Riveroflifelisajoy’s Weblog
Just another WordPress.com weblogArchive for November 10, 2007
BLACK FACE AT HAMLINE AND BAGGY PANTS DO NOT MIX!
Putting Black face is offensive. Wearing baggy pants below a descreet level on one’s body is also offensive. One Is worse than the other but why?
If young black kids want to wear their pants around their ankles that is annoying and should be stopped. But Young White college kids who are the hope and future of this country wearing black face should be stopped because they are tomorrow’s leaders!!!
Please let me correct that statement. Young black kids are also OUR FUTURE LEADERS….THAT IS WHY THEY MUST DRESS FOR SUCCESS!
They may be the next George Bush, Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King, or Condoleza Rice or any other elected official who will have the strength and power of the United States behind them. I would hate to hear that when I am in my 70’s or 80’s that a man or woman was elected president and that person thought it was funny to imitate people who were enslaved, and mistreated because of their RACE, CREED, RELIGION, ETC., ETC., ETC!!!
Freedom is not free—it must be continusously fought for and reclaimed.
Black people are still listed as 1/3 human in the constitution of the United States. So how is it funny to make fun of a group of people—matter of fact the only people in this country who are considered currently in the constitution as part animal and can sold as property?!
That is not funny and why was that never taken out of the constitution any way? So let us ask our college presidents and their board of directors to make it a mandatory class for all colleges across the country to have a class on TOLERANCE OF RACE, RELIGION, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, DISABILITIES ETC., ETC., AND ETC.,—
The ethnic myth is a alive and well and kicking people!!! Let us take our respective heads out of the sand or pot hole. Teach yourselves and your children to respect themselves and others whether they look beautiful, cute, pretty or ugly etc.
It is not worth it to dislike our fellow Americans, and fellow humans around the globe. It is counter productive and serves the greater harm for generations to come.
That Hamline College needs to address that issue internally and externally by giving TOLERANCE TRAINING—Our young black men also need a history class on the struggles of the African slaves and their over coming slavery.
Then look at the Jim Crowe Laws that forbade blacks from drinking from a water fountain, after slavery was abolised. Look up the old news papers that defined black criminals as ANIMALS AND BEASTS.—Maybe then our young black men will see the forest for the trees!!!
Style is a state of mind….but Sometimes you have to MAKE PEOPLE RESPECT YOUR INTELLIGENCE AND GIVE THEM A REASON TO DO IT.
Being black is not a crime, being in baggy pants is definitely not a crime—but if you notice that style of wearing clothes came from the ‘jail house”—another dilema that we will address later.
College education is a must in today’s society. So train your children to dress for success. Weekend attire can be anything that they chose….but schools and jobs should present a certain atttitude.
To sum up for now—The college students of Hamline need to be punished in a way that will do their hearts good. Have them volunteer in a orphanage of children of color. Have them help out at a homeless shelter and assist the disadvantaged and maybe they will find that their attitudes will readjust.
We are Cold and We are Hungry!!!
I am Cold and I am Hungry!!!! I can’t take it any more!!! Last week after I paid my rent of $1600.00 my child said what are we going to eat?
I looked around the house and he did too….Ole Mama in da Hood’s Cupboard was bare chile!!! What to do? What to do? —Suddenly it hit me.
The “free food” places my mother used to frequent before she had her stroke. I used to get angry at her for getting the canned food, and bags of rice, and spagetti (uncooked) and also bags of dry beans. I thought and even told her—You do not need that stuff —you have a good job at the Post Office.
I am not the best cook so I had No idea of what to do with a bag of dried beans. You see, my husband had been a Corrections Officer before his castastrophic illness that took him away from my son and I. So when my husband had been with us, we would shop for food and spend atleast $300.00 per food shopping session.
But now—for nine years…it is catch as catch can—Meaning do the best you can, pray for the Lord to increase a $50.00 food purchase to equal a $300.00 and stretch it as far as two weeks or more! As my earlier blog on hunger discussed…”I am not eligible because the Welfare deparment only helps people who have more than one child and make less than $38,00.00 per year. They do not care about your debt to income ratio.
They do not care about your net income—they do not care that you pay $1600.00 per month for a three bedroom for your mother, yourself, and your child. They do not care about the life insurance policy that you have to maintain since your husband has left nothin for his son, and there is no child suuport. —So what do you do when you have barely any heat in the house becuase you cannot afford to pay the heating bill and cannot afford to pay the food bill after it is all said and done?!
Mother’s are always right!!! Get to the Free Food places—it is in your community—ask around at the churches….Don’t despair—I just had forgotten during the summer so we really suffered until a loan from my nearly empty pension came in. We did not got to any amusement parks, or any type of recreation. All I did was create paintings to keep myself positive.
