When The Village Elders Go To Rest...Before It's Time
After sometime of hanging around, I caught the tail end of one of our pastors talking to a young man. "Now you have your mother read this to you." "Yes, sir." Being a big advocate of making children read, I quickly interjected my two cent. "No, you read it." The young man turned his lovely big round eyes on me in bewilderment. I wasn't ready for his reply. "I can't read." After asking him how old he was, in a moment I was devastated. He was in the third grade and he could not read.
Of course I could not just let him except this as his reality! No. Never would I allow a young black male to believe that is something he CAN'T do!!! Never, ever! Trying to hold back my tears, anger, and absolute disgust at what was allowed to happen to him, I drove in hard that he could read. It may be a struggle at first, he might have to work extra hard, but he could read. And I wanted him to know that. Those eyes stared back at me as if to say, "No one has ever told me that I could, but if you say I can I will."
"You can read!...You understand?" "Yes ma'am!"
The Black community has become so skilled at blaming others for the destruction and dying off of our villages, while skirting our responsibility in the problem. We hold majority of the blame. I know that I just used the most vulgar words by saying the blame falls mostly on us.
But the real #Blacklivesmatter outcry is how we have allowed our villages to become unproductive, desolate, cesspools of self hatred and destruction. If we could educate ourselves during slavery, under the harshest circumstance, risking our lives just to learn how to read, how come we can not educated our villages with all of the modern amenities afforded to us? During Reconstruction we produced some of the greatest inventors, medical professionals, engineers, lawyers, educators, artist and so much more of the best that this country has ever known. There was no Brown vs Board of Education. But the village elders worked their fingers to the bone, endured raids of their home and murder to ensure that the next generation would be a success at the cost of blood, sweat, and tears. But it's the "Man's" fault that our modern villages are burning to the ground?
Until our village elders actually stop working to build their religious kingdoms, obsessed with sporting fine designer wear, amassing car collections, wasting money on booze and cigars, partying with the people they claim are responsible for the collapse of the village wealth, and get back to taking care of the people in the village we will continue to be a cancer destroying our own chances of being great again.
If we spent the same amount of energy pushing and promoting knowledge of our great ones the way we do half naked singers, vulgar mouth comedians and actors, and self promoting preachers our young people would know who and what they can be. We will wast hard earned money on shoes endorsed by a men who give little back to their village, in comparison to their wealth they have gained from mothers and fathers on limited income.
How do we get angry at others because they do not care about our village the way they do theirs, when we don't give a two cent bubble gum wrapper about our own? How much money has the Black community spent on books in the last 5 years? How much have we spent on hip-hop and R&B concerts? How much have we invested in art and development programs for our children? How much have we wasted on video games? How many hours of school have we skipped? How much time have we spent watching day time talk shows and evening reality shows? What is the percentage of parents who attend in-service days or go to PTO/PTA meetings at their children's school? How many parents bought their children the latest smartphone?
The question is who's really at fault for the dying of our villages? It's a sad reality that many of our village elders have gone into retirement and rest well before time. Don't call a rally and march the streets when a white police officer shoots one of our own! Let's get angry when one of us cut short our future greats. That's when we need to march. We march to take back our village from the evil that invades our mind to hate ourselves so that we shoot and kill each other. We get the drugs out of our community. Our men volunteer to read to young men in our schools. Our men patrol our street, protecting our young from the dangerous serpents. Our women show young ladies how to love ourselves so that we don't become whores prostituted on stages for every one to gawk at like they did our enslaved ancestors.
Village elders, WAKE UP! This is not the time to sleep. Wake up...!!! Our villages are dying.
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