SIMPLE WORDS – SIMPLE TRUTH

A reader I admire very much asked me to comment on the current condition of Black America. I said I would… without thinking it through. It’s complicated. Life in today’s world forces us to compromise. We have to fallback to go forward just a little. It is very hard to say or do exactly what we think is right because (most likely) others will disagree, others with more power and less forgiveness. We are now reading from a new history book—and you must be literate on another level.

There is a color shift taking place in America. However, the new model has been rendered colorless. We all know that a Black America does not exist in and of itself. Nonetheless, everybody knows where and how you arrive and that being Black can’t be given away. America is more than the idea of a Black President or a Black talk show host. That’s a fake political power/money game, which has little to do with the daily life of black people. My opinion is further supported by the idea that little to nothing is what it appears to be relative to the gap, which divides Black and White rich and poor. Both sides can be influenced by endless flows of money, and can ill-afford to be needy and powerless in a rich world.

To illustrate the point: I had the opportunity to hear Bill Cosby speak at Compton High School, in California, some time ago.  Mr. Cosby said: “We [Black people] are sitting on the answer.”

There is an indefinable love-hate-relationship, which is innate in the black experience. It is apparent that no one (at least not yet) is capable of unraveling this snarl or reversing those deeply rooted feelings of not being able to quite catch up.

Have the efforts of black intellectuals, those who are gifted and/or with access worked against us? Or did they just take another route? The one (too often) fixed with false smiles, blatant bullshit and don’t mess with my money. Today there seems to be no effective way to fully express the concept of unity, i.e. telling us what it is and what we must do for each other. Maybe it has to be defined by something less divisive than our exteriors. But we already know what that’s about. It is about the same thing it was back when. When the brothers and sisters connect and speak in a single voice tensions multiply, and that’s what’s feared.

Today, these feelings and expressions of denial are broken down to a uniform code of behavior. Black culture can only be defined and owned by Blacks or else it will be stolen, or misrepresented just like history, dance, and music in a hundred forms. Another example is language: “You know I got mad love for you. You feel me?” The white main stream is constantly using black street jargon, and throwing it back as their definition of blackness, or coolness, while at the same time they rip Ebonics as if it is scourge. Whites want to imitate being black without being black.

So, we must ask ourselves this… “Am I for the truth, no matter who tells it?”

In my opinion: America must stop bull shitting and start preparing. We must be willing to accept the truth that benefits all of us and not the few of us. Ultimately, we have to let go of the resentment, the anger, and take responsibility. We must forgive each other, forgive those who trespass against us and do what demands courage in light of the humanity and consciousness that unites us all.

Economic Apartheid

I will attempt to write a simple truth about power. The truth reveals a very dim view with the open sores of greed and history left bleeding for the dogs of conscience to lick because little else will heal wounds so-o deep—and so-o bloody.

Ours is a time when the disenfranchised must stand beneath a sun that blinds with its brightness and shade that masks with its darkness. It is self-evident that clarity is the duty of neither.

America took as much land as they could, and paid as little as they had to for it—if and when they ever paid at all. I can’t imagine Native People having more than a day or two of happiness on those God forsaken reservations on which they were forced to subsist.

In 1980, The U. S. Supreme court ruled that the federal government had taken Lakota Sioux land illegally and awarded $105,000,000.00, in compensation.

Demanding their land back, the Lakota refused the payment.

The judgment has since grown to more than $803,000,000.00.

Nothing is what it appears to be. “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.” C. Dickens.”

Of course there are many examples of eminent domain, and the following definition is one of my favorites: the right by which a sovereign government or some person acting in its name and under its authority, may acquire private property for public or quasi-public (corporate) use upon payment of reasonable, or more commonly unreasonable compensation and without consent of the owner.

The right of power of the government to take private property for public use (private official use) upon making just compensation is a pipe dream. Because the true value of land is inherent in its perpetual use, and this use can not be reduced by time, mathematical formula, or systemic equations because under all remains the land. And under the land and within it lie its tributaries, its minerals, its commodities both sacred and holy—it is the land’s value that can only be pointed to in a way that value is synonymous with the air breathed and the nature of life.

It has been said that the rich walk above the ground on stilts. I don’t have to wonder what that means. There are many mansions in the house of the Lord.” Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. God loves a cheerful giver.” But the rich and powerful rarely heed these words. The primary driving force of American government is the possession and consolidation of power, and ultimately rendering the masses powerless.

This is the true aim of the rich and the powerful. The source of that power fundamentally is religion and politics, fueled by limitless money streams and the continued control, in and of its continued development, and increased by the distribution and ultimately the return of capital and interest to those rich and powerful who call themselves capitalists—for a lack of a better word.

THE POOR, THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD…

Being born poor is an unearned condition. It is a covenant. It is the law of inheritance, and the law of the jungle rolled neatly into a debilitating and predictably unhappy ending. It is linked to ignorance and violence in the way cancer is linked to suffering. Can any good come of burgeoning poverty via a mushrooming global population? The larger question is: What does the world aim to do about it?

It is in knowing the truth that the depth of our ignorance is revealed, and it is the truth that defines the sheer complexity of our problems.

Now, I don’t have a crystal ball, psychic precognition or divine powers, but I do believe in basic goodness and existential evil, and in the existence of a secret global agenda. I am reasonably certain that there is at least one insidious plan to centralize individual sovereign nations and place them under the control of the autocratic power of a stronger union or single entity. I do not think democracy will play a role.

To the point: The United Nations projected that the world’s population is likely to hit 10 billion souls by the year 2100. Growth in Africa is of special interest because it is black and/or because it is so-o rich in strategic metals because population rates are rampant. They are so high that they are likely to triple before the end of the millennium, rising to 3.6 billion from the current level of 1 billion. What is the world to do? How does the global family intend to feed, educate, medicate, integrate and manage the multitude of the unimaginable?

To another point: It has only taken the world 12 years to grow the global population from 6 billion to 7 billion, which will be eclipsed as early as October 2011. Every single billion adds its own moral, economic, political and environmental dilemmas. Increasing populations in America will likewise grow to half a billion by 2100, due to increasing longevity and presumably better health care. The question is: Would the world be better off with a more manageable population?

The final point: What is Mother Earth to do with so many mouths to feed? Clearly, fertility is not declining. Is this a job for birth control, The Population Council, which was established in 1952, by John D. Rockefeller III, the Vatican, or do the poor just say NO!