Yes Somebody Should Be Rowing

Unfortunately, President George Bush, the man we elected to do the job of leading this country is in charge until January of 2009.  To hold President-elect Barack Obama responsible for the mess Mr. Bush has made of things is pretty unfair.  Mr. Obama himself has said that we only have one President and he needs to do his job.  But it won’t stop a lot of people.  If the study of human nature proves anything is that people are more than ready to have double standards.

Black Friday Because Money Is Nothing Worth Saving

Although not exactly an official holiday, because so many take the day after Thanksgiving off, Black Friday is recognized as the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season.  Retailers often decorate for the Christmas season weeks even months before.  But nevertheless, many retailers open very early, typically five in the morning or earlier, and offer door buster deals and loss leaders to draw people to their stores.  The term Black Friday is supposed to have originated as a reference to the heavy traffic on that day and the beginning of the period in which many retailers are operating in the black and actually earning a profit.

In many places it is not uncommon to see news stories of shoppers lined up hours before stores with big sales open.  Once the store opens, shoppers will stampede like credit card carrying cattle afraid that the stores may have only a few of the big draw items.  Local media often promotes the frenzy and will cover the event, mentioning how early the shoppers began lining up at various stores and providing video of the shoppers standing in line and later leaving with their purchased but questionably affordable items.

Here in St. Louis, the local news reported that there was a gentleman camping outside one of the local Best Buy stores before the store even closed Wednesday night.  The Best Buy will open about five so this guy waited about thirty six hours and for what?  If this man had a real life he would’ve kept things in perspective, kept the need to consume balanced with his need to continue with the rest of his life.  But the need to perpetuate the hype, the need to add to the frenzy, the need to help perpetuate business as usual takes precedence over the exercise of common sense.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the young man camping outside the Best Buy is a store employee.  The store manager wants to manufacture the idea people need to come to this particular store to get the real deals so a deal was struck where this guy could get something in return whether it’s being paid or exchanged for time off or something else that might not be worth the temporary life stoppage.  But someone driving buy or hearing about the early retail camper on the news like I did would be influenced to think that they have to get in line as well in order to have a better chance of going broke or going into debt.

All year long we have been hearing about the condition of our economy and how people need to be a lot more careful with their spending.  People need to save money and make sure they have enough wealth on hand to weather any hidden financial storms that might be coming our way.  All that logical advice gets thrown out the window.  Yes we need to be careful with our finances, but this is a relatively brand new tradition to help retailers drum up the business that helps the retailers.  It is probably in somebody’s directive somewhere that the local news must promote retailers if the television station wants retailers to advertise on their channel.

This morning, many of us have forgotten the lessons we have spent the past year learning and have made the choice to continue as if our lives as retail consumers will continue indefinitely.  Even with talk about the domestic auto industry collapsing and the devastating economic ripple has the potential to affect one out of ten of us directly and everyone with absolutely few exceptions indirectly, we will continue to spend and borrow and foolishly give away our money, the only thing that the majority of people value about us.

We know we need money to survive and to prepare for a better future for our family.  But instead of spending money wisely and investing in our future we are spending money on cutting edge electronics and popular toys that will be obsolete by the time they’re carted outside to a waiting vehicle.  Money that could have been used for the purchase of health insurance or life insurance or an education or whatever that has the real potential to improve and/or maintain a standard of living over the long term will instead by used to buy a trinket.  It might be an expensive trinket, but it is a trinket nevertheless.

Yesterday, many of us gathered together around the dining room table to give genuine heart felt thanks for our good fortune.  Today many of us are willing to line up at some retailers front door for our chance to blow that good fortune away.  That’s okay.  God will bless us with enough good fortune next year so that we can blow it all away again.  It’s tradition.  And despite whatever we learn over the year that says a new tradition of poverty might be in our future, until it comes, it’s business as usual.

Thankful I’m Not In Mumbai This Morning

I guess somebody hates India’s freedoms and want to destroy its way of life this morning.  Yesterday, a group calling itself the Deccan Mujihideen is took credit for a series of coordinated attacks against the public in Mumbai, India, located along the west coast of the country overlooking the Arabian Sea.

