Truthfully Speaking

When Are You Gonna Take The Weight?

Since I attended the State of the Black Male conference in NYC way back when, I have not come back and updated you guys on my reaction to being there. I guess I have had far too much on my plate and little time to sit down and create a coherent post that would allow you guys to see what I saw and feel what I felt. Overall, I think that the idea was great. I thought that this was and is very necessary. I would like to see it become something more consistent.

With that said, I want to briefly prep you guys for a post that I should be completing soon and posting in a little while. While at the Conference, I purchased Kevin Powell’s book Who’s Gonna Take the Weight? I have yet to complete the book because I have been reading numerous other books at the same time and placing less of a focus on this one. There is also something about the book that is keeping me from really getting into it. But as of today, I have made the decision to complete this book. It’s a tiny little thing and a very simple read, so I should be done with it within a few hours. But I was just reading something from page 82 of the book. It says:

“To be a Black boy turned out by the horrific conditions of America’s gutters is to be a black boy fighting for survival every minute of your life.”

This line alone is the basis for a piece that I am working on that I hope to simply title:

“When Are You Gonna Take The Weight?”

stay tuned…

Allergy season

It’s incredible how we are so able to allow ourselves to be put into these kinda foul moods. It’s only 12:09pm and I am absolutely agitated. I have no good reason for feeling this way. I am at work. It is my lunch break. I am tired (for some strange reason), but overall there is nothing that should have me so tightly bound.

EXCEPT…

That it’s allergy season. I left my damn Claritan in the car this morning and by the time the kids were back for third period, my eye was bloodshot red from me rubbing it. I felt like I had small pieces of hair in my eye that were impossible to get out. One student commented on how red my eye was and I secretly hoped she didn’t think that I was taking a blunt break during my free second period. Lol..

Things are becoming more and more final and soon I’ll be packing boxes and renting Uhauls. For now, I am simply trying to live life and enjoy it. I’ll be in DC on Friday night, early Saturday morning. I plan on having good times. I was going to go to Dream, but I hear that they’ve gotten into the habit of shooting people there. So ummmmmmmm yeah, thats just a little bit frightening.

Til next time…

Who Determines What Americans Watch?

… Cuz we sure as hell don’t. We’ve got Reality Television (insert utter sarcasm–>here) and the news. What more do we need? B.E.T ( Black Entertainment Tragedy-As one of my favorite professors so correctly referred to it) Uncut shows damn near everything and then of course there are those Blockbuster horror movies. You know, the ones you pay $9.25 for and hope to not have nightmares about for the remainder of the week. And when people say, “How can you watch those things?”, you simply reply:

“That shit ain’t real. It’s just a movie.” Cuz as long as it has the fiction stamp of approval, we can rest easy. As long as the writer says that he/she got the idea from a dream, it’s fine. But the reality simply is this: FICTION IS SIMPLY A FICTICIOUS RENDITION OF REALITY; rather, what some accept to be fiction or fictive may very well be a brutal truth for someone else. For America, soldiers dying en masse is for the movies. For the people of many underdeveloped countries, people dying en masse is FO’REAL.

Many people in America that are shouting about how was is the answer have romanticized views of good and evil, right and wrong, winners and losers, history and reality. They think that the “good guys”(Americans, of course) come to the aide of the “victims” by destroying the “bad guys”. And after we win, we come home having gotten a “red badge of courage”, to purple hearts and admiring onlookers. And none of our people die. Or so we think as we watch false renditions of reality broadcasted throughout the mass media. But ask the Army vets that you see walking around “not right” from how shit really went down when they were away fighting for us. Ask the men and women that came back to no homes, no significant others, perhaps a limb missing here or there, and no warm welcome and true thanks.

War is real. Torture is not imagined. America is one of the biggest proponents of censorship. That is not to say that censorship is not sometimes necessary. But why don’t we censor the ass baring, coochie popping, tip drillers from television, or even the hate mongering, cowardly Klan, or most importantly to me, the highly coveraged stories about violence that exists among minorities and others that exists right here at home? Is someone scared to see Vietnam revisited. Do we prefer to have our eyes wide shut? Is this shit just too real like those videogames for X Box and PS2 that parents are trying to ban? When do we begin to open our eyes to the realities of the world?

