I hate when people bring up something that I did in the past which they may not have liked. I probably apologized for it and expressed my will to never do it again. What is done is done and I cannot change the past. I would love the idea of being forgiven as well as having the done deed forgotten, but that is never fully the case. I may be forgiven, but what I have done will not be forgotten. The act of before and its affect are what I must now live with and deal unto accordingly, even appropriately if I desire to maintain my own peace.
No one wants to constantly be reminded of their own transgressions against others. We would all like to be seen by others as the perfect model of a human being. If it were up to all of us, our wrongs would simply be rights. That is everyone’s ideal solution to their deviated and delinquent behavior. Why else would a misdoer argue to justify his or her wrongdoing? It is only to appeal to someone else’s empathetic nature and to coerce their agreement to righten themselves being done wrong. We all do it! It is the civilized thing to do. Tell me I am a fool to my face so that you and I can continue the cooperative effort of allowing you to mistreat me. That is the name of the game. Rarely does the argument ever end so peacefully. Usually someone has to form a compromise to assuage an ensued and heated debate over the misdeed. If not, that is where violence comes in handy. “Oh, you don’t like me treating you bad? Take this ass whooping! That will show you what is good for you.” There, the fence of civility has been cleared and we have entered into savagery. It should never go there, but unfortunately it does and always will sometimes.
Enter Memory:
What if we forgot when someone mistreated us? Aha! Some of you never gave that a thought I bet. I do not mean forgot in the philosophical or theoretical sense like, “oh don’t worry. I forgot that even happen.” I am talking about in the literal and physical sense like “hold up, what happened? When? For real? You lyin’! Nah that shit ain’t happen… but for real though?” The fact we can recall traumatic experiences in life is a defense mechanism and it serves a very valuable purpose. Our cognitive recollection can remind us of what we do not enjoy and if working properly will help us position ourselves to never let or allow what causes grief to negatively affect us again. Without memory and the ability to rewind and playback our experiences, bad as well as good, we would be suffering from amnesia (a brain disorder).
White folks, the rest of this is for you:
Ironically, we all have the innate ability to forgive. The catch is we have to find it in ourselves to choose to forgive being mistreated. Forgiveness is very similar to forgetting, although the two concepts are not the same. Forgiveness allows us to say to ourselves, “you know what, I have to stop thinking about what happened in the past all the time. I’ll never let it happen again though!”
To be forgiven for mistreating someone means that we have to allow ourselves to be accountable for what we have done to that other person. When we allow ourselves to be forgiven we have to also accept that who we mistreated will probably never forget what we did to them, and from time to time will remind us that they have not forgotten for safe measure. This must be done in order for them to further remind us that they intend to never let it happen again, but will forget about it until the next time they feel the need to remind us again.
Memory lasts in time and matures. It grows and becomes a new life. It takes on different names and languages. It has homes and styles itself in the latest and modern fashions. It has children and parents. It is a living, breathing, reproducing organism. Memory is essential to a society and its order. Memory passes on to generations and raises them. It feeds them their favorite foods, sings them their favorite songs, buys them their first car, helps them raise their own children. Memory reminds us of all the good things that have happened throughout human history, as well as the bad. We are the memory of us all from before, in the present, and into the future. We are accountable for our history, whether we were physically here to witness it, or it was passed down to us through memories. We can forgive ourselves and allow ourselves to be forgiven, but we will never truly forget. That old shit matters to us all.
“Con coco o sin coco?” Is what brothers and sisters ask when you ask them if they have any weed to smoke in the Dominican Republic. With cocaine or without cocaine? In the Dominican Republic cocaine is a more socially accepted drug of choice than marijuana. Weed is actually looked down upon in the way smoking crack is looked upon here in the United States. This was a very bizarre state of affairs when I realized the ramifications of such a construct. This meant that in the Dominican Republic, I was a crack head and the coke heads were the laid back stoners. My how the truth can be malleable and ambiguously obscure.
When I went to a close friend’s potluck a week ago, who is actually Dominican himself, I kept hearing him and his cousin yell out “I’m in love with the coco!” They finally played the video for everyone and we all were glued to the monitor as we watched a man sitting at a kitchen table with his friends, seemingly spreading powdered cocaine over it with playing cards and rolling up blunts. How simply sensational of a sight I thought! Who cannot relate to this image? How can you not see how relevant this scene is? I thought all of this at the same time as I thought how disgusting the video was. The mundaneness of what Hip Hop or Rap has degraded to. Who could support such garbage! These were the conflicting debates floating in my mind as I continued to stare and listen to what one of our good friends from college described as a nursery rhyme. He was right. The lyrics were so simple a two year old could recite and comprehend them after one listen. It was actually kind of disturbing to think of the influence this video will have on younger viewers.