Gunmen attacked at least ten targets in India’s financial capital city.  Over a hundred people are feared dead.  More than three hundred people have been wounded in the highly coordinated attacks by bands of militants dressed in black shirts and jeans who invaded two five star hotels, the popular Leopold’s restaurant, a Jewish center, a crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji railroad station where gunmen sprayed bullets into the crowded terminal leaving the floor splattered with blood, the Cama and Albless Hospital and G.T. Hospital, as well as other sites.  The gunmen killed indiscriminately, armed with assault rifles, hand grenades and explosives.

One of the most high-profile targets was the landmark of Indian luxury the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel.  Shootings were followed by a series of explosions that set fire to parts of the hotel on Mumbai’s waterfront. Screams were heard and black smoke and flames billowed, continuing to burn until dawn.  The gunmen also seized the Mumbai headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Jewish outreach group Chabad Lubavitch and attacked the Oberoi Hotel.  The gunmen appeared to be holed up inside all three buildings on Thursday, holding hostages, as Indian commandos surrounded the buildings.

Mumbai is considered the center of India’s financial community and a symbol of India’s prosperity.  It is also one of the most populated cities in the world with some eighteen million people crammed into everything from shantytowns to high rise luxury condos.  As India’s affluence grows so does its disparity.  A lot of experts and pundits will say that these people have no respect for human life.  These pundits are the same people who are more likely to have one of those high rise condos while other people live in a corrugated metal lean-to in the high rise’s shadow.

We see the blood of people on the floor of the train station and think how horrible.  But we don’t mind looking at the factory floor stained with the blood and sweat of people who labor for the smallest fraction of currency each and every day in order to make somebody else unimaginably wealthy.  Blood sacrificed solely for the sake of somebody else’s wealth is very tolerable.

Thoughts On Thanking God

Before I get too deep in this article I just want to take a moment to say that I’d like to give thanks to god for all he has done for me and for others through me.  I thank god for being here today and I pray to god with thanks for my health and the health of my family.  I give thanks to god for giving me the strength and resources to face each and every trial and tribulation that god uses to test my character.  We give thanks for the food on our table as well as the food not on our table.  We give thanks to god for our health even when we are struck with disease and conditions, some times devastating, because we know no matter how bad we may have it, it can always get worse.

We give thanks to god and do our best to stroke his ego because we know that every time we see a rainbow in the sky we are reminded that god has a history of being a vicious killer who could wash the vast majority of humanity away with torrential rains.  We give thanks that god spares us from the angel of death that could come and take away our first born sons.  We give thanks to god and give him a cut of our prosperity through our local church because we know that if we fail to make payments to god and give him a piece of the pie that we open ourselves to misfortune.  It’s not tithing, it is protection money.

A lot of people do a lot of conspicuous prayer of thanks to the almighty.  Back when I used to go to church with my Pentecostal pa or my Presbyterian ma we would start every get together for worship with a prayer of thanks.  I watch football and see so many players drop to their knees in the end zone after scoring a touchdown.  I don’t watch much baseball any more.  But I do remember the occasional home run hitter touching themselves in the catholic cross pattern or kissing the golden cross trinket hanging around their neck as they started their run around the bases.  On the news, one doesn’t have to wait long to see somebody whose house just burnt down to the ground give thanks to god because that person and his or her entire family got out with their lives.

We give thanks to god for not kicking our ass the way he kicked somebody else’s ass.  We give thanks to god for not striking our family with a child with severe mental problems.  But then we will turnaround and tell the people with an autistic child that god wouldn’t have given them that child with mental problems if they couldn’t handle it.  We hear stories of people having their baby shot to death while they slept in their cribs from a stray bullet from a gun several blocks away.  God wouldn’t allow a five hundred megaton incendiary bomb to fall on children’s heads unless they could handle it.  God would not have allowed their entire world to be turned upside down and utterly destroy their lives unless he had a reason.  We know that god wouldn’t give anyone more war than they can handle.  God works in mysterious ways you know.  Let’s give thanks that we are not part of that mystery.

