I Had Never Thought it Would Have Come to This

I used to look forward to the future twenty years ago. Our problems would be solved through technology, racism would fade away and we would live forever. But in the new millennium we fight wars in the name of religion and keeping our country safe, which is sort of how things started. Racism is worse than ever, women still aren’t respected and it’s hard to see where technology has really helped anyone. We have spent more time trying to find an easier way to communicate with our computers through a bunch of lights and eye candy, but we’re still stuck in chat rooms, only now they’re known as social-networks. People are blowing their money on flat screen televisions so they can watch the Super Bowl in high-definition; the same people who wouldn’t spend money on anything else that buy everything from Wal-Mart or Cosco.

Everyone is pumped with vitamins so no one should get sick for eons, but the even worse colds and the increasingly violent strains of influenza you see going around suggest that viral infections are bigger and better than ever. My parents finally accept rap, hip-hop, whatever, but the music sucks these days. To be totally fair my father was one of the first on the block to have a copy of “Rapper’s Delight”, though he grew to hate it since then, hard to tell what he would have to say if he were still here. Some of us are still falling victim to AIDS in record numbers while others are living with HIV for decades.

I expected the problems that Barrack Obama has faced, but I wasn’t supposed to have to hear anything about a Jena 6 or “nappy headed hos” in the twenty-first century. You would have had to be a fool not to have seen how decisive people are when it comes to discussing Oprah Winfrey, but no one really thought we would still see African-American and now Latino women put out there in music videos or worse yet, careers built on tell-all memoirs or soft material that perhaps as many teenage girls read as grown women. We were supposed to become more civilized and cosmopolitan, but these days we are about as ignorant, short-sighted and naive as ever, about everything.

Yes it is politically incorrect to comment on it, but quite honestly, even hypocritically, despite whatever nonsense we did overseas buildings were not supposed to fall down on our own soil. I went from joking that America was impenetrable and invincible the week before to wondering who else was going to be killed in New York for the cause. We live in a world of contradictions; in Dubai the worlds richest and brightest are living in a cosmopolitan area that is being built up to rival anything New York, Chicago or any of the other world class cities has to offer but it’s still rough in places like Afghanistan. Our freedoms have been trampled by fears of what will happen to us if we truly speak our minds about what bothers us, will we be stoned at the hand of society, literally and figuratively, or do we have to live out our lives with the guilt of how that made the next person feel.

People care about animals more than they do humans, far more than they’re willing to let on and more than enough than I care to hear about. Somehow, someway, every political cause seems to come back around to someone’s civil rights, while the group who actually did die and fight for those rights for decades doesn’t seem to fully understand how they can use them to better themselves. What’s worse our economy is so interdependent on globalization no one really knows what is American and what isn’t anymore. It was supposed to help American companies compete with overseas corporations and open up our borders to trade, but instead it’s helped China exploit Africa now that we’re too occupied with how to keep Hispanics away from our borders.

Speaking of China, it’s gotten to the point where you wonder if more than two blacks are assembling together if they do not have an anti-establishment agenda or if they’re just up to no good. It sounds ludicrous, until you think of your own reactions when more than a few young black men are seen together or how society is coming down on blacks in a church in what is probably a ghetto somewhere on a side of Chicago where no one else would want to be at because everyone may have left the area because of new opportunities in the suburbs. If a pastor can mobilize a future president to destroy what was all-American about this nation from within the White House, then we’re back in the stone age of how groups like the Black Panthers were treated when they were giving out free breakfasts.

Yet you can’t say that in this country; instead everything is about prejudice and hate. YouTube, which few respect anyway, is suddenly the area for political discourse. It’s odd, because African-Americans have assimilated in this country for so many decades they don’t even realize who they are anymore, but we could instantly snap back in an instant if we’re reminded of how we’re still treated and what goes on. It isn’t everyone assembling in clubs and organizations and behind closed doors that make those of other races feel excluded, it’s certain people. A lot of African-Americans do not want to think, talk, act or even be reminded of prototypical Black politics and socio-economic issues. They do not want to think about the past and like to look forward to the future that I had thought or hoped we would be a part of in this day and age.

Instead we obsess and focus over who is calling who a nigger and continue to give the word power because we are powerless to grab onto anything else to mobilize ourselves with because so many of our institutions have been torn apart few know where to begin to create a new infrastructure with which we can empower ourselves again. No one is disputing the history of the word, but where do you go from there; if Whites weren’t using the term there would be something else to talk about, and then something else again. It isn’t that we still aren’t in a struggle, but at the same time, is it easier to attack those clues than to really try to change someone’s way of perceiving us to begin with, or worse yet how we see ourselves.

I look at Africa, much of which seems to be looking a lot more like the rest of the world and wonder how much things have truly changed because tall buildings and a metropolitan way of life is only a nice pretty cover over uglier aspects of humanity. Our high-rise projects and basketball hoops in the park didn’t help us either, neither did anything else “urban” when appreciated for the aesthetic of it; are people treated any better, are there still dictatorships, oppression, injustice, is become more “Westernized” helping the mother land or killing it. If they’re actually getting a real appreciation for it then perhaps on some level they’re better off than we are.