DANGER! Deep Thoughts Ahead!
I have had a few big thoughts lately, they aren’t completely clear yet, but I feel like writing them down would help. Lately we’ve been studying Blacks, lynching and the Civil Rights Movement in my Humanitas. Such horrible and uplifting stories fitted so close together that it’s hard to get control of your emotions before they are torn in a completely different direction. The story of a pregnant woman who was upset that her husband was lynched, she spoke too loudly. The same mob that killed her husband stabbed her in the stomach, stepped on her fetus, hanged her from a bridge and her adolescent son next to her. Then the story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A personal hero of mine who fought oppression with intelligence and strength while managing to hold onto his morals tighter than anyone expected. A poet who told the people the night before he died how he had been to the mountain top, he had seen the promise land and that his people would reach it soon. So uplifting and inspiring, the desire to fight but to not play by the rules, to ask why when no one else would. I guess the idea that connects my two levels of thought is the more recent stuff we’ve studied. Articles written by Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown concerning the psychology behind the oppression of people of color. How there were two types of African Americans, there were the negroes who tried to be white and the Blacks who merely tried to survive. And that got me thinking, y’know are those the only choices they had? And that still stands today for many, the idea that you either try and be White or Black and you fit in where you can. I just don’t think that those are the only choices we have, like Dr. King I will ask why. I don’t want to be just Black or White, I’m me. I fell like it’s so easy for so many people to judge everything. Not just people, but people’s decisions, their own life and everything in between. How I sometimes catch people watching me and Jessaline and I hear them thinking how I’m just trying to take advantage of her. They just glare and walk away, thinking that it’s not right. I know I’m a victim of my own criticism too but it’s impossible to be completely open-minded. Yet it remains so hard for people to be moral and good in this world today. Everyone is so ready to judge me and mine for every little thing. Think how hard it was for Dr. King, to sit their everyday and try and think of a way that will help his people without hurting anyone and yet getting sacks of mail everyday calling him an uppity nigger who doesn’t know his place. Or other Blacks calling him a sell-out for insisting on adhering to non-violence. No good deed goes unpunished I guess. So many seem ready to call me an asshole, pervert, pig, you name it. And you know what? I’m not going to correct them. I can’t go up to them and look them straight in the eye and tell them I’m not. I don’t know, I don’t know what I am. I don’t think that I’m an asshole but that doesn’t make it true. If someone thinks I am, then to that person I am an asshole. I think that for whatever reason people enjoy seeing the bad in others. They prefer the mistakes to the successes, the faults to the virtues. I refuse to see that, I know sometimes I do but this will be my mission in life, I want to see only the beautiful, the amazing and the good. I may have to note the bad every now and then, and I will fight to fix it but I refuse to ignore the wonders of my life and my world. And even this outlook can be criticized, I’ve been called many things in disgust, an optimist and a naive individual. Well, in the words of John Lennon, “You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.” But you know reality is so cruel, why should I want it? Reality can be beautiful but too often it is cold and uncaring. How many people use the line “life isn’t fair” to excuse their unfair actions. Just because the world is like that doesn’t make it ok. I would rather come up with a dream and try and mold reality into its image rather than just accept all of the world’s shortcomings. Even if I fail I will fall with a beautiful lie in my chest and a vision in my eye. All of history’s most memorable characters are people who acted on their visions of how the world should be, Dr. King, Napoleon, Gandhi etc. Now maybe I lose sight of things occasionally, and that’s when mistakes occur but I have good intentions at heart. “I ain’t no perfect man I’m tryin do the best that I can with what it is I have,” (Mos Def). I don’t have a final line that will tie together all these thoughts perfectly like a well planned essay, this is too real to me for that. Let this entry be like me, a little disorganized and confusing but hopefully inspiring.