It was stuck in my head. I walked home with my girlfriend singing “I’m in love with the coco” out loud. We would both laugh and shake our heads at our own senseless embarrassment and juxtaposed affinity for the simple yet catchy tune. I asked her to play it again when we got home. We watched the whole thing, twice. I watched it again, alone with my headphones. I bobbed my head. I lip synced the single syllable lyrics to myself. I smiled at the screen. I enjoyed it. It was addictive.
The beat! The foundation of the auditory retention is the low frequency of the sub bass line in the background music. The engineer of the musical score synthesized the reverberations of the low tones very well, and in unison the sound effects which work congruently with the bass are mesmerizing. If there were no lyrics, the song will still have a profound affect onto the listener. I can imagine watching the video with the instrumental only and still fully understanding the theme of the song. Without a doubt, like many other current rap hits, the beat carries the song and without it I sincerely believe it would not work or feel the same. The producer and his engineer did an excellent job.
The lyrics are simple, as already stated. However, the lyrics are contrasting to what is the current political atmosphere in the Black community. Whether Genasis intended to cause a debate or not is not the question. He has most certainly done so. While at my friend’s potluck, I recall a divide amongst all who were watching the video. Some loved it. Some hated it. I did find myself somewhere in the middle. The melody of the lyrics and the cadence of the rhyme took me back to “con coco o sin coco” in the Dominican Republic. It reminded me of a time and place when and where I was unsure of my political stance on drugs and what is socially on the fence, and what is totally overboard. I will not promote violence and I believe guns should be used only for protection, however I was reminded of the G Thang video when the guy had the pistol tucked into the back of his pants while working the barbecue pit. The guns looked real and I looked at them closely. I was drawn to them the same way I have always been when watching a movie or television show. This video was no different. This was a good rap video. If we must separate Hip Hip and Rap to achieve a sense of clarity and social aptness in our culture and responsibility to our community then I say this is an excellent rap video.
Whether Genasis will stand the test of the fickle music industry is oh but yet to be seen. I for one could not care less how things play out, but best of luck to him and his family. As for this record, very disturbing yet highly intriguing. It is extremely interesting how the same thing can be done in so many ways and still one out of the million appears and feels so different. This one was like tasting something different in a corner store bottled water and thinking “wow, what is this?” Only to look and see it is Poland Spring with a new logo and feeling unconsciously satisfied with what you perceive as something new.
My son is a rich man. He’s not even born yet. His mother and I have created wealth for him before he can conceive of it for himself. My mother and father created this wealth for him, even before I could conceive of it. Their mothers and fathers created wealth for them as well. We are all rich people. As long as one lives he or she is rich, however one must recognize and realize this fact of matter. Our wealth is passed down from the generations before us. Our job is to receive it, create more wealth from it, and deliver it to others.
Money is a representation of time and how that time is or was spent. The value of that time spent is relative to the magnitude at which that time spent is or was worth to others. The more the time spent is worth for others then the more value there is to the money which represents it. Money means absolutely nothing without someone to signify its value. A dollar in the hands of no one is nothing more than a worthless shred of paper. It is a figment of matter which will erode in time if left unattended. One must attend to it and deliver it to another in order for it to matter. One who receives it must acknowledge it as a valuable note of time spent for it to belong to a derived currency of exchangeable commodity. This is the meaning and essence of money.
We perceive ourselves as either rich or poor even without money. Money does not determine the state of being rich or poor, rather it represents the state of the time spent amongst the perceived rich and the poor, whether delivered or received. The poor can deliver money to the rich and neither party feel either rich or poor. Likewise, the rich can deliver to the poor and both feel rich. The rich can believe they are poor, and the poor can believe they are rich, all while no one possesses any money. The fact is, the state of being rich or poor is based solely on how one perceives themselves and more importantly how their time has been spent. This idea is rooted into the sayings “time is money” and “money is no object.” However, those sayings are misleading, because time in fact is not money and money is actually an object. The truer saying is money represents time spent. How well or how poor someone spends their time is not a representation of money, however it does represent itself in their feeling of wealth or poverty. One must have a clear understanding of the difference between time and money in order to amass wealth.
