I'm willing to bet that the Urban League is chock full of first generation college graduates, but relatively few children of second and third generation grads. The old money has no misplaced optimism. They know better. They understand that there is no substitute for discipline, talent, loyalty and luck. They know that if people aren't motivated to make the difference in their own lives that no amount of coaching and prodding is going to make a material difference.

It's a bit tough being a Conservative because what Cosby said is all we really need to say. Our value is rather like everyone elses - we repeat that which needs to be said because obviously too many people aren't listening. But the difference between our perfect black solution and that of the other guys is that we choose not to profit by the suffering of the downtrodden. We won't end up institutionalizing the entire apparatus of keeping hope alive. We know that hope is born every day in every generation and that it keeps itself alive. That's the very definition of hope.

But on the Pimp side of the equation hope must be kept alive by artificial means - the self-congratulatory means of middle class co-sponsorship. And let's make no mistake about it, the National Urban League is not well-endowed by clusters of multi-millionaires. It is a march of middle class dimes, it is recycled black dollars, it's made of the stacks of spare change from brothers and sisters in my tax bracket. That's why what I'm saying is sacreligious. I'm the prime target of NUL fund-raising. Somebody who can do $100 a plate (as opposed to $5000 like the big dogs). Hope is kept alive by the diatribe and litany of ills that oppress the black masses. Katrina this, welfare-that, black on black the other, bombing you on your head until you think black Americans must be the most despised, hated, pathetic and undernourished souls on the planet. (Especially compared to average white Americans).

BUT YOU CAN HELP!

Can you? Can you really? Wouldn't you if you could? Hasn't everybody already?

Somebody might call me on it, but I have a very hard time believing that the Urban League, for all its good intentions, is anything more than a black owned and operated marketing organization selling a repackaged American Dream. They are selling the dream short however, but suggesting that they themselves are integral to the struggles of black Americans' upward mobility. But there are no barriers the Urban League can take away, no cities it can rebuild, no economic deflection it can manifest. There is nothing it can do but inform. It is a body with a tongue, and what that tongue is saying is that 'we still have a long way to go'. In the consulting business, that's called building in future work by making oneself indispensible.

There will always be a black underclass. They will be, as they are today, plagued with the same deficiencies of every underclass since the dawning of civilization. There too, will always be upwardly mobile escapees plagued by liberal guilt, and shaming Conservatives denigrating the lot of them, their struggles and false promises. We're all part of the same old wheel of humanity. But in the end since we know about humanity and its folly, we know that the middleman will never get any credit. So I conclude that the Urban League's days are numbered. What will kill it? The black middle class will stop kidding itself.