It might be a mystery, but there’s always a reason god lets one or a few benefit so greatly from destruction while others are devastated.  We all know that god wouldn’t give anyone more trouble than they can handle.  But is the opposite true?  Would god give god give anyone more success than they could handle?  Let’s put our hands together in a prayer of thanks to god that none of us has to worry about suffering from more success than they can handle.

God is a very busy spiritual entity.  A lot of people need to come to terms with how insignificant our lives are to the Supreme Being.  God isn’t waiting in heaven to hear our praise and thanks in words of prayers because they are like music to his all powerful, all listening ears.  God isn’t a spiritual puppet master trying to figure out exactly how much pressure he can apply to send each and every one of us to the brink.  Why in the world would he be testing us anyway?  That’s just stupid for someone who is supposed to already know everything.  That’s not mystery but stupidity.  God works in stupid ways!  But let’s give thanks for the stupidity regardless.

Many of us have been taught that we praise god through the good and the bad.  We’re supposed to praise god at every meal and at every gathering and at every morning and before we lay to rest.  We’re supposed to praise god for every ass kicking as well as every act of alleged spiritual largess.  But god doesn’t need or want or even listens to empty praise or prayers of thanks for every little thing that happens in life.  Believe it or not god knows we go to bed and he knows we have to eat.  The last thing that god needs to do is listen to a billion people saying thank you every minute something routine happens in their life.  Rote prayers of praise and thanks from humanity are pretty much pointless.  I pray that the Supreme Being of unlimited intelligence figured that out by now.

Adherence To Tradition Not Adherence To Stagnation

“OK…I totally stumbled across this site haphazardly and I feel a little lost. What in the world are you talking about? I’m really curious about this now.

But as someone on the outside, knowing nothing about this sect of people or thoughts, I think it’s rather sad to be that caught up in anything outside of self. Any institution, any tradition, any unyielding static cultural remnant is, in my opinion, disastrous to our progression as human beings. I’m glad that you questioned the significance of your actions, though.

Would you mind writing me and filling me, though? I am always interested in anything spiritually enlightening! SophiaM@RealToolz4Pros.com” – Comment by Sophia

Thanks for the feedback Sophia,

People and people’s behavior run the gamut. While some people are rooted to the past, others are prone to look towards the future. While some people enjoy tradition and hierarchy and strict adherence to structure, others would prefer a more open and flexible environment. Ifa has a strong and long history of being a tradition strongly rooted to the past with strict adherence to spiritual law and hierarchy.

While some people are happy to follow spiritual traditions rooted in other cultures, others would like a spiritual connection to their African past. Unfortunately, there are few options for people to develop a spiritual link to their African past without the strict adherence to African tradition. And while that adherence to tradition served the African community well for thousands of years, in the age of capitalism and materialism, there is a stronger focus on developing wealth than there is on developing spirituality.

One can read about Ifa. There are plenty of books with people’s interpretation. But there are some concepts in Ifa that must be experienced. Even though the motivation of the teacher might be more geared towards earning a comfortable living, the student with a sincere desire to develop their spirituality will find their way. Spiritual entities like the ancestors and the Orisas and the Supreme Being Olodumare are more than ready to reach the student trying to reach them.

The spiritual entities do not have a list of regulations and rules and laws that each individual must adhere to in order to pass some test to earn spiritual enlightenment. A lot of people insist that the only way this can happen is if we spend our days in complete submission to tradition. People need to understand that spirituality runs the gamut just like anything else.

My time with my spiritual house was time well spent. These days I may not follow the traditional tenets that say people must shave their head to prove their devotion to spirituality, but in order to truly understand I sacrificed my hair to learn it. No one else needs to. If they want the significance or the symbolism of a head shaving to be associated with their initiation then more power to them. I just don’t think people should go around saying that adherence to tradition is absolutely necessary.  It is a choice.

