The Problem is Darkness

As a people, in particular a nation – we some dumb folk. I really wanted to use another word that conjoins a female parent with the act of copulation, but that is beside the point. I know I have been harping on the inadequacy of the general populous in concert with what is supposed to be leadership, especially as it pertains to legislation implemented for show in the perverse attempt to protect folk from themselves via the impossible act of legislating morality, just so happen this time it deals with gun control, assault weapons ban and across the board registration requirements.

Now, all this reminds me of something I heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say on a talk show once when I was a kid. I think I was in Kindergarten at the time. Back then TV and television watching was a social event and when Dr. King was on, everybody in the household watched. Otherwise, if I was inside and not playing outside and had to watch TV, all who knocked on my door asking for me to come outside, and I said I couldn’t, that I was watching TV, knew I was on punishment. Back then you only stayed in to watch TV when you were on punishment.

On the show, the two tortoise-shelled rim glasses wearing white cats asked Dr. King if those who rioted in America who were black took away from his cause and his message of non-violence. He quoted Victor Hugo and stated: “Where there is darkness crimes will be committed. The guilty one is not merely he who commits the crime but he who caused the darkness.”

Now it seems to me the weight in which I look at Dr. King’s mental prowess is like a ton to an ounce when I compare it to the likes of a Barack Obama or a Rahm Emanuel. It seems that the latter two gentlemen are so caught up on the propaganda (and banning guns), more than the root causes of the ailments of our social predicament, or saving lives. Fact is when the gun laws are put in place (and I doubt if they will be) the social ills that precipitate our violent oriented society will still remain. First it is not the tool, for we see around the world car and suicide bombs can and do as much damage as assault rifles. Second, the darkness which the metaphorically inclined Hugo made and Dr. King referenced is still going undealt with. The darkness that produces crime is a historic occurrence based in the economic deprived citizenry of our nation who just so happen mainly to be folk the same color as I. It is this loss of opportunity, or really, the lack of opportunity that facilitates the “I will get mine even at the expense of yours mentality. It is not guns but the reality of the environmental circumstances in which we see 25% of blacks in poverty – a rate which is at its highest in the past 60 years and snow-balled downhill just by chance when America has its first African American President.

Yes, TV watchers watch the subscribed and pre-prepared news broadcast and say the economy is getting better but outside of make-believe facts do not support this. Truth be told, thanks to our declining economy, poverty is ravaging out city like some exotic parasitic infection. Add to that the millions of young folk, who only watch TV, play video games and self-medicate in our materialistic culture, and whom are unemployed, do not even have the prospects of long-term or temporary employment for that fact. In Detroit for example, more than 60% of folk fewer than 18 years of age live in poverty – an increase of 40 percent since 2009. And this is one reason why 80% of the murders in Detroit or a Chicago are gang-related. These numbers are staggering, especially in urban areas from New York, to Oakland, to Memphis to New Orleans. Across America, more than 150 million folks live in poverty. Not to mention more than 1 million US school children are homeless. This is the darkness the aforementioned spoke of. Where there is darkness there will be crime. But no, to accept such requires logic and reason, two things that are severely lacking in modern American culture. Our status quo instead is to accept what is being told without query and let the government deal with it, since the government is the only solution and only folk with the answers (albeit their track record suggest otherwise).

Even if you go to college it doesn’t translate in to success or economic stability. One recent study published by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity revealed that Almost half of college educated workers are over qualified for the jobs that they do have.

And we black folk go along with everything being feed us as if we were still expecting master to drop some chittlings on our plates. Because if gun control do pass, we gone be stuck with the same thing we got with mandatory minimums and three strike laws – more black men in prison. Yep, I said it; I can add that the man who Obama asked to work out something on guns, Joseph Biden, is the same cat who came up with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. If I must remind you, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, H.R. 3355, Pub.L. 103–322, (commonly referred to as the Assault Weapons Ban) was originally written by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. In the Bill, Biden as a lawyer mandated that people in prison were not to be allowed to get an education in the form of a high school diploma or a college degree and also created the 3 strike law, which sent a lot of black people to prison for life. Democrat Bill Clinton sign this into law in 1994. Biden’s law also made many new provisions to be considered as capital offenses including but not limited to gang membership, and created several new federal death penalty offenses, including murders related to drug dealing, and drive-by shooting murders. And this new bill, well it will be the same, just a disproportionate number of black men being incarcerated.

