I'm the typical Leo personality where I operate with a feeling that I'm the center of the universe, knowing I'm not, but also acknowledging that we all operate from this same space. I rule as a fair, sensitive, and powerfully fearless king. Whether in my own mind or as the head of my family I try my best to live in truth.
Personally I hate the term "humble" and how it is used and weaponized to a degree these days...especially against Black Youth...almost a "stay in your place" vibe while others get to be audacious and fully confident in themselves...I often will ask people "do someone have to be on their knees for YOU to feel tall?" If not there is absolutely no need to demand someone else's humility....I choose to applaud audacity and confidence...want my kids to find their things and love themselves...not conform to make others comfortable in ways that will never be reciprocal
Co-parenting more often then I like to think about feels like someone is getting into my coin bank and is slowly replacing all my dollars pieces and quarters with nickels and pennies. I just didn't and wouldn't have noticed, then it's too late to get it all back. That investment is gone. So I'm trying to do better to check my balance and protect the little I can, but the coin bank is only in my possession part time. It is a wild and unrecommended existence. Even with great parents on the other end. It never fills the hole/feels whole and you are bound to miss so much...
Paying into a system that normalizes #schoolshootings, #policeshootings and shooting shootings as if it is just a natural state of life is confounding and depressing. It isn't a new phenomenon in a country born just as much on hate as it was on high minded ideals. Not even targeted well cultured hate...just hate conditioned through operating from a scarcity model while actively wasting resources at a quicker pace than cultivating growth. A form of hate that is more dangerous in how it's easily conditioned in the isolation that grows in people's spirits. Isolation built despite the world being so connected. Propagated in an anti-human culture that happily feeds on its young and manufactured minorities that .
So the outcries to vote for change, write and or plea with elected officials...it isn't enough when this IS the culture! Death, poverty, mental instability, imprisonment/enslavement, nutritional despair, panic, outrage, and such has been made profitable and passable as an everyday thing.
Usually I try to operate with a solution in mind, but there is too much evidence of money and this sick theater/ snuff film called politics taking greater precedent over people. Politics is just ORIENTATION. We all have experienced some form of orientation...what is the purpose? To get you accustomed to an environment, process, culture or way doing things...right? You'd assume politicians and the people by in large have brains, hearts, emotions, family's and a relative sense of wanting the best for them...but maybe JUST them and no one else...?
So what are we doing?
Why is equality (hold up wait...that is too broad a concept) .
Why is equity (nope no that is too esoteric and conditional).
Why Is Common Damn Sense so hard to act upon when it comes to eliminating the worse aspects of our collective humanity?!?
That's where the solutions get fuzzy, because we also live in a country and world that gleefully denies people's humanity as class distinction is how they derive their comforts (built via the mythology of race or religion or gender or hue etc.). Then you try to deal with that darkness in the hearts of what feels like the majority who, whether willfully or not, are ignorant of their own cognitive dissonance to the degree that the shared dissonance becomes harmony.
We are adaptive beings capable of creating and surviving damn near anything. Yet, this is what is CHOSEN. Over and Over and Over...
Peace to all taken from this world violently, senselessly and without cause as well as the hearts left to deal with it.
1700s The earliest known United States shooting to happen on school property was the Pontiac's Rebellion school massacre on July 26, 1764, w
#CrownAct Neccessary unfortunately, but definitely a message worth digesting daily until it is as natural as the beauty too many Black women (or any women who feels aesthetically repressed) feel compelled to hide because of social constraints or conditioning more so than the joy and superpower of versatility they can flaunt at their own discretion.
Think of all the insults and assaults we brush off, laugh off and give life to about people's natural selves...then think about all the noise and protections put in place to allow for the most unnatural things and fleeting preferences that get respected as identity...
Seems backwards...likely because it is. We can learn though.
"Healing From This Trauma, So My Kids Don't Have To"... Really a statement to sit in for a while...What does this truly mean if put in practice?
Having a sharp tongue, aggressive demeanor and all the violent impulses that come with that includes the abilty to close things off...people off...opportunities off...
