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Rustang
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Rustang
Post Number: 396
Registered: 04-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 08:51 am: | 
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A Triumph of Felons and Failure
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 24, 2006
I was browsing at a newsstand in Manhattan recently when I came across a magazine called Felon. It was the “Stop Snitchin’ ” issue, and the first letter to the editor began: “Yo, wassup Felon!”
Another letter was from “your nigga John-Jay,” who was kind enough to write: “To my bitches, I love ya’ll.”
Later I came across a magazine called F.E.D.S., which professes to be about “convicted criminals—street thugs—music—fashion—film—etc.” The headline “Stop Snitching” was emblazoned on the cover. “Hundreds of kilos of coke,” said another headline, “over a dozen murders,” and “no one flipped.”
What we have here are symptoms of a depressing cultural illness, frequently fatal, that has spread unchecked through much of black America.
The people who are laid low by this illness don’t snitch on criminals, seldom marry, frequently abandon their children, refer to themselves in the vilest terms (niggers, whores, etc.), spend extraordinary amounts of time kicking back in correctional institutions, and generally wallow in the deepest depths of degradation their irresponsible selves can find.
In his new book, “Enough,” which is about the vacuum of leadership and the feverish array of problems that are undermining black Americans, Juan Williams gives us a glimpse of the issue of snitching that has become an obsession with gang members, drug dealers and other predatory lowlifes — not to mention the editors of magazines aimed at the felonious mainstream.
“In October 2002,” he writes, “the living hell caused by crime in the black community burst into flames in Baltimore. A black mother of five testified against a Northeast Baltimore drug dealer. The next day her row house was fire-bombed. She managed to put out the flames that time. Two weeks later, at 2 a.m. as the family slept, the house was set on fire again. This time the drug dealer broke open the front door and took care in splashing gasoline on the lone staircase that provided exit for people asleep in the second- and third-floor bedrooms.
“Angela Dawson, the 36-year-old mother, and her five children, aged 9 to 14, burned to death. Her husband, Carnell, 43, jumped from a second-story window. He had burns over most of his body and died a few days later.”
If white people were doing to black people what black people are doing to black people, there would be rioting from coast to coast. As Mr. Williams writes, “Something terrible has happened.”
When was it that the proud tradition of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, gave way to glossy felon magazines and a shameful silence in the face of nationally organized stop-snitching campaigns?
In an interview, Mr. Williams said: “There are so many things that we know are indicators of a crisis within the community. When you look at the high dropout rate, especially among our boys. Or the out-of-wedlock birthrate, which is really alarming. Or the high rate of incarceration.
“When you hear boys saying it’s a ‘rite of passage’ to go to jail, or the thing that is so controversial but has been going on for a while — kids telling other kids that if they’re trying to do well in school they’re trying to ‘act better than me,’ or ‘trying to act white’ — all of these are indications of a culture of failure. These are things that undermine a child or an individual who is trying to do better for himself or herself. These are things that drag you down.”
Enough, in Mr. Williams’s view, is enough. His book is a cry for a new generation of African-American leadership at all levels to fill the vacuum left by those who, for whatever reasons, abandoned the tradition of struggle, hard-won pride and self-determination. That absence of leadership has led to an onslaught of crippling, self-destructive behavior.
Mr. Williams does not deny for a moment the continued debilitating effects of racism. But racism is not taking the same toll it took a half-century ago. It is up to blacks themselves to embrace the current opportunities for academic achievement and professional advancement, to build the strong families that allow youngsters to flourish, and to create a cultural environment that turns its back on crime, ignorance and self-abasement.
More blacks are leading successful lives now than ever before. But too many, especially among the young, are caught in a crucible of failure and degradation. This needs to change. Enough is enough.
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Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 6244
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 10:09 am: |
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Rustang,
Part of the reason why I'm beginning to move towards some form of legalization of recreational narcotic consumption is because I think that such would ameliorate if not thwart MANY of the social and criminal maladies that plague Black communities. Maybe if smoking cocaine is addressed in a manner akin to that drinking scotch, we could erect better legal, social and cultures controls over it.
But we're NEVER going to get a handle on these problems UNTIL Black foks begin to impose some fairly rigid, harsh...perhaps even (momentarily) some DRACONIAN standards upon each other. For example, and I think I've state such or similar here: If you have out-of-wedlock kids, beat or abandon your family, carjack someone, sell rocks to grade schoolers, etc.; your a$$ gets WHOLLY and, perhaps, PERMANENTLY disowned by your family, fired from your job, excommunicated from your church, etc. And these things must happen amongst BLACK foks.
I think it’s only when we go fairly HARDLINE with each other that many of these problems are addressed.
PS: Who the hell are PUBLISHING, PRINTING and DISTRIBUTING magazines dedicated to Felons, anyway? THEY should be as vilified as the people and subject matter that are highlighted in those publications. This is akin to the RECORD COMPANIES and RETAILER cavalierly dealing all the killer, thug gangsta rap stuff. |
Rustang
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Rustang
Post Number: 398
Registered: 04-2005
Rating:
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, August 26, 2006 - 04:34 pm: |
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Abm, I would agree with the legalization of the 'recreational' drugs.The epidemic of drug-related crime is not the result of drug use, it stems solely from the price of the drugs.Junkies wouldn't be committing robberies if they could support their habits for 20 bucks a day instead of hundreds.Legalized, taxed and regulated drugs would eliminate an entire class of criminals, namely the drug dealers, and the associated beatings, rapes and murders that they commit.Every problem that people normally associate with drug abuse is more accurately associated with really expensive drug abuse.Knock the bottom out the price and the problems that affect society as a whole will disappear.
The cause of the problem with this generation of young knuckle-heads is the last generation of young knuckle-heads.If you look for the common denominator in the problems such as unwed mothers, single parent homes, teen pregnancy, spousal abuse, the horrible living conditions experienced by a young lady trying to raise a couple of kids by herself with a minimum wage job, etc....it doesn't take any special genius to see what the problem is.Ostracizing them from 'The Community' would not be an effective counter, however, since staying as uninvolved with their children's lives as possible is the objective to begin with.I suspect that something more like having the communtity leaders getting together, finding the ridiculously inadequate 'father' and whipping his ass every time the mother came up short on a bill or couldn't afford a trip to the doctor or books and clothes for school would go a lot farther on the road to solving these problems.You father a child, you WILL contribute significantly to the upbringing of this child.Just that simple.
Those 'chain-gang alumni' magazines were news to me also.Many young brothers today take pride in how much time they've spent caged like an animal.I don't get it, but to each his own, I guess. |
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