Adherence to tradition is not necessarily a bad thing.  For example, I come from a family of ten children and we are spread across the country.  Like many families, my family has a tradition of attending family reunions.  Ever since I could remember when always made a pilgrimage to see our mom and dad’s old stomping grounds to celebrate Grandparent Peacemakers.  Because my immediate family is so focused on keeping our parent’s traditions going, we can’t seem to focus on getting our own immediate family reunion jumpstarted.  My brothers and sisters and I would have more flexibility in our plans to get together if some of us didn’t feel so obligated to continue our parent’s tradition.

But if we ever successfully make the transition to making our new tradition a priority, we run the risk of losing touch with our extended family through the disconnection from old traditions.

The bottom line tradition and innovation need to be balanced.  Unfortunately, many organized spiritualities, such as Ifa which is wrapped up solely around tradition as practiced by the large number of members, do not lend themselves to the side leaning towards originality.  The only thing traditional Ifa lends itself to is tradition.  In the end innovation loses and stagnation triumphs.

Peace

Forgiveness In The New Age Of Political Bipartisanship

A lot of attention is being paid to President-elect Barack Obama’s cabinet choices and his willingness to pull people from the other side of the political aisle as well as his old political opponents.  There is talk that Mr. Obama has offered the post of Secretary of State to his Democratic nominee competitor New York Senator Hillary Clinton with all of her foreign policy experience and tarmac ducking experience.  Mr. Obama is entertaining this even after Ms. Clinton planted the idea during the campaign that while Ms. Clinton and Arizona Senator John McCain have years and years of experience, Mr. Obama has little more than a speech to his credit and is little more than a warmed over version of Jesse Jackson.

More talk has Mr. Obama extending an olive branch to his Republican rival Mr. McCain even though Mr. McCain went off the deep end and called the new President-elect a dangerous choice for America and made the suggestion that Mr. Obama isn’t one of us, the patriotic Americans who love America.  Mr. McCain couldn’t even look at his rival for the presidency during their first debate.  And now, the man Mr. McCain blatantly disrespected is willing to bury the hatchet and talk about some political collaborative efforts that he could use Mr. McCain’s help on.

Mr. Obama has even forgiven the political turncoat Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, who deliberately and unabashedly worked hard to get Mr. McCain elected.  In December of 2007, Mr. Lieberman endorsed Senator John McCain for the presidency.  Mr. Lieberman even went so far as to denounce the entire Democratic Party in a speech to the Republican faithful when he made an appearance on stage during the Republican National Convention.  Mr. Lieberman faced serious retribution for his betrayal of his party.  Many of Mr. Obama’s supporters wanted Mr. Lieberman stripped of his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

However, Mr. Obama had urged Senate majority Leader Harry Reid not to remove Lieberman from his position.  Mr. Reid has made public his anger over Mr. Lieberman’s criticism of Obama during the election.  The Senate Democratic Caucus voted 42 to 13 to allow Mr. Lieberman to keep his chairmanships, although he did lose his membership in the Environment and Public Works Committee.  Mr. Lieberman credited Mr. Obama for helping him keep his chairmanship and for his favorable treatment.

Without a doubt, there is a serious amount of forgiveness and clemency and hatchet burying going on in Washington these days.  People compare Mr. Obama’s overwhelming impression of political exculpation to the behavior of President Abraham Lincoln who pondered had to literally reconstruct the country after the civil war as Mr. Lincoln and his cabinet deliberated over how to reintegrate the states that tried to secede from the nation and what to do with Confederate leaders and the freed slaves, determined to find a course that would not alienate anyone.  People in Mr. Lincoln’s day thought that his policies were too lenient.  But nevertheless, Mr. Lincoln will go down in history as a President that worked to heal a nation and mend fences.

Mr. Obama is willing to forgive any and everyone except his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  Mr. Wright gained national attention when excerpted parts of his sermons were subjected to intense media scrutiny in an attempt to paint the new President-elect as little more than an undercover, typically angry black man who wants to make America pay for its so called abuses of the black community that happened so long ago because racism no longer exists.  Mr. Obama took extraordinary steps to calm the issue.  He denounced his pastor’s statements in a speech titled A More Perfect Union in which he sought to place the pastor’s comments in a historical and sociological context.  Many people thought the speech was historic.