Also can't forget the weapon of humor and laughing off! (Watching Dave Chappelle's The Closer just now and truly enjoying it, while also reading The Guardian article to try to understand the critique)
But are you healing? What does healing look like and how do you convey or "pass it down"? Whatever you are dealing with or are made to deal with because of other people's hate/actions...
I'm more and more trying to identify the root issues internally as these kids are getting bigger, smarter and more practiced at the social/intellectual/emotional judo of the parent/child sparring we do. In an effort to teach, it is a balance of wanting them to learn to protect themselves. Wanting them to carry themselves with a sense of strength, but also doing so in a way to not hurt them while doing it...
One wrong flip of a phrase...Pressure applied at the wrong time...holding too tight to something a second too long...boom!
Constant adjustment and self check and relying on your co-parent to inform your approach. But Healing...from trauma not a broken bone, cut, virus or even a transition in relationships...trauma (acute, chronic, and complex...buried and unrealized).
#ShaCarrieRichardson is Bombing First LoL! Even if you support her you can get it...Hope she really build and take advantage of that momentum she was on when she cracked 10.72...
"Don't let what fuels you fool you..." Sis!
Onaje Malik ~
She'll figure it out...I hope her team/family covers her. Jamaica is a problem on that track!! "We" need all the legs we can get!
Is This World Our Best Option...Evil Outweighs The Good?
Hate is hate and violence never makes sense...no spin needed and no hashtag should be needed to understand this.
We do such a great job of carefully dividing ourselves into these little subcategories of humanity...so much so that when one of these "communities" are affected by any level of oppression or tragedy it is so easy to not see ourselves in them, speak for them, stand with them...
Domestic terrorism in America is a cultural norm...it is funded, backed by law, written as a strategic means to disolve citizen's resolve to reform oppression (or just exist) and then when it is clearly displayed it is called by some other name and the perpetrators of the "crime" are carefully taken in for debrief...the murderers are humanized more than the should be victims.
That's how it looks/feels...at some point we have to just believe what this country is. So when we see citizens storming Capitols there is measure of truth in those misdirected outburst. Distill out the entitlement and willful ignorance from it...Citizens have every right to be pissed off! Fighting for crumbs while disposal of whole meals are being guarded behind the gate to fully perish.
Why is it that the economy being stimulated the highest priority repeatedly?!? Moral stimulus, educational stimulus, nutritional stimulus, Healthcare stimulus...so many areas way more in need of emergency attention...too.
Humanity shouldn't be secondary to economics, but hell maybe they privatized what it is to be Human as well and many of us just missed that play...like fresh water resources, GMO standards, and in time I suspect the very air we breathe.
Peace and protection to all...connect to your loved ones, say what you feel, try to secure your progeny's future as best you can...form a village and protect it. We are over taxed, undeserved and should be out of patience...
Both sides complicit...still no impeachment or real consequences. Leaving him in office and with influence...also free to run for other public offices. 70 million+ voters backed him and even with the events at the Captiol nothing says those numbers have dipped so much. So if the violent mob gathers again, more die and those reported bombs aren't magically located before detonation we can clearly see it was allowed.
Watch "Chris Webber and Stan Van Gundy React To NBA Playoff Games Being Postponed | NBA on TNT" on YouTube
Feel every bit of what Chris Webber shared...every bit.
At some point trauma gives way to reaction...constant assualt and reminders of how much this country hates the skin we are in, but happily tax and take. This one act won't be the change, but hopefully it cause the money to start to apply pressure to their gangs to ease up on the disproportionate murder of melinated people.
Stop reclining and funneling people of color to areas (red-lining race based covenants in deeds) where crime is all but sponsored by the state and then using that same practice to criminalize the youth.
Stop denying the role played and they are playing in handicapping progress
Prepare to repair the damages inflicted over the generations.
Watch "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Responds to Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL)" on YouTube
Get Women Off The Whipping Post!
