Pick A Penny Pate

Pick a penny pate; never a penny tail. Pick a penny pate and good luck will be your fate. Who tells us this stuff? I had to think hard on the last part, but I did not want a mundane retelling of an old superstition and the second sentence had to have the end rhyme. It also had to have that Baptist preacher cadence. Did I succeed?

However, the superstition only applies to pennies. Nickels, dimes, quarters…pate or tail…in your pocket they go. I found a penny today in the grocery store. In the past, I’ve discovered that when times are hard, there are few pennies to be found, but when times are good…pennies are everywhere if you’re looking. Times are hard; there are few pennies to be found.

I read an article…don’t remember where…where economists use the rise in Black unemployment as a sign that the hiring sector is cooling which is a good thing as that’s an indicator that inflation is leveling off. Last hired; first fired syndrome or never hired; chronic illness…take your pick. We suffer and it is a harbinger of good for the economy. Something is so wrong with that picture.

Our Let’s-Outdo-Taney Supreme Court has opined that affirmative action may no longer be used in college admissions, but legacies, athletes, donors’ children…that’s legal. But, that would be…those non-merit admissions benefit whites. Only those considered “Other” are held to merit. As I stated about character in a previous Post…who is the determiner of merit and what is its definition?

Since one, per the opinion, can speak to race in one’s essay…”Other” should detail all the laws passed by and interpreted by whites to the detriment of the Other. Whites have been very vocal in their fervor in passing laws to deny voting, property, and other rights to the Other. Also, the policies and procedures by the federal and local governments should be set forth in detail. Pictures of white rage at providing an education to the Other should be attached. Those essays can detail how such laws, policies, and procedures prevented their ancestors from attending the named university so they could be considered a legacy. How whites destroyed their ancestors’ wealth so there was no money to make a mega-donation to the university to assure their admission. Their history damns them. And those are facts…

Oh, and red states have already targeted minority scholarships. So, we’re back to before affirmative action where my tax dollars will go to educate the white student and not students who look like me. We’ve been here before. There was a time when being Black meant there was no government assistance; all government assistance targeted whites. That’s the time the white supremacists salivate for. All for white; none for no one else.

It is only when those government assistance was open to the Other that such became a socialist undertaking that was anathema to the American fantasy of personal responsibility. White supremacists forget that there are those of us who can read and also understand the meaning of the words they use to further their agenda of ensuring that they control the gutting of the Other’s wealth and the narrative to justify such control.

White supremacists are trying to return the United States to a darkness. They may succeed, but will the United States survive? I just read an article in The Atlantic about the stupidity of the people who occupy the United States. I don’t know if stupidity can be overcome; maybe ignorance could. Ignorance implies the intelligence to understand one’s lack of knowledge. Stupidity implies that one doesn’t have the capacity to understand one’s lack of intelligence. The more I read, I can only agree with the author’s use of the word “stupid”. A word to white supremacists…your hoods, your weapons, your lies etc. …anyone can wear a hood/robe, everyone has access to the same weaponry, and your lies have no audience. The days you long for will never return.

If there is a group in power that can do no wrong and denies the current state of the earth, and since their group is to blame for nothing, they refuse to do anything to ameliorate the foulness they have overseen and caused, could they possibly gaslight themselves into extinction?

Why is everyone who does the least right thing a hero? To me this word has been overused to the point where it has no meaning. Hero should apply to someone doing something above and beyond what even an extraordinary person would do in the same circumstances. A policeperson saving someone from a dangerous situation is not a hero; they are doing their job. The person may be courageous, but the person is not a hero.

Why do we need validation? Do we not exist if we do not have validation? Is this the meaning behind the tree falling and no person is there…is there sound? A sound is an energetic wave…the energetic wave will be there even if no person is around. Therefore, the sound will be there regardless of a human presence. The flora and fauna would have “heard” the sound of the tree falling. I wonder how that sound would have affected them? How did the tree’s demise affect the fungi that connects all flora? Or had the tree’s knowledge been stored, now ready to be disseminated to the tree’s progeny that was already germinating to take its place? Or was its demise necessary to make growing space for some other flora that would be needed for the future?

This is just to say that all the negativity, the ignorance, the lack that is spewed for personal validation is not necessary. We exist without that validation. Think…if we turned that search for external validation into a search for self-knowledge. Maybe, we would progress to the point where we understood that just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. Maturation would be the goal so this Earth would flourish and we would flourish with it.

We forget…man, woman know thyself…an age old wisdom that we do not believe is important. Have you ever read Ozymandias by Shelley? It really brings home the impermanence of greed and narcissism. A broken statue, a desert where life once thrived…how many lives were used up to build a monument to greed and narcissism in what is now a wasteland? Every time I read that poem…it conveys a lesson the toddler kings and queens of today refuse to learn…I feel dread because the reckoning of the current times will affect us all. The O’Jays sing when the world’s at peace, will the world still be in one piece… That is the question.

It’s 2023 and basic human dignity is missing. There is legislation in a state that municipalities cannot require water breaks for certain workers (outdoors) in a time where the temperatures are rising higher and higher. How can anyone call this civilization? This is not civilization, but a capitalistic system where the human workers are treated as fungible commodities. And, as chattel slavery should have taught us, fungible commodities have no value as sentient beings who have the right to life. I repeat, is this civilization?

Is a retreat into barbarism a requirement before the brain can fathom a civilized mode of being?

The toddler beings who cause planets to implode do not have the intelligence or maturity, mental, emotional, or psychical, to understand that in certain situations a broken egg is a mess to be cleaned up and not a precursor to a delicious omelet.

For some reason, I have been thinking of Gideon. I am not a fan of the Bible, but there are some nuggets of truth and common sense in its pages. The lesson I get from Gideon is that we do not need a horde to effect change. We need those who understand that one must always be prepared to defend oneself from the dangers that one knows are there, but are unseen. Even when one is surrounded by “friends”, one must be on guard. They, who are alert, will be few, but they will be the ones who will make the efficacious and beneficial changes that will endure, even in an encroaching, all consuming desert.

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