Getting money is quite simple. Often times money is usually laying on the ground unbothered for anyone to casually pick it up and put it in their pocket. Most people walk by pennies and nickels everyday and pay them no mind because they feel it is not enough money to care to stop what they are doing to obtain it. It is understandable that such a small amount in the currency of today someone would care less about these coins and little bits of loose change, but this is one of the easiest and most convenient ways to get money. After all, if getting money is all someone would want in life then there it is sitting right there for them with very little effort to receive it. It is the idea that getting money will create wealth that leads a person astray and misguided. They will spend all of their time doing whatever it takes, whether time spent well or time spent poorly, all for the simple task of getting money. Most of the time the money they receive from simply trying to get money is not enough to satisfy their true and instinctual goal of amassing wealth. They do not feel wealthy once they get the money they’ve been seeking so they continue spending their time trying to get more money and begin to believe to themselves that they are in fact poor. They feel poor all the time while trying to get money because they do not have the amount of money they believe they need or want in order for them to feel wealthy. They have confused getting money with wealth, and have not seen the difference between the time they’ve spent and the money they have received for it. The two things are not the same. They cannot tell that others have not valued the time they’ve spent the way they would like them to because they were so focused on getting money that all others had to do was deliver them a calculated amount of it without having to truly appreciate them or their time in exchange. That is time spent poorly. While questing to get money they do not notice most of all that they are not spending their time well with others! They are selfishly seeking the object of money in exchange for this unappreciated time, therefore they receive what is current to the value of that time spent with others, which consequentially is of little value. Simply getting money will most likely lead to one simply getting money and nothing more. One would have to make believe they are rich in order for spending all their time only to get money to be fulfilling and equal to building wealth.
It is the creation of money which is equal to amassing and building wealth! Once the difference between time and money is clear then a person will spend all of their time well and wisely! They will appreciate others and will share meaningful time and energy with them. Ideas will be exchanged and innovative products and new tangible creations will arise. It is the time well spent that will garner more from others. The service of one another’s time and energy being appreciated will equate to higher values and substantially gainful working relationships. In time, these relations will cultivate networks of thinkers, builders, and energetic intellectuals who agree to work and share the time it takes to create the products one would want and more than that, but need! You see, it is the time well spent with others which creates those products we spend so much of our time to obtain. It is the time well spent that is of highest value to everyone! You cannot amass and build wealth based upon poorly spent time. Your time spent poorly will not equate to a fortune. However, one may get plenty of money while spending all of their time poorly. It is not a matter! Time spent poorly does not matter at all. One will have to believe he or she is rich in order to enjoy spending their time poorly. Why delude in such an idiotic perplexity? Spending time well and wisely is truly fulfilling and leads to actual wealth! You see the difference! Money is an object! Time well spent is wealth! They are different and will never be the same thing. Nevertheless, money can surely be created and gotten through one spending all of his or her time very well with others! It is key to first notice how well one spends their time alone which must be mastered. Only then will others see the worth in appreciating their own time spent with that him or her. Time spent well alone through seeking what it is that is worth building and creating is the beginning of amassing wealth. The creation of wealth starts by first thinking about it to oneself! One must then develop their wealthy creation and offer to share it with others. It will surely be greatly appreciated no matter how much or how little in the beginning. It will grow wealth so long as one continues to build upon it with more time well spent. To create money is to create an idea worthy of others spending their time well with that same idea. That is how wealth is built! This is how money is created. One must understand how to create money.
Vandalism, Rioting & Looting: A Brief Explanation for the Law Abiding Citizen
Laws are social in nature. There must be an agreement between two or more people in order for law to function. There is order without law, and that is called natural order. However, as people grow larger in numbers and form communities, different ideas of what that order means becomes apparent. Laws are formed in order to better interpret these orders amongst the larger group. Written laws are created to further substantiate the new and evolved meanings of the agreed upon orders, and that is called policy (within the English diction).
The idea of the police is a direct result of policy. The formation of a community or state appointed group of people to enforce the policies is as old as the formation of laws. In the brief history of America, the police were formed mainly to protect property from destruction, burglary, and theft. Later on, continuing to today, they have been granted more authority over more policies and jurisdictions of the interpreted laws. Nonetheless, protection of property is the historic basis of American police enforcement.