But the scrutiny of critics continued to press the issue of his relationship with Mr. Wright.  The controversy came to a head when after trying to just fade away to oblivion Mr. Wright made a series of high profile media appearances in which he claimed amongst other things that Mr. Obama was simply a politician fighting for a political office.  He had to distance himself to look more acceptable to the American public.  Mr. Obama had enough.  Mr. Obama called a press conference and spoke more forcefully against his former pastor, saying that he was outraged and saddened by his spiritual mentor’s behavior and resigned his family’s membership in the church Mr. Wright help to make.

It’s interesting to note that right after Mr. Obama made his forceful condemnation of his former pastor, the interviews by Mr. Wright ceased.  Mr. Wright never retorted.  Mr. Wright, who many accused of trying to bring attention to him self and injure his spiritual protege, quickly returned to his path of obscurity, as if he had accomplished whatever he had set out to do.  Whether it was intentional or not, scripted or not, real or not, planned or not, the public action of severing his relationship with Mr. Wright was enough to bring closure to that particular issue for the vast majority.

Still, it is interesting that people who called Mr. Obama naïve, dangerous, a Muslim, unpatriotic, a terrorist, irresponsible, and wrong for America, are being welcomed back into the fold with open arms.  People who accused Mr. Obama of trying to teach children porn, of trying to turn the United States into a socialist country by taking away rich people’s money and giving it all to the poor, of palling around with terrorist, and of being the antichrist amongst many other accusations.  People who did their best to destroy Mr. Obama’s character are being forgiven.

But the one man that says Mr. Obama is who he is, a politician trying to win a political office, is just too offensive for even Mr. Obama to forgive in this new age of political enlightenment where even the greatest political devil can be made an ally.

Preemptive Pardons

Several ongoing Congressional investigations target either former and current members of President George Bush’s administration or deal with alleged misconduct associated with the war on terror.  There is speculation that Mr. Bush may issue preemptive golden pardons to protect those who supported his policies from conviction from a future administration.

Democratic New York Representative Jerrold Nadler introduced HR 1531  urging President Bush not to pardon senior administration officials or anyone else for crimes the President authorized.  This resolution says that Mr. Bush may have committed crimes involving the mistreatment of detainees, the extraordinary rendition of individuals to countries known to engage in torture, illegal surveillance of United States citizens, unlawful leaks of classified information, obstruction of justice, political interference with the conduct of the Justice Department, and other illegal acts.

Bush has been urged to grant preemptive pardons to senior administration officials who might face criminal prosecution for actions taken in the course of their official duties and Mr. Nadler’s resolution urges Congress to investigate those crimes and any pardons relating to them, and urges the attorney general to appoint an independent counsel to prosecute those crimes.

Transformation Dreaming

I used to have dreams of death that would literally scare me awake.  In my dreams, I have died a variety of ways.  I’ve fallen to my death.  I’ve been peppered with bullets.  I have been attacked by vicious wild animals from rabid squirrels to grizzly bears that were far from being a gentle Ben.  But for the last couple of nights I had a couple of dreams of death that gave me a new perspective on my relationship with the universe and my relationship with my spirituality.

Two nights ago, I had a dream that I was driving down the street in a Jeep CJ.  I pulled up to the red light of an intersection getting ready to make a left turn.  Two men were crossing the street in the crosswalk in front of the Jeep.  They stopped to talk to each other right in front of me.  I thought they were being jerks.  When the light turned green they continued to stand in front of me holding their conversation.  I turned the steering wheel a little harder and made my left by going around them.  As I continued to go on my way, two men appeared in the middle of the street again.  I drove by them as well.  Like the first pair of men I just went around the second set.  I looked up into the sky and there was a contrail of something headed straight down into the ground.  Suddenly there was a huge explosion.  It looked like a nuclear device detonated.  A few seconds later it looked like the horizon was growing.  A huge, fiery wall of sheer force was fanning out from the explosion point.  Escape was impossible.  I had only seconds to live.  I blew a kiss to the sky and thought to myself, I’m coming home.  When the wall of furious fire hit I was immediately consumed by the flames.  I had an out of body experience.  I could see inside the flames and I watched as my skeleton was charred to black inside the Jeep.

