THINGS I WISH OBAMA WOULD SAY

Things I wish I would hear from President Obama and the Democrats that I know I never will:

(While playing as tape of Mitch McConnell stating that he wishes Obama would fail)  The Republicans say they love this country, but they want me to fail.  That’s like saying you love the patient, but you want the surgeon to fail.  It’s saying that you love the defendant, but you want his attorney to fail.  Someone should tell them that if the surgeon fails, the patient dies.  If the lawyer fails, the defendant goes to jail.  What is more important?  Your love of country or your hatred of me?  Apparently they hate me more than they love their own country.  Doesn’t that sound sad?  Do you really want to be led by people like that?

On the Public Option For Healthcare:

The same people who told you Medicare would be the end of freedom are now saying that the public option is socialism.  It’s nothing more than expanding Medicare coverage.  If you’ve ever had to go to the emergency room of a hospital with a real emergency, then you know that the place is crowded with people who should have been at a doctor’s office, but they have no insurance.   They hospitals tack the cost of caring for these uninsured people onto your bill when you go to the hospital.   You’re already paying for these uninsured people’s medical care.   And you have to wait hours for emergency care, because people have nowhere else to go.  Does that make sense? 

On Deficit Spending:

Once again, the fear mongers are telling you that we are putting our great grandchildren into debt.  They are saying that the way they grew up, they didn’t buy anything that they couldn’t pay for immediately.  My opponents must be awfully rich.  I don’t know about you, but when I bought a house, I had to take out a mortgage.  I went into debt. That was deficit spending.  Would you rather take out a loan to get your child a college education or just tell your kid he or she can’t go to college?  If you would borrow to educate your child, then you would engage in deficit spending.  What about a car or a major appliance?  No note, no car.  Obviously, we have to use common sense and not go borrowing money for things like unnecessary wars, like the last Republican administration did. But if the investment is worth it- whether it is educating our children or putting Americans back to work- then we might have to do a little deficit spending.  We cannot bring down unemployment without spending some money.  When the unemployed get back to work, they pay taxes.  Is there a better investment for America than getting our people back to work?

On Taxing the Rich:

First, let’s set the record straight.  We were never going to increase taxes on the rich.  We were going to let a temporary tax cut for the rich expire.  The tax cut was temporary because we could not afford to pay for it.  In the second place, the Republicans keep telling you raising taxes on the rich will kill jobs, while offering to lay off teachers and policemen as an alternative.  Does that make sense?  And in the third place, I’d like to know how taxing the wealthy is going to kill jobs.  If we return $100 in tax money to struggling working class people, they are going to spend it on things they need but could not afford.  That stimulates the economy.  If we give $100,000 in tax money to the wealthy, who already have millions in banks and investments, they are only going to add it to the money they already have saved.  They already have more money than they can spend.  That will not stimulate the economy.  Somebody is trying to insult our intelligence.  I’m not going to say who it is, but I will say that their first name is “Repub” and their last name is “Licans.”

On Deregulation:

The Republicans are calling me all kinds of dirty names because I believe in regulations.   They are telling you that government is evil.  I have to admit there are a number of things the government could and should do better.  But, we’ve had all kinds of life and job destroying oil spills already, with regulations.  Can you imagine what would happen without them?   There was a time when rats, rat poison and even human fingers got mixed up in the ground meat we bought.  That’s why we have regulations.  We had ten year old kids working twelve hours a day, seven days a week in coal mines.  Kids who never saw the sun.  Regulations stopped that.  Every time we deregulate, people on Wall Street do things that wreck our economy and get millions in golden parachutes for their efforts.  We wind up bailing them out because nobody regulated them and we don’t want our economy to go through another depression.  The same people who want me to fail, tax breaks for the wealthy while throwing teachers and police out of work, who want no regulations on large corporation that are so big they can wreck our economy, also want the votes of working class people.  Again, somebody is insulting our intelligence.

Mother English and her abused children

Time for a break from Washington politics.  Here is a (hopefully) humorous look at language for those who LOVE language:

                    My gut told me the dame was trouble the minute her silhouette darkened the glass door to my office.  “I’m looking for a Private Investigator named Louie the Lip,” she pouted sticking her way too ruby red lips out with each syllable.

                “Who wants to know, Shweethart?” I asked so cool you could hear the saxophone in the background.

                “I’m Mrs. English.  However, I’m also known as ‘Mother English.’”

                “How may I assist you?” Something about her made me feel like I was back in Sunday School.  I hated Sunday School, but I liked this dame.  She had class.  Real Class. 