In America, and quite like most countries worldwide, when a group of citizens who feel the law has been misinterpreted by their appointed officials and the police enforcement has infringed upon their agreed civil liberties, those people believe the law is no longer valid. Protesting can be passive as well as aggressive. Peaceful protests to misinterpretations and gross infringements of the law are most often received with little resistance by community officials and law enforcement, therefore they usually do not beg any attention from law enforcement or appointed officials. The community grievance will persist and remain unsettled. Violence to officials or law enforcers is a far greater risk to a protestor’s personal well being, plain and simple. Otherwise, hand to hand combat and gratuitous violence would be a protestor’s first option at proving their political point. In history, violence has proven effective when a disgruntled group of people wish to have their social and political demands met by a government, often times leading to a newer government run by those formerly disgruntled parties. However one may want to interpret a civil protest, war is and always will be an option if tensions reach those points.
Destruction of Property: Since the historic basis of law enforcement, specifically in America, is to protect property, it is considered a great portion of political leverage for an angry protestor to test the policy of protecting property by the police enforcement. City officials must and will answer the complaints of those property owners who have been hurt by the property destruction, and those law enforcers must use proper judgment when addressing the mob who is aggressively taunting their authority. This political conundrum the government is placed within is perplexing and very costly. The predicament which it will certainly lead to during and after the riot and destruction of property does affect the future policy and places government in a position of defense, rather than the offensive stance they’ve been abusing before. One must acknowledge and question the role of government in this instance and refer to reinterpretation of the law and its policies. If it were not for the policy to promise to protect property and enforce this seemingly simple task, which often times is rarely addressed correctly on a normal basis by law enforcement, the angry protestor would have little advantage in a corrupted society besides peacefully being unheard, or angrily waging full scale war.
I hope this brief explanation has helped the law abiding citizen to understand why vandalism, looting, & rioting happen, and what true and rational purpose they serve in urban society.
Once there was a time when our fathers and our mothers were together in nature. Our family was whole. Our tribe was one. Our nation was wealthy. We did not seek out false senses. That was a time when we knew who we were and understood our presence amongst a universe. In that time we could look upon our brother and our sister without shame. His and her bodies were not a work of art, but were them in their flesh. We could see each other as who and what we were together, and commune for greater meanings. There was no term for our being. We were as we were and we were loved. We could find our future within ourselves and create something beautiful without the thought of procedure, and ceremony was a family affair and not a legality.
Then one day the sons and the daughters of our fathers and our mothers were stolen to be farmed. Sentenced to a life of criminality. Their bodies were ravaged and draped in bloody soiled rags. It was a tragedy. These were our new fathers and our new mothers. They were auctioned to be bred. The purpose of their flesh was to make flesh. There was no person, only an object. Our new fathers were bulls, and our new mothers were heifers. They both could be mistreated within the new laws. They were not told, but forced. So it began they were sexual creatures. Created only to create more genetic mutations of a lusty alien inhabitant. In the new wilderness they worked for nothing and lusted to do more of nothing. The bodies of our new mothers and fathers became ornaments of promiscuity. It was no longer them in their flesh as it once was. It was the flesh on them, and then it meant more than who they were. They passed their fleshly syndrome to their children, and their children to their children. It never ceased. The body then came before the mind, as the cart had become before the horse. The godly dynamic of our mothers and fathers from our beginning was lost, and gone to be lost for eons.
Today we accept the sexual potency of the farm bred people. Our lost past is still missing in the annals of time. We cannot escape our fixation of our own flesh. We lose sleep over the thought of having to go without satisfying our lusts. We loathe a simple matching of our time with our love for the mind. It is an idea well misunderstood and no longer sought. It is deemed unnatural. Nature is now the body and its desire. It is the new realization of what a meaningful partnership is determined. To go back to where we come from is to be savage. We are the product of farm breeding and our sexual potency is the commodity which has survived with us. It must mean our survival, if not then we would be extinct. This is the belief. Although untrue, it stands as our cognitive misguided instinct. Our fathers and mothers would not understand us. They would believe we are savages.
What we all have to recognize is that amongst us we have a common maladaptive, misguided, miseducated, indiscriminately imposed, abnormal, weakened and downtrodden mental consciousness. It is one of a subordinate servant. We all must further fully realize and actualize as a people that we also have one common enemy, who with their selfish, misguided, uneducated, insidious, diseased and unwarranted superior yet truly inferior way of thinking, have fooled us into believing in a great myth. The great myth is that they are superior and we are inferior. It is time we recollect our awareness and our thoughts and reach back in time and recall that we have a common goal, and that is to reclaim our power and become a great nation once again as we have been before. It is imperative that our goal be achieved if we intend to survive and substantially reap the true benefits of our toil for our generations to come.
