Thurston’s Thoughts
Is it a Crime
Who is Committing It
The statute of limitations for most crimes began not when the crime is committed but when it is discovered. Likewise, parties to a contract must be released from the obligation of the terms or are in breach of its anticipated stipulations. The commonality is an awareness of the violation or a voluntary release from accountability of its breach or default. During Black History Month we can’t help but be drawn to time statues and breaches of agreed upon considerations. Sorting through time many promises have been made and obligations have failed to be met. However, despite essentially a summary judgement, how can our expectations continue to defy their demonstration?
History examined unflinchingly betrays the rhetoric of convenience used to sugarcoat the facts of the past. American History is such a ball of confusion and misrepresentation of material facts, malicious intent, and deceitful motivations to render it corrupted and almost historically worthless. We all know the company lines, manipulations, and revisionist masquerades because it is presented as educational fact. Spanning the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Founding Fathers, Christian values, Civil War, Confederacy, the North’s abolitionist posture, Emancipation Proclamation, Juneteenth, and Reconstruction they are all propagandist contortions which a forensic examination would prove more fiction than fact.
Since the Civil War, if Field Marshall Order 15 was to be honored as agreed upon, there has been many opportunities including the current multi-billion dollar expenditures to Ukraine, Israel, and immigrants. Congress has had over a century and a half to authorize reparations but only need weeks to subsidize war and instability. As a principle of business, if settlement has not occurred in nearly four score and seven years times two, the check probably is not in the mail. Accordingly, the priority of restitution has been rejected as evidenced by the repeal of affirmative action. It would seem if we are always last in line for the promise of America, why are we not when our pledge of allegiance is needed?
The many accumulative oppressions of racism has produced a cultural psychosis of normalizations ignoring the covert demonstrations of its dysfunction, exclusions, and expectations. By now is should be painfully obvious that we can’t trust that. Through the spectacles of brutal honesty the plague of our people, culture, and conditions are in our power to activate our liberation from the psychological captivity of this socially engineered relegation. These obstacles of stagnation have been centuries old in ideology and systemic execution. The subversion was a regimented categorization restricting education, opportunity, and resource accumulation as the normal social, political, and economic model.
Although these are receding social conditions, they still sustain the ramifications of its occurrence, intent, and presence. However, for us to remain psychologically impaired is an expression of conditioned victimhood and despair. Begging, patiently waiting, and praying only invites pity, permission, or charity but seldom results. However, we have been treated that way without the dignity of our persistent resistance. We have splurged on complacencies which have diverted our resolve and divided our solidarity of purpose. Our current social tribulations are of lesser impositions than faced by our ancestors. It is our obligation to navigate a course and the necessary sacrifices to combat the residue of captivity by lessening the ongoing affect from it.
We are not what they say we are , we are what WE demonstrate we are. Our family dynamic, incarceration rate, us-on-us crime, substance dependency, mental health, educational deficits, economic discrepancies, health concerns, and wealth depletions are direct results of targeted agendas and policy implementations. They are designed to define us as a subjugated classification, especially if by our behavior we resemble or succumb to that. We must recognize, practice, and promote therapeutic resolutions. So, a designated holiday or month of pacification does not relieve us of our daily obligation to carry ourselves daily with the dignity of celebratory ambitions and behaviors.
Is it better to confront the implications of current racism than the history of it? The current form is easier to prevent or reduce than the denials of the past which don’t necessarily confront the present. The past gashes the present while the present can heal the future. To keep it ruthlessly real time moves in one direction, forward, and our methods of leverage and persuasion must evolve as the targets, demands, or avenues change in the present to remedy the future. So, just as rank has its privileges, it also has its burdens and priorities have their order. The present and the future are amendable, the past is not.
A commitment to the current goals must endure the paths to achieve them. We must engage with the courage to be carried on our shield if our demands are to be honored by us and undeniable to others. We must demand urgency and expedited delivery of our provisions prioritized as others’ have been. Still, our primary ambition must be our internal recalibration that depends on us individually and collectively acquiring or possessing the tools to personally achieve our objective. The most skillful or proficient display of acumen in any field possesses the competitive edge to not only meet the standard but create the standard or pierce the barrier.
In addition, zero tolerance for disregard or disparaging portrayals whether ours or others formulating stereotypical subjugations. Can you imagine a Presidential candidate openly to our face hurling insults like scraps to be gathered and gratefully consumed by stating that the Black vote could be garnered by selling a sneaker and being under indictment. So sneakers and criminal indictments are synonymous with us and the most attractive way to gain Black votes while having a symbol of your white benevolence standing closely by grinning like its Juneteenth. That’s what some think of us to our face only to imagine it would surely be more colorfully expressed behind our backs.
The point is certain behaviors produce certain perceptions and degrading behaviors invites disrespect and disregard. The things that secure respect will also secure the other things we have been historically denied or discounted. A fortified edge leaves no room for disrespect, disregard, or malicious mockery without peril. Social justice is the plight of the diligent warrior to secure ground now to be built upon later. What our children see they become, so what we show them should be what we what to see in them, free of the shackles of subjugation but instead based on the content of their character, presentation, and power.
The seemingly automatic assumptions and funky depictions are displayed or conveyed by a minority which is cast upon the majority both by Blacks and Whites. Some battles are along racial lines, others economic, and still others social but in reality they are all internal and individual to either represent the problem or the solution. So is the real crime what someone does to us or what we allow them to do to us. Only the victim mentality will be drag to the gallows while a warrior’s spirit is met at the gallows unbroken.
Victimhood is nourishment for the weak just as adversity is porridge for the determined. Given the statue of limitations are still running and the breach has not been dissolved, the debt remains unpaid. My question is by who, them to us or us to ourselves? The easy way out is to say both but which one is more likely to be settled. The next question, is it a crime for us to patiently wait instead of charging the summit of our demands? Our future plight depends on the answers despite others’ breaches and promises made or broken to us. The crime of default is theirs’s but the crime of resolution is becoming increasingly ours.