                “They’re killing and torturing my babies!” She cried out, her cool veneer was like a rabbit in a magician’s hat. They’ve kidnapped my baby, “Fewer” and they’re making her fraternal twin “Less” do all of her work.  I’m sure you know “Less” isn’t equipped to do “Fewer’s” work properly.    

“When was the last time anyone heard from “Fewer?”

                “Just before this television network decided it had- I can’t bear to say this- it’s so hard on my ears …” She scribbled something-with perfect penmanship I might add- on a piece of paper and handed it to me.  “More drama, less commercials,” the note said.

                I was beginning to feel her pain.

                “That’s not the end of it.  The Mercedes Benz people have a commercial featuring a car with l-e-s-s doors!”  This time she spelled the offending word.  “Why oh why can’t they allow ‘Fewer’ to do her work with items that can be counted, and let ‘Less’ work with things like water that cannot.  Is that too much to ask?”

                 I screamed as the words “less commercials” assaulted my brain.  Has this happened before?”

                “Yes’” she dabbed a tear from her eye.  They did the exact same thing to my babies, “Who,” and “Whom.”  “You should see “Who” struggling to be correct when he’s misused as in,” … She drew a deep breath as if gathering up her courage  … “Who does this belong to?” she blurted the words, her face a contortion of pain.  “As you can see, “she gathered the strength to go on, “Not only have they locked my baby “Whom” away, but they done something horrible to my other babies, my prepositions.

                “They’ve … they’ve …   dangled them!” So help me, I saw fire shoot out of her eyes.  “They’re using them to end their sentences.  I don’t know how much more my babies can endure.  My prepositions are allergic to periods!”   She was on the edge of hysteria, and there wasn’t a single thought I could provide as solace.   I wanted to offer her water, but I knew if she stopped, she might never find the courage to continue. 

                “For whom are we looking?”  I thought I’d give her a thrill and let her hear her baby’s name used properly. 

                “I can’t prove anything, but it may have started with the program ‘Star Trek.’  My baby, Infinitive, was so sweet and whole, until they came along and split her with their, ‘to boldly go.’ Why couldn’t they have just said ‘to go boldly,’ and left my poor little Infinitive alone?  The next thing I knew, everyone was pronouncing “plethora,” pluh THOR uh.   “Irregardless” started gaining acceptance. People began confusing “I” and “me”, saying things like “Join Helen and I” and using “myself” as the only personal pronoun in a sentence.   

                “Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not the in flexible prude that some people think I am. I’ve rather enjoyed some of the inventive alterations that have been made for informal conversation.  One fine example would be the fact that since one has to acquire one’s hat before leaving, the idea of leaving and acquiring what one must in order to do so is encapsulated in the term, ‘hat up,’ is, I think quite inventive.  It’s just that people must understand that there is a time and place for everything.

                “There are times when I can be like this,” amazingly she turned on bedroom eyes, hiked her dress to show legs that would turn milk into butter and plunged her neckline to reveal that kind of cleavage that starts wars.  “There are other times, however, when I’m most appropriately dressed like this.”   Somehow, she turned the neckline up to the top of her throat, and her dress hem down to her ankles.  She still looked good.  Just different for different occasions.  Versatile.

                “I’d love to help, but you have to give people a reason to care.”

                Language is clothing for our thoughts.  A neatly dressed young man sends a completely different message than one who wears his trousers below his derriere.   The same holds for language.   It provides intellectual structure.   At the rate the U.S. is declining intellectually, we won’t be able to make a pair of shoes in another decade!  Sloppy speech produces sloppy thinking, as much as it results from it.  

                “I’ll do what I can, to get the word out, but I can’t promise anything.  But I would like to ask you something.”

                “Yes?”

                “What’s your first name?

                “Proper.  And now I have a final question for you.  Why do they call you, ‘Louie the Lip?’”

“They ushed to call me, ‘Louie the Lishp,” until I learned not to talk like thish.

               

ACCEPTING THE REAL OBAMA

                The death last month of former senator, Chuck Percy, (R. Illinois) was particularly sad in that it signaled the end of the last vestiges of a whisper of an echo of hope for a two party democracy.  Percy was a dinosaur, an oxymoron, the last moderate Republican.   His passing serves as an exclamation mark for the blog I’m presenting.

                I recently ran across an article by Mellisa Harris Perry entitled,” Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama,” in which Mrs. Perry asserts that the rate at which White liberals are abandoning President Obama is a function of a subtle type of liberal racism, rather than a true referendum on his job performance.   Her arguments were based on comparisons between Obama and another centrist Democrat president, Bill Clinton.   Her article represented a rare occasion in which I could not completely agree with her.  Yet the most interesting aspect of her commentary was not the commentary itself, but the reaction of those White liberals to whom she was referring.

