Today's civil rights organizations mere shadows of what they once were

The civil rights organizations of today have a lot in common with labor unions in the United States. Both have become mere shadows of what they once were, and neither is largely relevant to the conversation.

To be honest, our nation has moved beyond their legitimate relevancy.

There was a time when blacks truly were being lynched with no hope of justice possible, and denied the most basic practical protection of our laws and the slightest chance of rising above social strictures regardless of their ability, sacrifice or hard work.

And there was a time when children really did work in sweatshops, and when workers died or were hideously injured in large numbers because managements wouldn't spend the money to install safety equipment or adjust processes that invited injury.

Through law and a dramatically altered social sense, that United States doesn't exist any longer.

Racial bias remains, but the major related problem today is that vast numbers of African-Americans remain trapped in dysfunctional neighborhoods, families and schools, and we haven't yet figured out as a society how to break those generational cycles without needing to dedicate such an enormous percentage of our production to it that we become about nothing more than that.

Unions and civil-rights organizations are animals that seek to survive on land where food becomes increasingly scarce. Their food is legitimate social imbalance, lawless behavior and attitudes very far from fairness that need to be changed.

Don't expect them merely to go gently into that good night, packing up and shutting down their offices, and getting real jobs (yeah, I know that's harsh, but it's very real).

With unions the tipping-point was when Albert Shanker said that "when school kids start paying union dues, I'll represent them".

The tipping-point has been more gradual for civil rights organizations, but certainly their umbrage at the Zimmerman verdict draws as good a line as any: when you can condemn a mixed-race Hispanic of racism in shooting a 17-year-old black adolescent who was kicking the pus out of him and gave every indication that he wasn't done with the kicking, then legitimacy has flown out the window.

Private sector unions are well on the road to extinction, and public sector unions might be as soon as states seriously make unlawful the striking of their members, a notion even FDR found absurd.

The civil rights establishment is not only on the decline, it's about to hit rock-bottom. As long as they insist on having "leaders" who care more about the cameras and their 15 minutes of fame than they do the people they are supposed to represent, then all that hard work accomplished back in the 1950s and 1960s will all be flushed down the toilet.

These "leaders" have no interest in lifting the black community up and ending injustice. Instead, they want to keep black people down and racial tensions stirred up.

For one thing, these so-called civil rights leaders claim to be the leaders of the entire black community, they are not. Any time another black person speaks up with a different opinion they are vilified and labeled as "Uncle Toms" with the willing accomplices in the media jumping on the band wagon.

What's really sick about these race baiters is that they get filthy rich off of the majority the people they are supposed to be representing and helping.

The civil rights establishment attempts to thrive not only on poetic truth, but also on confusion among what are relatively low information folks wanting a reason either to hate, or, to love.

And the civil rights establishment manufactures that confusion, and even the "low information" content in the messages they offer for our consumption, because they are no more than hustlers.

Unfortunately, too many of us are too easily hustled, a phenomenon that knows no boundaries based on race, gender, educational achievement, or economic status.

Folks need to think, rather than simply to believe.

Civil rights organizations should re-dedicate themselves to finding ways that society can affordably break generational cycles of dependency and violence in economically deprived black neighborhoods.