Last night I had another dream.  It started off inside what I believe to be a Home Depot.  I was in a gigantic home improvement store.  I remember walking through the paint and wallpaper department.  I was pushing an empty shopping cart.  As I walked out the store the shopping cart was able to follow me.  It was dark and kind of cool outside.  The parking lot was sloped and as I walked down it the shopping cart hit me in my back.  At the edge of the parking lot, I saw there was no place to park the cart so I turned around to push it back up the slope.  Suddenly I heard two gun shots.  I hadn’t noticed before but there was a young black teenager pretty close to me and he started ducking.  Not wanting to be a target I started ducking as well.  Two more shots rang out.  I turned and across the street from the parking lot was an angry young man with a pistol pointed in my direction.  He was wearing an oversized, red hooded sweatshirt and white sweatpants.  He was yelling.  He yelled at me that he hated my punk ass.  I did not know who he was or why he would be angry with me.  I fell to the ground.  A bullet from his gun grazed my left shoulder blade and left buttock.  The shooter was running towards me with the pistol extended and pointed at me.  By this time I’m lying prostrated on the ground with my head his best target.  His aim is bound to get better.  I am about to die.  My last thought was how much I loved my son.

At the end of both dreams I woke up.  The typical reaction to me dying in my dreams would be a racing heart from a sudden rush of adrenaline.  But instead of a racing heart I woke up as if I had experienced one of the most pleasant dreams ever.  From what I understand death is a symbol of profound change.  Death is nothing if not the most transformative change humans will ever experience.  All we know from this side of the life/death portal is that people mourn when loved ones die.  It’s typical to fear the loss of communication that comes with death.  No one knows what, if anything, lies on the other side waiting for us.  And fear of the unknown is one of the biggest fears of all.  If I had these dreams a few years ago I would have been waking up with my heart racing and head pounding and gasping for air as if I had ran a marathon.  But in these dreams I stayed calm.

While I am far from living with a death wish, I do understand that death is inevitable.  It is a common law of nature.  If something has a beginning, it too will have an end.  Nothing at our plane of existence is forever.  Everything changes.  To resist change is to resist growing.  To resist change is to resist progress and to resist proceeding down one’s spiritual path.  Growth doesn’t happen without change.  Transformation doesn’t happen without change.

No doubt my subconscious is trying to tell me something.  At forty six years old, I’m probably going through some sort of midlife crisis.  Like a lot of people, like many men, I’m probably trying to come to terms with the loss of my youth and the fact that there’s a good chance that the majority of my life years are behind me.  Unable to turn back the clock and redo parts of my life already done I really have no choice but to look forward to my life.  While others might don a leather jacket, bling, and a new sports car, I guess it appears that I might be ready for something a little more transformative in my life.

Ending The Luxury Of Disparity

I need some help here.  God has been asking me my opinion of race relations and humanity lately and I have to admit that I haven’t been very gracious.  I’ve been asking god questions like why he hasn’t hit the reset button already.  I ask god why he hasn’t steered that meteor our way to put all of us out of our misery.  God laughs at me.  Why would he destroy life on earth right now?  Because some people don’t like the way things are going right now or because some people have more material wealth than others or because there is hardship and struggle while others have it easy and live in relative luxury?  What would be the point?

The point is to stop this world so deeply entrenched in disparity and ugliness that keeps us so focused on the very things that keeps us from being focused on the very things that keep us from working together.  I like to believe there was a time when we would live simply and with a sense of community.  But these days, when I walk out my door in the morning, I know that it is me against just about everyone else in the world.  There’s the person who would mug me on the street if he or she could.  There’s the retailer who is trying to get me to pay more than his or her item is worth.  There is the big business corporation that wants to nickel and dime me into poverty.  There is the person driving without insurance.  There is simply so much we do as a society to keep from being a collective society.  Things like compassion, integrity, honesty, and so much more are quickly becoming things of the past.  We don’t even want to give each other the time of day let alone medical care.  This life is so miserable on so many different levels.