                The White progressives who backed Obama are frustrated and disappointed.  Many are at the point at which they will not vote at all, given a choice between Obama and the Republicans.  While I feel the same frustration with Obama, my immediate reaction was that these progressives are every bit the ideologues as the reactionaries on the Right.  Don’t they realize that Obama is the only thing standing between us and the barbaric hoards of the Tea Party who applaud executions and would gladly pay money to see gladiators fight to the death if given the option? 

                I was all set to chide the progressives, not for racism, but for their lack of pragmatism, when the tape of Obama exhorting a Black audience (including the Congressional Black Caucus)  to  “Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. ”  was aired.  I was stunned by how completely inappropriate and inauthentic Obama’s performance was.   How dare the man who had listened so patiently to all of the complaining, grumbling and crying from his right wing adversaries have the nerve to say this to the least complaining and most hurting of all Americans, the African Americans?    How much time had he spent in the Black community, as president,  before making these outrageous comments?   Where had he marched for us?   The cluelessness of Obama’s exhortation (he was trying to inspire, probably called himself taking a page from Bill Cosby) forced a quasi-epiphany: It’s time to accept Obama for what he is, not what we had hoped he would be.

                Obama inspired right thinking people with his oratory, his campaign, and his slogan: “Change We Can Believe In.”  That kind of change does not come from the center; especially in a nation that has gone so far right wing that the old right is the new center.  It comes from the Left, which is where most of Obama’s base can be found.  Yet, even in her defense of Obama, Dr. Perry, by comparing him to Bill Clinton as “another Centrist Democrat” is, in a subtle way, gentling shifting us toward lower expectations.

                Were our expectations too high to begin with?  They were obviously too high for this individual, but they had to have been high to pull off the political miracle of the millennium.  Right or wrong, the First Black Syndrome demands excellence.   Can  you imagine the implications if Jackie Robinson had been a .220 lifetime hitter? (He was actually .311).  We thought we were electing a warrior; a champion.  Shaka Zulu, Pihankhi, Sundiata. 

It is painfully clear that Obama is not that warrior.  Had he replaced Achilles in the Trojan war, Troy would have wound up with half of Greece.  This is not to say that he has been a bad president.  He inherited an incredible mess, and many of his accomplishments have been laudable.  And the fact remains that he is the last barrier between us and the lunatic Right.  In fact, many of the pundits have surmised that his reelection strategy will be based on choosing Obama over the party of Rush Limbaugh.

My position is that I will continue to defend Obama when he unfairly attacked, whether it is from the rabid racists on the Right, or the jealous Media Minstrels on the Left.  But given the fact that we are laboring under a one party system, we must apply as much pressure to Obama as the Right does.  I say this as someone who grew up in a neighborhood where if you could not fight you could not go outside, yet who stood on the sidewalk on Stoney Island Avenue on the South Side of Chicago and wept openly when word came of Obama’s election; and as someone who painted a portrait of Obama surrounded by heroes of Black history.  We must make him accountable.

I lament the fact that I’ll never know the pride other Americans felt when Ronald Reagan (divisive figure that he was) stared down Mikhail Gorbachev and told him to “Tear down that wall.”  I will vote for Obama in the next election, and encourage others to do so as well.  He does stand between us and the Neanderthals.  But it feels so much better to vote for someone who is truly inspiring, than against the forces of darkness.

               

A CALL TO ARMS FOR ALL CIVILIZED AMERICANS

                In my last blog I documented efforts by the Christian Right to justify slavery.   A good friend and astute political observer responded by asking,”Why aren’t more of our black pundits who are so quick to point out Obama’s failings drawing more attention to this stuff?  This Christian version of the Taliban could end up leading the country.  Where’s the battle cry?”

                I have to echo these sentiments.  Where is the battle cry?  It seems that it wasn’t that long ago that whenever an African American appeared on television,  to speak on any subject, before that person could address ANY  issues, the gauntlet would be thrown down: “Will you denounce Louis Farrakhan?”  It did not matter whether the Black person had any affiliation with Louis Farrakhan or not, he or she was immediately challenged to denounce Minister Farrakhan because of remarks Farrakhan had made regarding Jewish people.  The denouncement served as a litmus test as to whether the individual would have any credibility to speak on any subject whatsoever.