We wanna be everyone’s savior, but can’t even bare to try to see or understand their pain. We wanna make their shit into a Democracy, but won’t allow them to choose whether that’s what they want. We wanna know that we are winning, but can’t bare to see our own people that are lost. Just leave us ignorant cuz that’s what America is all about, being able to see the resolution, but never willing to watch the fight.

I always said that we were messing with some people that are doing this for life. Perhaps this is not the time to make a joke, but I was watching the Comic View on the “Tragedy” last night, and one of the comedians made a joke about what these people are fighting for. His joke kinda went like this:

to the American: What are you fighting for?
answer: For a G.I Bill. For my GPA.

to the Iraqi: What are you fighting for?
answer: IN THE NAME OF ALLAH!

Anyone that is willing to use their child as a source of destruction of an American (namely, mothers strapping bombs to their infants and asking American soldiers to just hold their babies so that their kids can know that they have a chance, only to be setting a soldier up), is fighting for something they believe in.

What are we fighting for? And how do you know if we aren’t getting truthful accounts in the USA? Censorship persuades us to see things as the government does. Unfortunately, governments have historically been known for using their people as pawns.

Life’s a Bitch…

…When you get caught.

I remember a while back when I posted here about my reaction to the movie people have come to simply call “The Passion”. I remember how there was all this hooting and hollaring about how brutal and gorey the movie was. I remember being enraged by all those people who complained about injustice as if it were just a facet of someone’s imagination. I began to understand that people just don’t want things to hit them so close to home. People don’t want to believe that humans are capable of the most heinous acts of violence. Rather, they don’t want to believe that decent humans aren’t capable of such acts. I said that I wouldn’t be suprised to hear that they were using Saddam Hussein to wipe the ground, and people couldn’t understand why I would say such a thing. I say that Americans live in a little vacuum of fantasy. We live in this bumble of falsities and we refuse to admit to our own indecency.

So when I saw the pics of the soldiers treating Iraqis like straight up and down shit, all I could think of was how these individuals will simply be put on blast when in fact, they are probably no different from many other soldiers. And who took the God damned pictures? You think that it was just as simple as a few people deciding to have some fun with the captives? You don’t think that the powers that be knew about it. You think Dubya feels abad about it? He just feels bad about being put on the damn spot with them pictures. You see, you can’t deny that it happened when it is as clear as poloroid.

And forgive me if I don’t seem to be shocked by this shit. Forgive me if I don’t buy all of this nonsense. FOrgive me if I think that this is once again, another American scam to make Bush look like he’s the least bit decent. Excuse me if I don’t understand why these people are being court marshalled when this is not an American issue, but a World Issue. Excuse me if I still can’t understand how we had the right after 9/11, to stop any Arab on the street and harrass them into admitting that they too were part of the grand scheme to iradicate all Americans without giving them the right to a lawyer or even to remain silent, but they can’t take these American soldiers and do the same.

Life’s a bitch, when you get caught. And that’s all there is to it

You won’t read this mom

You won’t read this. You don’t even know how to turn on a computer. You prefer to write in books and read mail delivered letters. You won’t expect a card or even care for one. Instead you will worry yourself sick about whether we are eating or even if we are going to the doctor to get prescriptions for our allergies. And you know full well that we arent. So you will go to your doctor and make him prescribe Zyrtec so that you can send them to us. And you won’t require any thanks.

You won’t read this, but you’ll tirelessly cook up pepper pot, curry this and that, vege meat (cuz you know that I have to have that with my beef), cook up with smoked turkey, macaroni and cheese, plantains, and all this stuff for us to feast on (cuz you know that I don’t cook in my own house and you fear that I will kill myself by starvation). You won’t expect us to send you bouquets of flowers. For you, those material things are only temporary, but a mother’s love is everlasting.

You won’t read this, but others will. And they will understand what it means to truly love a mother.

Happy Mother’s Day