This is where god said something like, “So what would it take to change things?  And don’t ask for a meteor because the ultimate destruction of the world is not an option, at least not yet.”

I think if humanity was facing its ultimate and immediate annihilation, we might be galvanized into a cohesive unit enough to put petty squabbles of materialism aside and work together to save ourselves.  We would find a bigger villain than each other.  A meteor the size of Rhode Island heading for the Earth wouldn’t do much to change things.  Astronomers would see the harbinger of destruction coming and the people who have would buy the equipment needed to survive its impact.  They’d build personal fortresses in mountainous areas and load them with enough food, water, and equipment to keep a small army of people living comfortably for decades while the majority of humanity perished.

The phenomenon of global warming is on its way and people still insist on business as usual.  Until it becomes an irrefutable and unavoidable, slap you in the face circumstance of life somebody out there will think he or she can make a good living by keeping the status quo.  There are so many people who stand to make a lot of money by keeping the rest of the public distracted from the fact that global warming is real that it is unreal.  A somewhat distant future disaster is not the key to making people work together.

If there was something like a sudden series of multiple earthquakes all around the world that severely damaged major cities, highways, and generated mountainous waves that damaged coastlines, and brought our civilized way of life to its knees, then we might be so focused on getting back on our feet, helping each other survive, that there would be no time to think about the luxury of disparity.  Suddenly, the amount of money some computer bank somewhere said everybody owned wouldn’t matter.  The only thing that would matter would be survival.  It’s the kind of thing that happened when the twin towers of the World Trade Center was hit that fateful September morning.  It’s the kind of thing that happens when fires ravage the homes of the well to do.  It’s the kind of thing that happens when a hurricane washes away the homes of people living well off the coast of Galveston Island, Texas.

It doesn’t quite happen when the community that’s destroyed is predominantly black.  For some reason or another, when we see only black people suffering from a disaster, we have a tendency to think it is because black people deserve their daily day of reckoning.

God would change his question a bit.  He asked something to the affect, “So what would it take to change the disparity between the races?”

I have to stick to my previous answer.  I don’t think things will change until we are given a challenge that threatens our very lives.  God wants me to think about what I’m suggesting.  The analogy he used is that of a car off course.  Sometimes, a little steering change is better than a yank on the steering wheel.  The yank could send the car careening uncontrollably.  But the small steering inputs are good only when there is constant vigilance as to where the car is going.  When the car goes for long distances without any guidance it’s quite possible that the yank at the wheel is the only thing that will keep the vehicle from crashing significantly.  It depends on the situation.

God asked me what the situation is.  This is where I need help.  I think the situation warrants a redirection.  I think god has been gone a little too long and things have gotten out of control.  I don’t think we have the collective will to provide for us all.  Humanity thrives on disparity.  We thrive on greed.  We thrive on ego.  We thrive on a hierarchy of status that requires the majority of us to exist at the bottom while a small number of us benefit at the top.

But I could be wrong.  I could be jumping the gun.  I need someone to convince me that humanity will work to end poverty and provide enough for everyone to thrive if given enough time.  If given time we will find a solution to global warming.  We will confront all of the issues that keep parts of the world in a perpetual state of readiness for war.  We will take the resources we expend to develop more and more potent weapons of war that enable our various war machines to kill more effectively and use those resources for schools and education, health care, redevelopment of infrastructure, cancer research, and a variety of other programs that can improve our lives and the lives of our children and our children’s children.

However, until someone that can convince me that the human race is not a cesspool of greed and petty behaviors that manufactures and magnifies differences between people as a way to justify disparity, I’ll pray for this nightmare of so called civilization to end.  It’s only a matter of time before it all ends anyway.  Why prolong the cruelty and disrespect we show each other.

Does The “C” In CNN Stand For Coon?

My morning workday rituals include catching up on all the news overnight.  At some time around four in the morning I will start my day with the television on in the background.  I will start with the CBS national news.  I then will switch to the ABC national news to get their version of whatever somebody says is the top news for the day.  I then switch back to the CBS affiliate to get the local news.  And I wrap it all up with CNN, the most trusted name in news.  MSNBC with Joe Scarborough is not an option.  And FOX News is anything but news.  While the others get about thirty minutes apiece, CNN can benefit from as much as ninety minutes of my time.