                We now have large segments of the right wing community, including at least one who is seeking the highest office in the land, attempting to justify one of the most horrific crimes against humanity, and nobody has demanded anybody denounce anybody!   I’d always considered Glenn Beck to be a sort of comedic figure, like the hilariously inept Stanley Tucci would be assassin in the Dennis Quaid, Kathleen Turner action/ comedy film, “Undercover Blues.”  The Tucci character called himself “ Muerte” or Death, while the Quaid and Turner characters called him “Morty.”   Beck was always “Curly” to Rush Limbaugh’s “Moe.”  He lacked the gravitas of the head stooge.  But when Beck declared slavery “couldn’t have been that bad,” he crossed the line.  He reminded me that, although he was inept, the Tucci character was trying to kill Turner and Quaid.  Beck aint funny no more.  Why has no one been called upon to denounce him?

                There has been almost no pressure on presidential candidate Michelle Bachman to denounce her own endorsement of racist documents.  Rush Limbaugh is so powerful in the Republican Party that no one seeking office in that party will challenge him on anything.  Limbaugh’s racism is a matter of public record.  He once told an African American female caller, “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”  I have never heard anyone call on anyone to denounce Limbaugh.

                The Republicans made Michael Steele the head of their National Committee so that they would not appear racist while being racist in their attacks on Obama.  Once they discovered that there would be NO repercussions, they dropped Steele like a bad habit, and have been going all out.   Why wouldn’t there be repercussions?   Say what you will about our Jewish friends, but there is much we could emulate from them.  For one thing, they have an organization called B’nai B’rith that provides an array of services to the Jewish community, not the least of which is that they monitor anti-Jewish commentary, and attack it immediately.  This new wave of justifying slavery is tantamount to the Neo Nazis trying to say there was no holocaust.

                We must challenge those who have access to the major media to take a stand.  Mainstream racists will gradually increase their vitriol, checking for repercussions, and when there are none, they push the envelope further and further.  The fact that they have gotten to the point where they can justify slavery shows that there isn’t much that isn’t acceptable anymore; especially since we don’t have anyone to challenge them.

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I’ve been having a difficult time trying to get my head around the evil that is coming from the right.  During the Republican Primary debate, Texas governor Rick Perry  was asked about the fact that Texas has executed some 235 people, far more than any other state, during his administration. When the figure was given, the audience cheered!  Americans cheered Americans being executed.  Perry himself declared he “never struggled”with the idea that innocent people might have been executed, despite the fact that twelve people have been exonerated from death row since 1973.  The Republican front runner for the nomination for the Presidency of The United States of America, has no problem with a few innocent Americans being killed by the state, and the audience cheered!

My final rant against the right wing (for right now) is based on their ongoing class warfare.  While steadfastly refusing to close any tax loopholes for the wealthiest Americans, John Boehner, Michelle Bachman and, of course,  the entire team at Fox News have taken up the battle cry of broadening the tax base. That means taxing the poorest fifty percent of Americans.   “The Daily Show” host, Jon Stewart shredded their pathetic arguments masterfully.  The good folks at Fox pointed out that over 94 percent of the poor own refrigerators as proof that they should have to cough up some dough.  I’m not going to comment on this any further.  I’ll let their argument speak for itself.

I sincerely hope somebody out there is getting angry.  I know I am.

                 

A POTENT STEW: RACISM, SLAVERY AND BAD RELIGION

               

There is a movement afoot in this country- a movement that is so vile and evil that, just a few years ago, I would have accused anyone who reported it of being a conspiracy theorist.  That movement is to justify slavery as a first step, I believe, toward re-instituting it.

The most troubling aspect of this neo-slavery movement is that its proponents are not (ostensibly) Klansmen or Neo –Nazis.  They are pillars of the community, businessmen and women; talk show hosts with millions of followers, and at least one presidential candidate, Michelle Bachman.

Consider that the Texas Board of Education just a year ago tried to eliminate the word “slavery” from the slave trade in textbooks and rename it the “Atlantic triangular trade.”  There were a lot of other silly lies this Board wanted instituted in the textbooks as well, such as the large role Christianity played in the actions of the founding fathers (Most of the were Deists).   There is a strange but NOT funny irony in Texas folks denying slavery, considering all the propaganda with which we’ve been assaulted purporting how brave Texans died for freedom.  The part the propaganda leaves out is that the freedom for which they died was the freedom to own slaves!

Then there is the pledge, signed by presidential candidate, Michelle Bachman, yes, the very same Michelle Bachman who said Obama had failed Black people.  Part of that pledge stated that a black child born in slavery had a better chance of having two parents than one born today.  This same Woman Who Would BE President kept on her list of “must read” books, a tome that asserted that Black people were blessed to have been enslaved and that race relations were excellent during slavery!  (I couldn’t make this up if I tried)

 And what blog on ignorant racism would be complete without a reference to Glenn Beck who has added his own creative interpretation of slavery.  Beck has, astonishingly, asserted that Blacks in America had the option of resettling in Liberia or staying here, and that things couldn’t have been that bad during slavery or else all those Black folks would not have opted to stay!