We have a lot of weaknesses in our way of thinking today. Our mentality is one of a non thinker, an imbecile, a wanton, a silly, a jest, a joke, someone who cannot be taken seriously. We have a great tendency to rely on others for our own validation. Our men are profoundly discouraged and our women are easily fooled. We think our way of thinking is good for us. We believe we are all individuals who have no agency to our community and one another. We consume liberally in belief that the more we consume then the more our illusionary success is substantiated. We believe the pervasively simple yet fleeting notion that money alone is power. We are quite foolish.
We are quite foolish in the sense that these anecdotal follies of the consciousness are simply proverbial ideological hand-me-downs from them. They wrote us a simplistic and undefined lackadaisical cartoon playbook for our so called life, then said it was the truth to our success. This quick sleight of hand motion from our enemy happened in 1964. The trickery and devilish events that played out between 1964 and into the 1970s have setup a current culture defined in uncontrollable pseudo liberalism, quasi intellectualism, and plain stupidity. We are once again a people divided, suffering from a generation gap which insists that our parents cannot teach our children, and our children are parenting children. Our history has been forgotten once more, especially our recent history.
These are symptoms of the weakness of the subordinate mentality. The idea that someone else is superior to us is more present now than it was 55 years ago. We once again seek acceptance amongst a people who will never fully accept us. We once again believe if we act like them long enough that we can actually become them. We once again believe that since we are born here that we naturally belong here. We are once again fooled by a stupid little lie, the lie of equality. We are not equal. We are not made the same. We do not think the same. We are very different, and the more we try to act like them the further we do ourselves a tremendous disservice, in service of them. The weakness of the subordinate mentality has affected our progress toward solidarity and wealth building. Our power sources are impeded by our subservient predisposition to labor. We do not labor for ourselves and our own people. We labor for them unconsciously as well as consciously. They take from us with no protest on our behalf. We give our mind and body to them without regard and willingly. We are slaves.
There is a weakness within the subordinate mentality. We learn their history and say it is ours. We determine the potency of our sexuality based on their sadistic standards and proclaim it as natural. We eat their food and call it our own. We use their model of family structure to rate the value of ours and say we are homegrown. Our women define beauty as that of their women and believe they are feminists. Our men attest to success as that of their men and call themselves entrepreneurs. We substantiate our wealth with the idea of owning property on their illegitimate lands. We fight their wars for them without just cause or due pay and claim to be patriotic. We teach our children their sciences, which are bastard inklings of our fathers’ knowledge, and call it a good education. We study their religions and praise their gods and call ourselves holy. These are but a few of the weaknesses of the subordinate mentality.
Our greatness is at hand. It is within our own grasp. Our power is between the lot of us and us alone. The gates must be shut and the lock must be latched. Our front door has been opened for too many centuries. It is time to close the windows and let down the blinds. We cannot afford our guests’ presence in our homes any longer. They have raided our refrigerator and soiled our furniture. They have left their mess and we must clean after them. We have partied with them on our dime and to our demise. They do not appreciate us nor do they care to invest in our well being. We are fools to believe they will change and become a proper acquaintance. Now and forever we should see them for who they are, parasites and guile adversaries.
Now we should look at one another and rebuild our kingdom, our nation, our empire. We now need to work amongst ourselves and ourselves only. We do not need any outside influence or acceptance. This is our duty to ourselves and our generations to come. No longer should we suffer from the weaknesses of a subordinate mentality. We must recollect our history and speak the truths of one another to each other. It is only then that our power will be rekindled and our nation rebuilt to its heights. There is only one way to solve our plight and that is through solidarity and close minded, self centered restructure of our own selves as a people. Our leaders must be reinvented and our warriors must be reorganized. Our women need to be reacquainted and our children reeducated. We are not powerless and we are not truly subordinate. We are powerful and we are superior. We are the greatest creation to walk the earth. It is for us to recognize and reclaim our true place and position here, now, and forever.
On my way to work tonight a young man stopped me and asked if he could use my phone. I asked him who was he going to call. He said he needed to call his mother because she was inside Harlem Hospital, which we stood right outside of, in order to get her out of there. I asked why he couldn’t get someone inside to help him? He said they told him since he was a minor that he couldn’t go inside without an adult. I said let’s go back inside because that didn’t make any sense. I asked him his name. He said Malcolm, then I introduced myself. I made sure he understood that asking strangers to use their phone in the manner he did was inappropriate. He said he knew, but I could tell his circumstances demanded desperate measures. He added that he really needed to get his house keys from his mother so he could go home and get ready for school in the morning. He couldn’t have been older than 14 years old.