I would tell my son” Ca mon’ John lets do some art work!!! Maybe it will make us rich one day!!! My son is 14 and does not believe in Santa Claus any more—so he just patted me on my head and said yes Mommy, I love you—I will just draw one picture—but I do not like to paint! My mother said, I don’t want to paint I don’t feel like doing that, if you do not mind. ”
I love my family—they have suffered and cried with me for the loss of my husband and suffered with each other when we take ill, and during the summer during my vacation we suffered together without food—until it hit me that I could go back to the free food places—no matter how humiliating it can be.
But guess what—-when you have food like the beans I have come to learn how to cook…on the table with some white rice—IT IS BETTER THAN NOTHING ON THE STOVE OR PLATE AT ALL!!! —So get up off of that computer and check your local churches for the Food Pantry—those who are hungry—God Bless and let me know if you get good results!—Meanwhile we still need an answer about the heat crisis in America!!!
I think we should all blog, or write or call our local and Washington elected officals about the Oil and Gas Heat crisis! What type of Christmas and Chanuka is this for our kids? Hunger and Cold? The rules of Heap are too strick, and the prices are too high. How do you expect me to even afford to purchas holiday gifts from the retailers—-I AM GOING BACK TO THE FLEA MARKET—GOOD BYE MARSHALLS, GOOD BYE MACY’S, GOOD BYE WALMART, AND GOOD BYE COSTCOS!!! How can I buy jewelry, coats, jackets, shoes, boots, cameras, etc., etc., when I cannot even put food on the table.
If something is not done not there will empty stores and empty stores means the down fall of the Gross National Product and the loss of business as we know it in America. I AM MS. JOHN Q PUBLIC—-I CAN NOT SHOP RETAIL ANY MORE—I DO NOT OWN A CREDIT CARD EITHER—-
Give me some ideas on how to save our economy please—or better yet how to feed, clothe and put heat on in my abode for my family.
Thanks! riveroflifelisajoy
What makes an American Gangster?!
Are you telling me that the world is full of good people? Are you telling me that people would not sell drugs to others so that they can make a profit from it? Are you telling me that corruption in the world is not real? Please rethink that!
I had explained in my comment at the Black Voices Blog on the movie “American Gangster,” starring Denzel Washington as George Lukus the Drug King pin of the 70’s–that there are American Gangsters all around us. Some are camoflaged!
In the early years of my marriage I had lived in Cambria Heights Queens with my husband and we lived with his parents so that we could save money to buy our first house.
Cambria Heights is a predominately middle Class and upper middle class community. The houses have beautiful brick Tudor homes and have over, over size front lawns. All properties are cut by professionals, the birds chirp sweetly during the spring and summer. Everybody has atleast two cars, 4×4’s, minivans, mercedes, BMW’s etc. Everyone has beautful curtains up at their windows.
Some people even have family or paid baby sitters who watch their children while they work around the clock to keep that tailored house and tailored lawn in check and up to date with the latest from “HomeDepot”—I know–cause I lived there when I first got married and after I gave birth to my son.
You can still drive down those streets and see the money and time invested in that community by it’s residents.
However, there was an American Gangster there some 16 years ago when I lived there. You would not have known it. This guy was low key. He wore his pants up on his butt….he wore a belt around his waist. He wore non-designer clothes.
Once in a blue moon you would see a small black BMW parked in his drive way. Once in a while he looked like he was going out to dinner and would get into this black BMW and drive off with his beautiful girl friend (she looked like Rihana without the glitz and bling—just a simple ponytail down her back–very demure—too plain to be exact).
He had no children. He only had two black Rockwieler dogs. He had them on a regular walking schedule. The house was smaller than my inlaws house. It had recent sandblasting and cementing work done on the brick face and the drive way. The house was plain but emaculate!!!
I noticed that he had the alarm strips on all of the windows of the house. He kept two very ugly Ford Taurus Cars parked in front of the house or the drive way. I never, ever saw heavy human traffic in or out of his house. He talked to my husband just to say a quick “Hello,”–but nothing too much.
One day I told my husband about the two caucasion men that had exited this guy’s house and got into a sleek shiny Mercedes Benz and drove off silently. My husband said,”oh, really? You know he is a drug dealer right?” I was shocked!! I was scared too! I grew up very sheltered.