It is difficult to get one’s head around the enormity of the lies these people are perpetrating.  Ever since Barak Obama became president, these people have discarded any parameters on the lying and have gone off the deep end proclaiming Obama to be an anti-imperialist Kenyan, a Muslim, a racist, and basically anything  else they could think of.

Yet what might be most troubling about all this outlandish lying (other than the fact that the media treats these people with respect) lies in the fact that they all have at least one thing in common: they are all allegedly devout Christians.  All three of the major religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, have produced movements and individuals who have stood for peace, kindness, justice and all that sane people hold dear.  They have also provided the rationale for chattel slavery, genocide and oppression.

So why are some religious people so loving while others, while praying to the same God, so hateful and violent?  The answer lies in whether the religion is based in any kind of spirituality.  More and more people are coming to understand that while religion and spirituality can and often do intersect, they are not the same thing.  Religion is basically a belief in a specific dogma.  Christians believe that God, in the form of His Son, sacrificed Himself for the redemption of our sins.  Jews believe in the God of the Old Testament.  And Muslims believe that Mohammed was the true prophet of God, whose proper name is Allah.  Spirituality can be found within the teachings of all three of these religions, although it is not tied to any particular dogma.

Religionists without spirituality are arrogant and judgmental.  They seek to remain separate from others to whom they feel superior.  They cannot learn from history because they are constantly rewriting it.   They ignore Scriptures that condemn their arrogance, like Luke 18:11.   They often presume to speak for God, attributing natural disasters to God’s wrath at those whom they disdain.  Remember Pat Robertson gleefully explaining the earthquake in Haiti as God’s retribution for the Haitians making a deal with the Devil during their revolution?  Michelle Bachman just stated that Hurricane Irene was God telling Washington to cut spending. (She later claimed to have been joking).

Several years ago, at the request of some alienated and isolated African American students, I delivered a lecture on spirituality at a conservative Christian College just outside Chicago.   I began- I thought innocuously- by stating that the first law of spirituality is that we all have more in common than that which separates us and that we should understand that for the majority of people their particular religion is an accident of birth; people born in Islamic countries tend to be Muslims and people born in Christian countries tend to be Christians.  The reaction could not have been stronger had I tried to kill them.   Little did I realize that by saying we are all the same, I was attacking the very foundation of all they held dear: their status as God’s Chosen People.

We are now faced with a new and invigorated army of slavery advocates.  I cannot overstate how evil it is for people to try to justify one of-if not the greatest- moral stains on the soul of the planet.  They can look themselves in the mirror and go to church every week because, rather than serve God; they are served by a God (of their own invention) Whose sole purpose is to feed their greed and insecurities.  Many members of my generation feel that they have marched and protested enough.  They just want to live comfortably.  Quite understandable.  But these neo-slavery advocates demand vigilance.  

If I could sum up the antidote to these fools, I’d quote a personal hero of mine, the ridiculously profound African American theologian, Howard Thurman, who once said, “I always look for my own scent when I meet another man.”

Helping Obama Stand Up To Republcans

                President Obama is a smart guy who understands the issues and what needs to be done.  He might have become the greatest president ever, were it not for the viral condition that has plagued the Democratic Party for decades, but seems to have hit him more than anyone else:  his weakness is his weakness.   When you stop and think about what the Democrats and Republicans stand for, it’s amazing that there is such a thing as the Republican Party.   They want to deregulate the financial industry so that they can steal billions and wreck the economy again as they did under both Bush administrations.  They bust unions, not just now, but going back to the greatest Republican of all, Ronald Reagan, who started his presidency by busting the air traffic controllers union.  They are absolutely fine with allowing oil companies and mining companies to destroy the planet.  They balance budgets on the backs of the working class people, the sick, and college students while protecting tax loopholes for the wealthy.  Yet, they consistently beat up on Democrats, especially Obama; cheered on by the very people they are hurting.  Amazing!

                I don’t know why the Republicans are so strong, and the Democrats so weak.  I do know that the Republicans have proudly staked out their position on the political spectrum as conservatives.  They transmogrified the word “liberal” into something dirty, and the Democrats whimpered along with it.  While John Kerry was running for the presidency, he appeared on the “Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Stewart pitched him the biggest, slowest softball imaginable, “Are you the most liberal member of Congress?”   It was the perfect platform for Kerry to launch into a response that said, “If being liberal means that I care about the elderly, and the working class people, then, yes.  If it means making a tax code that finally gives a break to working class people, then, yes.  If it means that I want all Americans, and not just the wealthy to have an opportunity to get a great education, then yes.”  He could have said all those things and more and reclaimed the left from a position of strength.  Instead, Kerry’s response was?  Drum Roll please!  “No.”