Once inside the hospital lobby I noticed the first problem. There was no one attending the front desk besides a female NYPD officer standing behind a podium. I saw two office phones sitting on the counter, but before asking could he use them, I told the officer of the young man’s problem. She told me that he came in earlier but she can’t let him through without an adult escort. So then I asked could he use the phones available on the counter. She made sure to inform he could only call a number within the hospital. He dialed, but got no answer. I looked towards the officer to see if she was willing to further assist, but there was nothing from her.
Malcolm went to sit on the lobby bench, defeated. I offered him my phone to call his aunt. By some stroke of guilt the officer asked us to come back to the podium. She then interrogated Malcolm about his day from leaving school to how he ended up at the hospital, as if she wasn’t speaking to the definition of a lost child who was in her presence with a stranger he just met off the street. He explains to her how he went home from school and his mom was home, but then he left to go to his recently deceased grandma’s house to pick up some things. When he returned home he was surprised to find out his mother had been rushed to the hospital and he had no keys to get back inside the house. The officer, seemingly needing my presence as a catalyst to validate his story, picks up her wall mounted phone and asks him for his mother’s name. The simple act of verification which could have been done the moment he entered the hospital the first time they encountered each other. She informs us casually that Malcolm’s mother is in the emergency room. With more nonchalant, she instructs me to pretend to be an adult, of which I graciously assured her of my apparent adulthood, and escort him to the emergency room.
On the way there I felt obligated to advise Malcolm of the difficulties of being a young black male in the inner city, especially when dealing with black adults at times. He seemed to understand. He reiterated how negatively the officer treated him the first time he walked in. I asked him was his face twisted in a frown like it was at that very moment? He assured me it wasn’t and that he had a regular face. I reiterated the need for him to always behave and appear presentable. He understood.
While waiting on the desk attendant to locate his mother, Malcolm asked me what time I needed to be to work. I waved it off and said don’t worry. It was then I recognized he wasn’t interested in not being a burden and holding me up. He was concerned with how long I could stay with him and not leave him alone. After some assistance from the emergency room front desk we finally reached Malcolm’s mother. I immediately could see Malcolm’s major problem, his mother. She was more than ill. She was obviously dealing with some substance addiction and did not appear to be struggling with fixing it for herself, based on the small talk she offered. Malcolm glanced at me and I could see he was embarrassed and ashamed. He asked her could he have the house keys so he could go home. She replied by asking him where were his. He reminded her that they were locked in the house. She changed the subject and told him she would be out shortly and that he could wait in the lobby. Interesting how the lack of concern for Malcolm was universal. He asked her again for the keys. She reinforced that the set she had were hers and that she thought she just gave them to him. The negotiation was disheartening. He finally got the keys and he and I left the hospital together.
Once outside I asked was he going straight home? He said yes. I asked him where did he live? He told me on 145th St. Before parting I left him with some lasting words of wisdom which I think every young black man should have the opportunity to hear from an older black man. I told him to use his education to one day open his own company and employ his people, black people. We gave each other a firm handshake and bid each other farewell.
I can honestly admit that there was a time before now when I would search the web for internet fight videos to see what craziness people would post of street fights and school students pouncing on one another for the world to see. Since then I’ve grown to disgust these videos as they’ve become more and more popular over these short years. It appears now that people are in the streets taunting and instigating these fights now specifically for the camera. I don’t look at the sensation of the violence the same as I did before. Nowadays I see the images as a stark reality of what we’ve degraded to as a society and what poor future we have in store for the following generations. Aside from the slightly present anti cyber bully campaigns that are out to curb the foolishness there doesn’t seem to be a foreseeable end to the display of ignorance we’ve come too accustomed to lately. There needs to be an end somehow someway.
My biggest problem is when I see inner city people of color engaging in senseless violence on camera. The root of the fight is almost never revealed and it only looks like a bunch of dummies out to brutally kill each other all while the camera person chuckles, heckles, and instigates the violence further and further. As time has progressed I’ve noticed a key difference in what these videos used to be and what they are now. Today people are prepared for the camera and the camera is the true judge. If the camera wasn’t present I seriously doubt the violence would be as brutal. The individuals in these fights are now performing for an audience they know is larger than the one physically present. The desensitization has reached a point when people are dying on camera and nobody flinches. When will people realize we are our only enemies?
