Social Responsibility

The September 11 observances were so moving. Some of the people who posted to my Comments on another site shared remarkable things. Some who wrote to me privately told of things that can be proven. Their statements show the bad faith and puppeteering of the day’s events. Just as with learning that the re-election of Bush the Younger was an inevitability, I was disappointed but no longer shocked at the news.

Explanations for the Inaction

Perhaps that loss of shock and social indignation is the reason so many of us allowed the snowballing effect of allowing our rights to be usurped. That was probably accompanied by (as in the Nixon regime) being overwhelmed with so many social, economic, and career upheavals that the only thing we could do was simply try to make the band-aid work to patch the gaping hole in our social fabric and livelihood.

I received many posts from a fellow in Morocco. The posts show the effects of the bombings and uranium that contaminates the environment. The quotes he provided and the anecdotes of life in the war zone(s) make me hate the fact that we, like sheep, accepted the increasingly fascist rule under the Reagan/Bush/Bush regimes and that we never had the motivation to exercise our rights as citizens to remove the ones (especially the last one) from office for failure to do the will of the people. Indeed, the majority of the people were willing to swallow the swill passed off as patriotism and a worthy national cause as truth. We blindly marched to the edge of the cliff and our own destruction in lemming style.

Racial Damnation

The fact that minorities, especially Blacks who are doomed to live out their lives in the ghetto, existing with poor education, lackluster values, their only hope contained in the deals they’re able to do to earn more than minimum wage and overcome the restrictions of welfare is consciously devastating to me. The fact that there are those who would, by example and deportment, damn others who are not of that ilk (and never were) is also disappointing to me.

The fact that Blacks carry such a burden from one generation to the next for eternity is not a curse but a test of how resilient the race can be. It is a test of each person with any part of an identity with that race to show the best of who they are. We are leaders, all of us, and we must lead by example.

When can we stop and relax? Only when behind our own doors and still being the best we can be for our own selves and for the sake of proving to our God that He has made a good steward in us to carry out His works in marvelous ways. Each time we go slack, we invite those who would keep us under their foot and in social bondage, we confirm their low opinion of us. We sin against ourselves. More importantly, we confirm that we are an example of what can be expected of the race — the poorest in personal habits, language, work product, knowledge, and everything else.

I still remember the words of my Second Grade teacher. I can’t remember what caused her to make the pronouncement. And in the mid 1950s, elementary school classes were a mix of colors and races, all children simply there to learn and be part of the mix without regard to the differences. But she told her charges, “. . . because you are Negro, you will have to be twice as good [as the Whites] in order to be considered half as good.” Her words were to encourage us to learn as much as we could and to put that knowledge to use in all aspects of our lives.

Where are those values today? Do we teach those values to the youth of today? I think not. I believe we teach them to expect to be subjugated and cut out of the race to be best. They then opt for their own entrepreneurial path, not realizing they do not have the training and knowledge to embark on such an endeavor. Thus, they stumble and do business in a poor and slipshod way, thereby setting an example that minority, and especially Black, business people are not a good choice for goods, services, advice and so on.

How should we survive? Will we overcome?