                Obama elevated the Democratic practice of being weak and not fighting back to an art form. Democrat Joseph Lieberman  supported Obama’s Republican opponent, Jon McCain, and stood quietly with the Republicans while Obama’s character was being assassinated during the election.   When McCain lost, Lieberman crawled back to the Democratic Party.  The word from Obama was that there would be no retaliation for Lieberman’s defection.  First chance he got, Lieberman voted against  Obama’s health care bill.  The tone was set.  No matter what you do to this guy, there will be no repercussions.   

                I have to admit that as a staunch Obama supporter, I tried to rationalize his weakness when it first came out.  I claimed he was being metaphysical, citing Romans 12:20 "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head."   Then I realized that scripture was intended for interpersonal relationships, not for the running of the government or of a business.

                There is no need to go on documenting Obama’s weakness against the Republicans.  A mention of the folding on the Public Option on the Health Care bill and the capitulation on increased revenues on the debt ceiling/ budget debate should more than suffice.  The only time Obama has shown any anger, was when he directed it against his own supporters.  For African Americans and other Progressives, this is a one Party system.  The only recourse we have is to either voter Democrat or sit the elections out.  So what can we do about our first African American President consistently wimping out on us?  How can we get him to effectively deal with those big bad Republicans?

                First he needs to establish a cabinet level position of liaison to the Republicans.  Of course he couldn’t call it that.  He could make up some name for it, like Department of Enterprise, Actualization, Taxation and Health, or DEATH!  Next he’d have to find the right person to chair that department.  He’d need someone with executive experience.  The person would have to be plain spoken, where the President is professorial.  Bold where the President is timid.  He’d inspire fear and respect instead of the insolence and impudence that is currently heaped on Obama.  It also would not hurt if he were an African American man.  After all, Obama is the only president in history who does not have a single senior advisor who matches him demographically.  There is one person, whom I know of, who would fit the bill: Suge Knight.

                Knight is known to be a violent thug who works through intimidation.  Normally, those qualities would disqualify him for most positions.  Yet for Obama’s purposes, these qualities are exactly what is needed.  There would obviously have to be some modifications in doing business as usual with Suge on board.  He would be the only cabinet member excused from all cabinet meetings and state dinners, and not charged with informing the president of his actions.  In fact, his job description would include NOT telling the president.  He also might have to be the first cabinet member listed as a foreign national for diplomatic immunity purposes.  Normally that might be difficult, but since they don’t want to believe Barak is an American citizen, it shouldn’t be too difficult to pass Suge off as a foreign diplomat/cabinet member.

Suge would have to be free to hire his own staff members, none of whom would be subject to background checks.  His sole purpose would be to persuade Republicans to be more reasonable in negotiating with the president.  This may all sound a bit farfetched.  But if Suge had been in this position during the debt ceiling/budget debate, I can guarantee that John Boehner would not have come out of it bragging, “I got 98% of what I wanted.”

               

               

SOLUTIONS TO CRIME IN BLACK AMERICA PART II

Solutions to Crime in Black America Part II

(Please scroll down, if you’d like to see the two previous blogs on this issue)

Standards-for teachers and students- must be raised, not lowered.  We now have English teachers who cannot conjugate, and high school graduates who cannot tell the difference between a verb and an adjective.  This may sound a bit trivial, but I believe that words are the clothes we put on our ideas.  The more elegant the clothing, the more elegant the ideas. The more disciplined the language, the more disciplined the thinking; and we need more discipline in any incarnation we can get it.

Much of our underclass does not understand the value or true nature of education.  I remember shortly after graduating from college telling a woman that I was working in textbook publishing.  She responded that the factory was hiring.  She knew I had a degree, but saw no relationship between that degree and the type of work I was doing.  On a higher level, our kids need to know that the education they receive in schools is there to prepare them to continue educating themselves throughout the rest of their lives.  Most of all, they need to know that it is really cool to be smart!

Another fundamental issue with the underclass and education lies in the fact that the underclass- as do all marginalized people- lives in the moment- from crisis to crisis.  While working in Child Welfare, I received calls from frantic parents whose heating gas had been turned off, desperately trying to get the gas back on because the temperature was supposed to drop THAT DAY.  In many cases, the gas may have been off for months.  They knew that winter was coming, but did nothing until the freezing temperatures were upon them.   It is extremely difficult for people who function like this to attend to their children’s educational needs that won’t pay dividends for years to come.