As we continue to perpetuate what is a new phenomenon of instantaneous access to viral violence, we will get entranced by something that is not healthy for our own senses as well for our culture. Everyone will find it absolutely normal to stop what they’re doing on a quiet day out in town to record a street fight and upload it onto the web from their recording device, laugh and share the images, then go about their day. No one will stop to think, what about the innocent who saw that and now think it’s okay to move along and allow violence to supersede peace? Ignorance cannot be the answer to random violence.
As law enforcement becomes a larger presence in the social atmosphere, who will protect children from the grips of police who don’t mind apprehending the young people they see engaging in the stupidity of these videos? No one will, because ironically their parents will also be apprehended due to the fact they are in the same video. There has to be a correction to this. I’m ashamed of the dumbness possessed by people who share my skin color in these videos. Every last one who still thinks it’s not their problem, but those in the videos should feel just as ashamed.
I believe we’re embarking on a time in America when racial inequality will take a backseat to social inequality full and out right. People of color will be hanging on to the argument of racial inequality for dear life, meanwhile society will say, “but look at how stupid most of you act in public.” A video will be shown of a school fight, an apartment complex fight, a fast food restaurant fight, and a fight between a family. Everyone will look at each other and say, “well that’s just those types of people.” The idea that there is a racial divide will be diluted and those who are ignorant to the fact will be forgotten. This is not what we should wish for. We can’t allow our actions to be the reason we are denied access to the gains of our society. It’s time for our cameras to display something more important. Until we find out what that is then we need not press record.
One day about three years ago I was laying on my living room couch and had what most would call an epiphany. Some people think that moments of clarity only happen once or twice in a lifetime, however I’m lucky to say I’ve had several in my 30 years on Earth. They’re lasting milestones in my thinking and I never forget what the memory taught me. This particular time it was a very simple concept that continued to grow and develop in my mind over the course of a year. I guess it’s still in development because yesterday it struck a new cord.
The idea is a common notion, except it is articulated very soundly in my mind. I’ll start with the basic element, which is a circle. To breeze over some deep and nerdy geometrical and mechanical physics lessons, you have to fully understand that there are no mathematical equivalents to what is considered a straight line. In short, straight lines don’t exist in nature. They are solely figments of intellectual design. What do occur in nature are fractals. To keep it simple, it is nature’s way of creating the illusion of a straight line. You see fractals when you look at a snowflake in a microscope, or when you gaze at a spiderweb. What’s interesting to one who may not know much about fractals is that they’re created by curves and semi circles, thousands of them. So until otherwise discovered thru modern science, everything in all ways are a part of and constructed by three hundred and sixty degree elemental parts.
That leads me to the first phase of my notion. Imagine a picture of a galaxy. Use a picture of the Milky Way if it makes things easier. Observe how there’s more light in the center than on the outskirts of it. Science has proven that a tremendous amount of energy resides in the center and less of it on the outlying parts. Similarly, this is the function with other observed galaxies in our close proximal universe. This happens with most sources of light in general, the center has more energy than its edges. No reason to explain why because it’s a known fact. What’s important to note is that at some point, whatever is furtherest away from the center of these systems will inevitably find its way to the center. It is also true in just about any instance of a self generating energy source like our Sun, and even the Earth. These are natural examples of self sustaining energy sources, as well as life forms.
Before I go into the next part of my thought, let me say that humans are not penguins and penguins don’t use money. That being said, I think people can learn a lot about how we use money from penguins.
I’m a capitalist. I don’t think I’d choose any other economic philosophy currently in practice today to thrive within. I believe capitalism is the best option on the market right now. I do however think there can be something better. What about something like “Circularism?” Not based on the paradigm of a triangle, but simply a circle instead. Circularism has more wealth in the center instead of the top, and the working class revolving around it instead of at the bottom holding it up. Not socialism, and heavy government regulation. Plain science and physics. Imagine an economy that distributes wealth in a natural cycle, that over time a population will have regenerated its own wealth throughout its entire self by simple geometrical forces. Take in account that goverment regulation is unavoidable to any economic philosophy, but regulation doesn’t have to be a determinate in whether a philosophy works well or not. The most crucial element to the cultivation of an economic philosophy is fear. Fear drives every social phenomenon.