I was unaware of what a drug dealer really looked like. But I certainly did not think that the drug dealers I had heard so much about it in the news looked like this guy! Wow!—We talk about STERO TYPES OF RACES–never, ever underestimate the crime world—
This guy moved away abruptly one day. I saw alot of haste in his actions. He was dismantling his house from the inside. He had boxes, and bags and did alot of moving at night. I thought it strange because I did not see a For Sale sign on the house. I thought maybe he was going on a trip. Then the activity stopped and the house was quiet. I did not see the dogs, or see the ugly Ford Taurus cars any more.
I told my husband, who had been a Corrections Officer at the time—he told me, “He got a call from a guy that he had been a partner with in the drug dealing thing that he did. The guy was coming out of jail and was going to be looking for him! He had a sc0re to settle–That guy was on the run!!! I suddenly believed that a drug dealer does not have to stand on the street corner!!! A drug dealer does not have to be obvious to the neighborhood.—-Yet this guy is helping to destroy lives.
But I knew like any other crime—a price must be paid….and I guess he realized that he was living on borrowed time—no matter how innocent a life he presented on that quiet tree lined, over sized lawned block in Cambria Heights.
Another little situation happened on that street in Cambria Heights. A house a few doors down from that quiet American Gangster guy took his place after he left. When I first moved to that neighborhood I noticed that this house in opposition to the “quiet gangster” down the block—this house was full of people and quite noisey!! Those were not drug dealers in that house….What happened was that the owner had died and left it to relatives–a man to be exact. However, this man already had a residence, so he used to rent out rooms to young black college students.
All of them appeared to have jobs, and cars….They were just talkative and about their personal private lives. Well, it seems that the man that rented the house sold it one day. He sold it to some other guy who moved in without alot of furniture and no family that any of us could see. The house needed some repair so it appeared that the new owner of that house broke up the drive way and side walk preparing it to be made as lovely as all the other lawns on that quiet block in Cambria Heights Queens.
However, things took a turn for the worse. He had a big rectangle dumpster placed in front of the house for discarding his cememt pieces from the drive way and the sidewalk. Then I noticed a brown bag always on the top portion of this dumpster. I would then see a bedragagled looking male or female suantering up this quiet block.
The people that went to this guys house were more out of place than the caucasian guys who had gone to the other “drug dealers” house directly across the street before he ran/moved away. This guy left the dumpster in front of his house for several months. Work on the sidewalk, and drive way came to a stand still and the human traffic to this house was on the increase. No one went into the house.—These strange, and haunted individuals would saunter up to that EYESORE of an dumpster sitting in front of the house and pick up that ridiculous brown paper bag and suanter off down the street again.
If they saw me exit my inlaws house they would look at me hard—-bold like—no fear or nothing! I could feel the negative energy.
Soon my husband and I moved away after I had my baby and we brought our first house.
But six months down the road my inlaws called to tell my husband what had happened….Which they really did not have to tell him—Because it was already all over the news!!! The guy with the dumpster in front of his house had a “factory operation” going on for “CRACK COCAINE” –This guy got murdered at 3 o’ clock in the morning. A horrible drive by—but also an attack a murder spree erupted. That guy never had a chance. He was taken out of that house in a body bag!!!! What a mess and I was so glad to be out of that neighborhood.
Drugs are every where! It is a disgusting plague of the human society in every walk of life. I find it worse those who fill the need so that they can get paid.
How do you live with yourself knowing that you are selling drugs to people; some pregnant women who give birth to drug addicted babies? How could you? Do you know that evil deeds do have Karma Attached to them?
My husband used to tell me that while he worked in Rikers Island, Solitary Confinement–HDM a.k.a. the Bing—commonly referred to— Most inmates with twenty years to life had related stories of murder, drug dealing, kidnapping and the like—Most inmates who were in for crimes of that deep level explained to him,”Look, I have done more crimes than this crap that I am in here for.” They did not catch me for the time I held this other drug dealer and some of his people hostage and then killed them!”
You might think that those guys were making up glorified stories to entertain my husband—but let me be clear—people in solitary confinement—back in the 80’s would fight Corrections Officers, and attack at any time. This was not a place for the weak of mind or body. To be honest with you—that is one of the reasons that my husband is missing at this very moment (for nine years to date). The stress of that job took him away from myself and his child. (—I will discuss that in another blog–some other time—but trust—it will be discussed.)
So in conclusion, American Gangsters are not to be glorified….but people please talk to your children. American Gangsters are men or women on a mission. Except that is not a mission for the better of society. It is a mission to supply their personal financial goals and they do not care to whom they sell and whose family it destroys.
Talk to your children, and educate yourself….What looks innocent is not always innocent. What smells stinky….is most likely coming from a source—seek the source of the stench and you will find the danger that lurks within—Watch who your children associate with. Do not underestimate you child and your child’s friends or relatives either.
Keepin’ it real and raw -riveroflifelisajoy!
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