For the past couple of months or so, with just about every break for commercials, CNN, the most trusted name in news, has been peppering their broadcasts with advertisements for their head coon as farce, D. L. Hughley.  CNN wants to capitalize on the trend for young people to get their news through comedy shows like the Daily Show with Jon Steward and the Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert.  In order to exploit this development, CNN has put its effort for comedy news behind Mr. Hughley.  And what a choice it is.  It ranks right up there with Arizona Senator John McCain choosing the infamous Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.  One of the advertisements for the program shows Mr. Hughley with his hand up as if trying to slow one of his guests down during one of his sure to be far from in depth interviews and saying something like, “Come on, man.  I barely know how to read.  I’ve got a G.E.D.”

Mr. Hughley is first to admit that he has no love of news, politics, current events.  He is quick to complain about the rigor of reading newspapers and web sites, listening to the radio talk shows, and watching his own network’s number one product, the anchored news broadcast.  And this is the man CNN wants to represent their foray into satirical news.  Mr. Hughley is about as qualified to be a network news anchor as Rush Limbaugh is qualified to be an advocate of affirmative action.

And speaking of affirmative action, it should be obvious to anyone with or without working vision balls that Mr. Hughley is a classic example of an unqualified black man benefitting from seriously unfair favorable treatment.  The last time I had anything to say about this man who will do anything to ingratiate himself to anyone willing to pay good money to see him lick boots, he was doing his best to bring attention to himself by telling black people to get over themselves and leave Don Imus alone.  Mr. Hughley was quick to add his less than helpful opinion and say, “There were some nappy headed women on the team and those are some of the ugliest women I have ever seen in my life.”  As a reward for being the epitome of the news media’s cheesing lawn jockey, Mr. Hughley is now given his own television show.

I must confess that I was tempted to tune into this show once.  During my morning ritual, an advertisement for the program showed an officious looking man calling Mr. Hughley a liar.  That piqued my curiosity for about a minute.  Early one Sunday morning, probably after the second or third airing of Mr. Hughley’s show, I found out that the officious guy calling the head coon as farce a liar was actually Josh Levs who appears regularly as part of CNN’s Truth Squad segment.  It turns out that Mr. Levs was planted on the scripted show and the liar accusation was nothing more than a gimmick.  The Sunday morning anchors were giving Mr. Levs a bit of teasing for being the victim of some colorful threats from Mr. Hughley.  I was glad that I never followed through on my curiosity.  I was disappointed in myself for being so easily duped into almost thinking of tuning into this travesty of comedy or of news.

Watching any other CNN program, no anchor, reporter, contributor, producer, cameraman, assistant, or anyone else affiliated with the news network would even think of promoting the fact that they didn’t have a degree, never mind never graduated from high school.  But there is no shame to Mr. Hughley’s lack of an education or lack of anything to credibly support him getting his own television show on CNN.  Stephen Colbert studied at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  Jon Stewart attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.  It took some searching but according to his linkedin.com web page Josh Levs attended Yale University.  But Mr. Hughley gets a pass with nothing more than a successful score on his general educational development test.

The Colbert Report is a 2008 winner of the George Foster Peabody Award which recognizes excellence in news and entertainment.  In 2008, the program also won an Emmy Award for outstanding writing for a variety, music, or comedy.  While I’d like to think that my opinion of anything is not influenced solely by the number of awards won or the caliber of such awards, for a comedy show to garner such recognition indicates a certain amount of sophistication and intelligent delivery in its development.

However, it would be no surprise to see Mr. Hughley’s show stoop to the sophomoric humor as fart jokes and put downs that are the staple of Mr. Hughley’s comedic talent.  What more can you expect from a man whose two cents to racially charged issues like a white man calling an organization of predominantly black women “There were some nappy headed women on the team and those are some of the ugliest women I have ever seen in my life.”  CNN might as well let Wolf Blitzer tell fart jokes in his opening monologue before he gives his “news” reports.