THIS! Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes her experience and feelings clear about her encounter with Ted Yoho. I'm thankful she didn't let him off the hook!!
Call them out...make the accountable because far too many collect checks (tax dollars at that) based on images that are perversely different from who they really are. Florida's Rep. Ted Yoho is coward, liar and is the epitome of why our government is not trusted just enabled.
I would hope anyone woman in my circle knows abuses and intimidation isn't something they have to "deal with" or accept to survive or thrive. Many men are looking for ways to support and protect...enable us to do so if possible or needed.
Here's to building real coalitions of connection to push each other and protect each other against all forms of abuse and intimidation. Being and Father and Husband doesn't absolve you of your disgusting manner towards women. He did this on the Capitol steps in front of press with a co-worker against a female co-worker and then tried to minimize it...imagine what he is like to others??
Love her energy and approach...even if some items in the agenda I question I'm confident in her ability to discuss and work through details more than sell her morals and movement to the highest bidders.
Women are not here for small so called men to get off their frustration or make themselves feel big by intimidating or abusing. AOC and the many women fighting the good fight are needed MORE...especially to drown out if not wake up the mass of women who voted for and still support 45...
At the outset, I must make one thing crystal clear. I do not and will never judge or condemn any Black person for speaking out against racis
Just the start of the article Michael Coard made it perfectly clear how we need to frame the critique:
"At the outset, I must make one thing crystal clear. I do not and will never judge or condemn any Black person for speaking out against racism. That includes Minister Louis Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammad, Khalid Muhammad, Sister Souljah, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Nick Cannon, or anyone else.
I adamantly and reasonably take that position because any particular statement that was made by any of the aforementioned persons- even if factually wrong, historically imprecise, intellectually misconstrued, or maliciously offensive- was a Black symptom of a white disease. Stated another way, it was a benign Black lesion caused by a malignant white cancer.
And, most important, it was an isolated oral response to a systemic physical assault. Not one of those aforementioned Black persons ever kidnapped or bought or sold or whipped or lynched or sharecropped or convict-leased or Jim-Crowed or redlined or gerrymandered or disenfranchised or miseducated or ghettoized or mass-incarcerated or police-brutalized or otherwise systemically oppressed any white person. And not one of those aforementioned Black persons had or has the ability to do so!"
Absolute Fact...digest it.
We can absolutely acknowledge misinformation or ignorance, but I'm not participating in tearing down someone I KNOW to be lashing out as a symptom of larger and continued abuses...I'll challenge myself more to be better versed to discuss such things, but I was called racist for even insisting that folks who ignorantly call what Nick said as racist get more education in what racism really is before tossing around the word. That is the kind of willful ignorance that is dangerous...not people constantly seeking to arm themselves with knowledge and they get a bit off road seeking empowerment, but the folks that double and triple down on hate and ignorance because of a privilege to do so...weaponizing that ignorance and hate to inflict actual pain, abuse and economic injury upon people...not just hurt feelings.
This isn't a dismissal, but about differential...details matter and it goes a long way in healing. Hurt feelings are much easier to patch up than the actual traumas/scars of years of seeing BLACK PEOPLE brutalized, raped, leased, and murdered and STILL having to move behind enemy lines to build a life...to build a nation...to drag these same dregs of society closer to humanity.
For Nick and especially for his very loud detractors...think before you speak...simple.
Funny how critical thinking aligned with conviction tends to eliminate the need to apologize or backtrack on you actions and words.
A lesson for him and others as we are more openly discussing Race, Racism, Supremacist Ideology, Bigotry, Prejudice, Stereotypes, Biases, and so many other poisonous things THAT ARE NOT ALL THE SAME...learn what they are before identifying them inaccurately in making an already challenging discussion just impossible to have.
https://www.magisto.com/album/video/eDxxUk1WC0l7IS8GDmEwCXx3?l=vsm&o=a&c=o via magisto.com
Always amazes me when I come across men who don't like women...Doesn't have to be romantically or otherwise, but to speak down on one that you don't know just because...that's some real damage there...Some men are boys...