Now that I’ve formed my basis, described my model, and presented my concept, let me elaborate on what I believe. As we creep into the mid part of this century, privacy will become more of a luxury to us than it is a commodity to us currently. Our privacy has everything to do with the future of our global economy. The less privacy our community has, the less value can be placed into capitalism. Wealth cannot be hoarded in a glass vault. As technology becomes more and more invasive and people become just as extraverted online, the price of privacy will shoot to new heights. The inclination of wealth distribution in this new environment will undoubtedly shift, and not in favor of the wealthy. Who does that scare? The wealthy, of course. Trillions of dollars will be spent on keeping money secure for private citizens and corporations will come in droves to cash in on the new privacy and personal data industries. As cash money digitizes and the percentages of hard cash with dead presidents printed on them grows smaller, wallets will be all the more vulnerable to pick pockets. Not only will the cyber crooks be on the prowl, but advertisers, city agencies, retailers, and anyone who needs your money will have faster and faster and faster access to your assets. This isn’t a story from a science fiction novel. This is reality.
A person’s net worth isn’t anyone’s business until they’re in the public eye. Average people don’t want anyone to know how much money they have because they simply don’t have enough of it. If they did then it wouldn’t even matter to them who knew how much they had because it’s not like it’s gonna get up and hop into someone else’s bank account without raising some law abiding eyebrows. What’s interesting is how much personal information the average person openly submits to the public via the internet, as opposed to what personal info the wealthy do. You figure hey, we know everything about the wealthy already. We do know a lot about the people who control most of our wealth, but we don’t really know details. They’d love to keep it that way. That is where capitalism wins, for now. Soon there will be a new generation of wealthy citizens who have a different perspective on what’s private and what’s public information. These people will be the people who uploaded their first profile pictures onto social media when they were 13 years old. Privacy will have a whole new meaning and people will be a lot more public about everything. That is where capitalism begins to fade into history.
Personal bank accounts will be a public affair. Maybe not the Bank of America joint account with mom, or the Chase primary checking, or the Fidelity retirement account. These institutions will hold steady as long as they can. The new accounts will be the future of our global economy, the Bitcoin account, the Paypal account, the mobile wallet you downloaded and put $15 dollars in but have yet to use. These new economic technologies are going to revolutionize the exchange of money and assets. People are currently selling their homes on their iPhones. At that rate of exchange, it will be no time before people are verifying assets for sales via instant message. Why not have your entire portfolio listed online via your “This Is Everything I Have” profile? That way people can just open that up and see if you qualify for that business loan, or that mortgage for the condo you need in Florida. “Everyone’s doing it!” Just like every trend, people will be drawn to what is popular and what makes sense to them as a person in a group and not in solitude.
Circularism is an adaptation, and not a takeover or just another revolution. You cannot regulate fear, you can only react to it. The fears I described are fears of today that will grow into the future. Capitalism can’t sustain a healthy economy in an environment where privacy is a luxury. The more people know, the less they spend. Capitalists survive primarily on the grounds of access, and keeping others away from the commodity they have access to. Access is the fundamental key to information technology. Computers are on the brink of their own turning point. The quantum computer, which relies on quantum codes or the next version of binary code, to calculate algorithms. This will also raise the stakes of how quickly we will be able to access information. The future is very bright for snooping online.
Enter the industrial snooping age. Less work, more snooping on who’s doing work and how much work they’re doing. That’s the ticket to cyclical wealth distribution. I’m not talking about little old factory worker snooping on big giant corporate CEO’s accounts in the middle of the night on a laptop. I’m talking about the freelancer on the mobile device at a coffee shop going thru lists of public account profiles of other small business owners looking for a match for a new venture, on the “Venture Match App.” Goverment economic regulators and staunch capitalists didn’t see that one coming. It won’t be an invasion of privacy that will sit capitalism down in its rocking chair. It will be publicity that will turn the tides of wealth distribution and create a free flowing cycle of economic freedom for a larger proportion of our population. The faster people trade ideas, the faster people will trade their assets, the faster people will trade their wealth.
Of course the rich will still get richer, and the poor will still get poorer, but at what rate and at what ratio? A different one. Relative to the polarity of wealth distribution today, almost anything would be more ideal. How about everyone just be poor? That would actually be better than some people having nothing while one person has everything. I don’t want everyone to be poor, but I do believe some could do just fine with less. Extravagance has always set it’s foot stern into economy. It for the most part seems to turn the wheels of the capitalistic money machine. The thing is that extravagance still looks back at fear for motivation. So the light dims on extravagance as privacy becomes less abundant. A beacon is shone on stoicism when the public is not only watching, but is also the judge. Without fail, our global economy will have to endure multiple losses in the transition into the public data age. As our thoughts become a part of the exchange of communication at the click of a button, our wallets will soon be at the whim of the tide called hysteria. We can’t avoid these certain laws of social science. We can only adapt. The good thing is there will be a new philosophy to adapt to, and I believe that philosophy will be Circularism.
Erick's Brain 