I write this to suggest that most politicians and Americans (especially African Americans are lost, misguided and lack the critical thinking required to both problem solve and address what is wrong within our communities. It is we who are the problem and as such only we can proffer answers and solutions to deal with such. It is darkness that creates the crime and the folk who create the problem are just as much as fault as the tools of criminals. I can honestly say that before Obama 32 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps. That the Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years, which means it has fallen even more for the average African American. And it will only get worse with America losing half a million jobs to China every single year and with a future that will have robots working in fast food restaurants and the service industry. Again, our problem is not guns it is darkness and no one can see the light.

Where is Black Twitter? In the back of Twitter like the back of the bus

I first signed up for Twitter in 2006. I used it rarely as a means of contacting other bloggers. I left it alone for a while because all I shared was what I read in newspapers and my blog post. I didn’t like it at the time because in order to do such, I had to copy and paste, and that was time consuming. At first I followed other bloggers, but as the social outlet evolved, I began to follow less people and more news sources, publications and outlets. I really got involved when the tweet meme became prevalent and more common, allowing me to share what I read, as I did initially without actually going on twitter just by clicking on a little green button.

Twitter is a valuable tool and fits into the premonitions proffered by Gil Scott Heron when he orated that “You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, /Skip out for beer during commercials, /because the revolution will not be televised.” For if there is to be another revolution, we have already seen the impact social media like twitter can play. In Egypt for example findings from the newly released second edition of the Arab Social Media Report by the Dubai School of Government provided empirical data that Twitter as well as facebook “abetted if not enabled the historic region-wide uprisings of early 2011.” Not to forget that use of social networking sites assisted in helping activist organize and bring attention to efforts that eventually led to the destruction of decades of autocratic rule in Egypt and Tunisia and publicity to public malcontent pertaining to the regimes in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain.

However, in other places, especially in my own back yard, twitter and social media is more of a toy that for a large corpus of users, especially my folk (African Americans) tend to misuse and/or ignore the maximum utility of Twitter; instead settling for mundane and vile uses that in most respects promulgate traditional stereotypical images of African Americans.

A study conducted by researchers at Northwestern University surveyed 505 college freshman in 2009 and 2010 revealed that 37.2 percent of black students used Twitter compared to 20.1 percent of their white counterparts did. Other research suggests that African Americans reportedly make up 25 percent of Twitter users and are responsible for a sizable proportion of its trending topics. By definition, trending topics are defined by Twitter as “new or newsworthy topics that are occupying the most people's attention on Twitter at any one time." This is accomplished by adding a hashtag (#) to a tweet to create the general them. Unfortunately, most of the trends one sees on Twitter are not news worthy at all. Some that I have seen include #itaintrape, #inaghettohouse , #HowYouAThug , #fatpeoplepasswords,#UNotFromTheHoodIf and as we speak, #What2ChainzWouldSay. If you cannot find these, you are probably in the wrong part of twitter, you have to go to a place that many refer to as “black twitter.”

I have wondered about this place. I could not find it anywhere in cyber space as if it had been sucked up by a black hole and turned into a white dwarf. But then I realized if it was anywhere, it would be in the back of twitter like the back of the bus, since most of the behavior is reminiscent of how Negroes behaved prior to the civil rights movement. One common proponent of the world of #blacktwitter is a visible preference for hogwash and prattle mainly manifested in the tendency to evince higher rates of interest in celebrity and entertainment news or overt violence directed toward others as a result of overzealous or sudorific twitter post and interaction.

For example, in black twitter (and this is a true story), it is not uncommon for people to have what they call #twitterbeefs. For lack of a better way to say it, a twitter beef is really mad cow disease in the form of 140 characters or less. Although I have names, I will not provide them but I can say it involved one woman placing a picture of another woman on twitter of her attempting to perform Fellatio on some nameless male. After words were exchanged across the distal temporality of cyberspace, this past week the other woman saw the young girl. She left the pickup game of basketball and beat the other child helpless – all while her associates watched and videoed the encounter and you guessed it – posted it on twitter. According to #blacktwitter the young woman is with child.

Now I did not ask to be in black twitter, but with the incessant retweets ( RT) that cloud the field, when one checks you are bound to see something that you did not sign up for. Most of what I follow now is news papers still, from central Asia, Central Europe, and African mostly, in concert with almost every political think tank around the globe. You may think I am over reacting and I know that many will have a problem with what I write because some folks do not want to hear the truth because it makes them examine their own delusions. Even if it involves #blacktwitter, a place where beef is as deadly as eating contaminated cow meat. A place similar to the twilight zone where folks will seemingly sale their souls for 140 characters post just to get a retweet and followers. Never is there any interest in community and collective empowerment or sharing information and/or knowledge for the betterment of all. No this is not what happens in #blacktwitter, just the opposite, what Dr. Martian Luther King, Jr. would describe as “a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”