A WORD FROM OUR FOUNDER

“What so ever I’ve feared has come to life” or "i see my Mary Ann slipping away"

She was the first woman I ever fell in love with.  And I fell real hard (she did too) and was too young to know what to do with that energy and so was she.  Two college age people smack in the middle of their college age gut twisting romance .  She was gorgeous, brilliant, cynical, and extremely talented. She insisted she was going to move to Hollywood and be a star or at least get the hell out of Milwaukee while trying. I didn’t want to move there and so this was a constant sticking point (these days I would have just said "sure whatever" and moved too but I was young and stupid and convinced that if she loved me she’d stay…that if she moved and I followed I’d always be second fiddle to her goals and she was convinced if I loved her I’d move and if she stayed for me she’d be conceding all the power)…That and she was black and even though this was 1994 she was convinced this was an issue.

 So we didn’t end up together and she not only never left Milwaukee she never even moved out of the same apartment.  Time marched on and she accomplished ZERO of the things she wanted to do and was single and 38 and had become a wanna be black activist type where her skin color is the driving force in her whole life (you know the kind- a geek for being black, exclusivly reads books about it, movies about it, hears speeches about it.) she’s let it completely overshadow everything that was good about her.

So now I find out she’s preggers and without a husband…so she’s about bring into her precious black community yet ANOTHER child of a single mom who right out of the gate has less of a chance than a child of a stable family unit. AND the kids going to have his head filled with all sorts of bullshit about how whitie is out to get him instead of positive messages like “you are special” “you can do anything you put your mind to” and so on.

He’ll no doubt be indoctrinated into thinking that his being black is also the determining force in his life.

People like her and her decision making are this child’s true obstacle. 

Even now, despite having nothing in her life as evidence that she has the wisdom to properly decipher such information, she continues to pollute the Internet with blurbs about how America is unfair to blacks and stories of racism and whatnot.  It makes me think of a line from America history X that is ironically about a skinhead getting HIS head out of his ass.  The Black principal from his past asks him “have any of the things you’ve done made your life better?”

This blog isn’t just about me bitching or gloating, it’s a lesson.  A lesson to all of us and our little causes and our politics and our views.  It’s all well and good that we care about things bigger than us.  But there is a line we have to draw. And that line we have to stop at is our causes becoming a drug an excape.  A thing we run to to avoid doing things in our actual lives, where instead of doing something, or facing something or TRYING to achieve we take a snort of activism.  It’s called losing perspective.  And another side effect of this is we start to believe everything is bleak and unmanageable.  I present to you a woman who thought a mixed couple was an issue in a major metropolitan city in 1994…and went down hill from there.  And all her worry and all her well meaning pollution has gained her nothing.  Nothing that she was going to strive for was ever honestly attempted, nothing big, nothing small.  I truly don’t know if the boogie man of racism froze her in her tracks or if she was just afraid to try and used it for a crutch but in the end it doesn’t matter.  She now lives in the land of “I’m black” and so will her kid.  I have no doubt her kid will have her talent and looks, and I fear will grow up with her drug.  

If her particular method of avoidance was to play dungeons and dragons while achieving nothing we could ALL EASILY see that she pissed away her life for no purpose...and a long extended blog would not be necessary to get people to see that putting all your time and concentration into that instead of your OWN LIFE is absolute folly.  but since she wasted her life and avoided doing anything under the false vocation of "activism" most people, on first glace, would not see the shear stupidity of it all.

what you have is a person (two people once her kid is old enough) who COULD make the world a better place but instead will pollute it.

Pollute it with fear, and animosity, and resentment, and the inability to move on and achieve.

Listen to me…you want to know why the white man seems to run everything? Why the white man seems to always come out holding the clean end of the stick?  Because on the battle ground of achievement we are all evenly matched…talent, hard work, cunning, all these are tools readily available to anyone…the winner moves just a hair quicker, thinks just a synapse or two faster, ACTS just a touch less inhibited.   The white guy never STOPS HIMSELF by wondering if the color of his skin will be a factor, if the deck is stacked against him, doesn’t stop and dwell on what happened to those who came before him.  It’s that simple.  This small micro factor gives him the edge.

No law can give you that edge, no amount of reparations, no deluge of links and stories meant to educate.  Not all information educates by the way, some of it only serves to stymie.  Only YOU can give yourself that edge.  YOU have to believe and attack. If you stop to dwell on or indoctrinate yourself with “I’m a woman” or “I’m black” or “I’m gay” or “I’m this or that” you can never come out on top of the people who are ONLY thinking “achieve”.  Break it right down to a simple core- What takes longer to say “achieve” or “achieve in spite of…”?  a split seconds difference in an evenly match field is the difference between success and failure.

Ignore that bullshit and achieve and you’ll, in your own way, in your own small scale, make this planet better than you found it…how many bigots did Malcolm X convert?  Honestly?  How many hearts did he change?  Now let’s look at bill cosby or Michael Jordan…by simply achieving in there field and being a force that demanded respect by that shear achievement they probably chance scores of hearts.  People on the cusp, people who could easily have let the stereotypes they grew up hearing take root, instead watched and were entertained by and grew familiar with two black men who rarely mentioned their skin color.  Can you grasp the good that these two did?

A million e-mailed links about who got what burned on their lawn in some bumblefuck southern town is a laughable shadow of the heart and mind changing that Bill Cosby accomplished by merely getting a nation to watch his t.v. show once a week and seeing the image of a Black Family laughing and caring about each other and struggling with the same bullshit that we all struggle with.

or the heart and mind changing power of being a good example.  You think every one thinks blacks are jobless leaches?  be black, have a job and everyone around you will have no choice but to change thier views of blacks...or whatever demographic you are and stereotype that goes with it.

 it's deceptively simple and effective.

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ANYHOO…Should I be pissed right now?

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Should I just want to grab her and shake her and say “OPEN YOUR EYES YOU DUMB BITCH, YOU ARE GREATER THAN THE WHOLE OF YOUR PARTS! You are not A BLACK WOMAN YOU ARE (name withheld), you are your SOUL, YOUR ARE YOUR MIND AND HEART…

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ALL YOUR FEAR AND LOATHING HAS ACCOMPLISHED WAS TO FUCK UP BOTH OF OUR LIVES.  YOU NEVER LEFT ANYHOW…WE COULD HAVE BEEN HAPPY ALL THIS TIME.

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WHY DID YOU FUCK US UP?!

But I really don’t care, other than as a cautionary tale…it was after all a million years ago...and i've lost better women since then.

On the other hand, part of me is looking back at a decade and a half of, for the most part, blind, directionless, questing for the correct shaped hole for the odd shaped peg that I am, and thinking…we COULD have just as well lived happily ever after if this was all she was going to end up doing anyways.  I could be typing right now from a nice house in a mediocre neighborhood as my two half breed kids run around and break my concentration.

Or maybe I dodged a bullet on that one and put way more time into it than I should have in the first place.

Whatever…people change, our paths split off and I can only hope I didn’t turn into as big a dumb asshole in my own direction as she did.

                       comments? concerns?

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