimate goal is to reduce sentencing for crack altogether,
as bleeding hearts hope to pull these terrorists close to their bosoms.

Memo to Black crack dealers: When you decided to sell poison to your
own people, you decided to create demand for harsher penalties, which
besieged inner cities did in the late 20th century as this plague
literally turned them inside out. Selling crack is equivalent to
firing a cannon repeatedly into a sinking boat (the inner city) and
crying "foul!" when the passengers take you prisoner.

I support the harshest possible punishment for crack dealers and dare
anyone to look at its huge number of inner city victims without
lobbyists or other highly paid mouthpieces.

Until we in the inner city start acting like citizens and demanding
better from those around us, crack dealers will continue to enjoy our
limelight.

No one is on our payroll to divert political attention toward the
endless number of Black and poor lives that crack destroys. Unless we
are proactive, sympathizers on high will make crack dealers the Emmett
Tills of the new millennium.

I've seen porch furniture vanish in my neighborhood during the 1980s
when this plague was brought to Savannah. I've seen and heard the
warfare its salesmen engage in around non-combatants. I know former
honor role students who are addicts and worse.

With these experiences why waste sympathy on the merchants of such
misery?

Black crack dealers should thank their lucky stars that they don't
live in Black nations where execution on the spot may be the
punishment for this awful activity.

Citizens of fundamentalist Muslim countries weigh their drug-dealing
careers against the prospect of public beheading and choose
accordingly.

Communist states have wasted no small amount of ammunition on drug
dealers.

I don't endorse such methods, but offer them as examples of how
seriously some folks consider this problem.

I know White criminals get more breaks than their Black peers, but is
the answer ignoring Black victims just to play 'gotcha" with criminals
from another ethnicity?

Racial justice includes equal punishment for those who prey on Black
and poor citizens alongside predators of the White and wealthy.
Anything less smacks of an upgraded version of judicial Jim Crow. And
if I wouldn't accept this from Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton or
Bush II, why give the current chief executive a pass?

If crack vanished today its damage could continue undiminished for
generations. That's how powerful it is.

Any concerns about sentencing disparities for crack dealers should
include greater concern for its victims.

Combating crack and those who want to coddle its dealers is part of
the 21st century internal civil rights movement.

How about fairness for crack victims and the communities crack
destroys?