Governmental bureaucracies must be pressured to open up to new ideas and approaches.  Several years ago I put together what I still believe to be a powerful program for empowering parents and children.  The program was called SPEAK (Serious Parents Empowering Achieving Kids).    The Chicago Housing Authority was emptying its public housing and needed programs for helping residents integrating the world outside the projects.   I spent four years trying to get my program considered by the CHA as well as the IDCFS (Illinois Department of Children and Family Services) where I had previously worked, to no avail.  No one even saw it. This isn’t a personal lament.  I’m not the only original thinker out here, and these problems require creativity that the system precludes.

Next we come to the 800 lb. gorilla: the Black church.  The only institution that is completely owned and operated by the African American community, the church represents enormous potential in this fight.  I would need a couple hundred pages to fully explicate the role of religion and the institution itself in this matter, so what I’m writing here will be spectacularly cursory.

Back in the 1980’s, I delivered a paper before AHSA (African Heritage Studies Association, a prestigious African American think tank, founded by Dr. John Henri Clarke, whose members/ participants have included everyone from Maulana Karenga to Barbara Sizemore to Dr. Joseph Ben Jochannan, to Ivan Van Sertima) entitled The Black Church, Cultural Nationalism, and The Prevention of Crime Among Americans of African Descent.  Wildly oversimplified, the basic premise of the paper was that people act in accordance with their sense of identity, or how they see themselves.  (For example, criminals view themselves as predators and act as such).  Churches inadvertently provide a sense of identity (Who are you?  I’m a Christian).   By utilizing cultural nationalism as a tool, churches could extend their sphere of influence beyond the borders of their memberships, and impact on negative behavior in the community by helping people define themselves in positive ways. 

We must understand that all religion is intrinsically political.  African American church leaders, from Richard Allen, Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond lead the fight for just and equality from the abolition of slavery to Civil Rights and beyond.  Conversely, White preachers traveled from plantation to plantation preaching to slaves to make them docile.  They quoted Ephesians 6:5-9 and Timothy 6:1-2 among other texts to justify slavery.  The same tactics were used to subjugate the serfs in feudal Europe.  The fact that slaves had rights and were still regarded as human beings until the peculiar institution of American slavery always got left out.

Ministry students study the history of the church extensively.  They cannot lead that which they do not understand.  Yet many African American ministers are clueless when it comes to the history of their own people!  Make sense?

Jesus was of a people who could be mistaken for Egyptians a la Moses.  Yet the most popular images of Him are of a blond blue eyed European.  Between these images, and Black folks constantly singing about wanting to be washed as white as snow, I’d say we have a problem.  I could go on and on, but I’d need a 500 page tome to fully express this issue.

I’m proposing that quality of life councils, or committees be established in areas where crime is an issue.   They would consist of members of the various communities that could impact the issue: education, law enforcement, judicial, social services, and others.  Resources and ideas could be shared.  This is, by no means, a panacea.  But it is a start.  And we’ve   got to do something.

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Solutions to Crime in Black America: Part One

                The magnitude and scope of crime in Black America is such that the time has clearly come to develop a new serious approach predicated on a new and serious commitment to ameliorating it.  (For those of you who missed the last blog or would like to refresh yourselves with the causes of crime, please scroll down to the last entry). The first step is for the rest of society to recognize what thoughtful law enforcement officials already know: this level of crime is NOT simply a law enforcement issue.  It is a social, political, economic and historical problem that must be attacked as such, from all different disciplines.

First, we must hold our elected officials’ feet to the fire on the issue.  They must be held accountable for, if not developing new strategies, at least implementing them in this fight.  They must demonstrate the will to overcome this debilitating issue.  Resources must be dedicated.  We need reparations to address this issue.  Of course, anyone who has been awake since Obama’s election knows that the racist elements in this country will thwart any efforts to set funds aside specifically for African Americans.  But creative ways can and must be found to fight this battle.  If (non-budgeted) funds can be found to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, surely they can be found for a more imminent war against crime in America.

An extensive advertising campaign needs to be launched.  On many levels, the issue of crime is an issue of ideas.  We must attack the ideas behind crime:   ideas such as “since my life doesn’t mean anything, neither does yours, and I have the right to take it,” or “the world owes me something” “ I proved my manhood by knocking up all those girls,”  “hurting people is fun” and the list goes on.  We have already seen the power of advertising to change behaviors.   Ads can point out that excellence is not only achievable, but expected.  The power of advertising to influence behavior is well documented.

