WHAT'S HAPPENED TO US?

What happened to us all?  Nobody has any standards anymore.  Did we ever?  Surely we did.  Somewhere along the line we slipped, like our pants from our waistline.  Slipped out of consciousness into an abyss of incoherence, incompetence, and incompleteness.  Some will disagree, and argue that I should speak for myself.  I am in fact speaking for myself, but their response is the reason I’m also speaking for them.  For those of us assured of where we’re going, I would only ask where have we been?  How did we get here? 

                                       

Intriguing is the parallel between the lapses in our judgment, and the lapse in generations.  This clearly accounts for our lack; lack of motivation, lack of understanding, lack of progress.  It’s our parents’ fault to some degree.  They weren’t there.  Not for us, and that’s the reason why we’re here; just here, going nowhere but where we are currently.  Even those that were present didn’t present us the tools of cultivation culminating in our success as well rounded, even tempered , intelligent and  successful individuals.  What happened to them?  How is it that the flame of the torch to be passed on from Stokely and Malcolm burned out?  At what point did the movement of our civil rights in a forward direction stall?  Did our grands and great-grands become so complacent with their accomplishments in the decades to follow that they lost sight of the fact that it would take more than a few decades marked by the height of our civil unrest to reverse the damage and advance the progress stifled by hundreds of years of imposed inferiority?  Did they lose themselves so much in the joy and fun of the music of the subsequent decades that they allowed its’ distraction from progress to go unnoticed?  Music always has been the devil’s realm, so it’s entirely possible that more brothers were asking for action between the sheets than those who echoed Marvin in asking what’s going on.  But the flame still burned, no?  Sure, until the 80s it seemed when the crack epidemic burned the remainder of both the flame, and our giants and heroes out.  It was then that papa truly became a rolling stone.  Thank you Mr. Reagan. 

                                                                      

So the pattern of regression continued. The blind lead the blind.  And with that as our starting point, now only the mind leads the mind.  But the mind doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.  Clinging to adages of old, submersed in our own air of ignorance today we reply that what we don’t know won’t hurt us.  More aptly put, it’s killing us that we don’t know what we should, and at some point in the current generation, the blame for that rests squarely on our shoulders.  The information is out there, more readily available and easily accessible than ever before.  Our heroes accomplished so much with so little, yet despite our increased media and technological advancements, today we accomplish so little with so much.  We do have a black president, but for me that new hope masks a personal fear that we will again rest on our ‘accomplishment’, instead of using it as a springboard to further our progression.  At what point do we decide not to perpetuate the negative cycles of our community existence?  We are doing their work for them.  It once was necessary to lie to us, cheat us, beat us if need be.  Now, we blind ourselves with bling, kick ourselves in the ass with implants and injections, and worry more about what’s on our feet than what we feed our spirit.  The internal is always more important than the external.  We have to cherish that, be mindful of it, and spend our energy living to empower it.  God lives there, on the inside.  I can’t believe He wants this for us.  I don’t want this for us.  We didn’t always want this for ourselves.  What happened to us?