Consider that not that long ago, it was perfectly acceptable to smoke anywhere.  Then came the “We mind very much if you smoke” campaign, and all that began to change.  Prior to that, back when filters on cigarettes were considered effeminate, advertisers convinced men smoke filtered cigarettes with the invention of the Marlboro Man, who sported a tattoo on his hand.  There was no way macho men were going to drink diet beer.  But what if they called it “lite” beer, and recruited a bunch of super tough former jocks to endorse it?  Advertisers made safety a criteria for car buying, where previously the consumers were concerned mostly about performance.  The list goes on.  These campaigns would have to be drafted by people who really understand the issues and perhaps in conjunction with African American psychologists and sociologists.

We have negative elements in our community whose messages of hatred, violence and stupidity must be repudiated.   Someone just sent me a piece on Lil Wayne (of whom I knew absolutely nothing, until that article) and the disgusting and foul message he puts out.  In this piece, Dr Boyce Watkins, stated that he was boycotting BET for disseminating this garbage.  My response was to ask about the Negro who started BET by eschewing any uplifting programming in favor of rap videos and who made no effort whatsoever to sell to responsible African Americans.  We must apply standards to all, and be willing to boycott or otherwise ostracize those who would exploit our communities regardless of the race of the offenders.

The schools have a major role to play in the war against crime.  Starting in elementary school, we can begin to plant seeds of positive attitudes and behaviors.  One place to start is with vocabulary lessons.  Words such as “honor” and “integrity” must be introduced and discussed at an early age.  Life skills classes, loaded with lessons on anger management, personal responsibility, empathy, morality and the difference between goal setting and dreaming,  need to be instituted.    There is nothing new about life skills classes.  When I was a kid, they taught classes on Home Economics that provided basic information on how to run a household.  These classes were just for girls back then. (I quietly objected to this discrimination- not out of a sense of fairness, but because I thought I’d grow up to be a swinging bachelor!  Silly Rabbit!)

Life skills must teach realistic expectations.  Far too many of our children focus their career ambitions on one of three areas: NBA, NFL or rapper.  Kids who barely made their high school teams, think they can play in the NBA.  For every successful rapper, there are probably at least a half million would-be rappers.   None of these kids have back-up plans or marketable skills.  I’ve counseled many of these kids with these goals.  I told them that becoming a rapper or making the NBA was like playing Musical Chairs with ten thousand people playing and only one chair.  No matter how good you are, only one person will be able to sit.  Virtually all of the kids I worked with had the same reaction:  “Nobody ever told me that or talked to me like that.”  The kids aren’t stupid.  No one is telling them anything!!!

We need to teach our kids real, Black history, starting in elementary school.   The only reason Daniel Boone and Kit Carson were more famous than Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, was the racism of those recording the history.    No one who knows about Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Denmark Vesy or Toussaint L’ouverture, can ever be brainwashed by the propaganda that Blacks were content to be slaves.   One book that had a profound impact on me was the story of Piankhi, the Nubian warrior king.  I was in second or third grade when I read it.  I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but the sense of pride I felt in reading about this great African king, I believe, helped in some small way keep me on my incredibly tenuous path to a productive life.  Black history must be taught separately as well as integrated into the fabric of all history.  Everyone needs to know the magnificent contributions we have made.

The fight to properly educate our children does not begin and end with the classroom.  Thoughtful African Americans are needed on the adoption committees that choose the textbooks for our schools.  Back in the 1970’s, I worked for a major textbook publishing firm.   I was surprised to learn that almost all of the African American employees had been hired within a time frame of a couple of years.  It was clear that we weren’t welcome.  I soon learned that the only reason there were any workers of color was because the predominantly African American adoption committee in Detroit revolted when they learned that the company had no black editorial employees. Even with their Black staff, this textbook firm continued to resist any efforts to fairly represent the Black community.

The battle over textbook content has never been more significant.  The good people of Texas have been busy little beavers rewriting and whitewashing history.

Let’s not kid ourselves.  For kids from homes where there is no structure; where the moms curse the children like drunken sailors, and basic manners and respect are non-existent; this is no small task.  But we do what we can.  The educational system should distinguish between children who have parents who will pick up their report cards and those who don’t.  Strategies, perhaps involving incentives, can be devised to involve the parents in their children’s educations.  We may be able to implement some evening classes that could involve both parents and students as family building activities.  Whenever possible parents must understand that they are every bit as responsible as the teachers for their kids’ education.   Basic lessons on respect can be taught in elementary school and elevated into a more sophisticated lesson plan on through high school.

Next:  Part two of solutions (STAY TUNED)