A shout out to all those professionals who came home after graduating from college, graduate schools, etc. Who came home started businesses, practiced law or medicine, taught school. A particular shout out to Dr. P. C. Brooks who practiced medicine in Hopkinsville, KY. Dr. Brooks was born in Hopkinsville and, at some point, after he graduated from Howard University Medical School in 1927, he returned to Hopkinsville. When he returned, there were no hospitals in the Middle Tennessee/Southern Kentucky area that would admit Black patients, so he founded a hospital. I and all my brothers and sister were born in that hospital and Dr. Brooks was the attending physician. Dr. Brooks passed in 1982.
I took these pictures of the hospital in the 1990s(?). I think the building is still standing, but it was being used as a private residence when I took the pictures. When Dr. Brooks passed, and he may have retired before he passed, there was no one to take over his practice and the hospital closed. Now, I live in a state where the hospitals are closing, especially in the rural areas. Healthcare should not be a for-profit enterprise, but every aspect of healthcare must be profitable in this capitalistic country.
My father saved the obituaries of every funeral that he attended. That’s the only reason I know anything about Dr. Brooks. I noticed his obituary when I was looking for pictures of my aunt who passed in August. Someone at her Memorial Service mentioned he was from the Hopkinsville area and that he might have been kin to Dr. Brooks. So Dr. Brooks’s obituary caught my attention. The obituaries were in the same plastic tub as an old album of family pictures.
When my father passed, I kept all the obituaries because sometimes there is valuable information in them. Sometimes the information is hearsay or just plain wrong. Some years ago, when I read a friend’s obituary, I was surprised at the mistakes, but then I thought about it. Brothers sometimes don’t know their sisters very well and memory does not serve us well at the best of times and certainly not when we’re stressed.
It shouldn’t be surprising, but it is. We, the descendants of the enslaved, are supposed to champion everyone cause but our own. These other groups don’t care that we get nothing in return. We’re the do-for-everybody group that they use to reap the benefits of this capitalistic society. At some point, every group that has been used has risen up and said enough is enough. Some of us are at that point, but there is a very loud minority that prefers the biscuit and the head rub. With all the knowledge we have available, how do they justify their preference? Or is it what I see again and again…reading words/hearing words, but no comprehension of context or history?
Living in the moment is fine if one lived in a peaceful and nurturing society. I think living in the moment in a capitalistic society is a recipe for disaster. I read 12 Years A Slave, Roots, and many other books, fiction and non-fiction that tackled slavery. In a slave society, how could one live in the moment, especially if one was tenuously free? How can one live in the moment in 2023 when one is constantly targeted because of one’s skin color? We live in stress because we always have to be on guard when out and about and sometimes in our own homes.
This is 2023 and vengeance is still sought for wrongs. And not just any vengeance…Old Testament vengeance. An eye for an eye…a tooth for a tooth. Where is the progression to a civilized society? That is why Gandhi responded when asked about Western Civilization…what civilization?. It’s all in perception…were the colonists terrorists or freedom fighters. I suppose the English would have labeled them terrorists, but the colonists would label themselves freedom fighters.
How audacious to take take take and take violently and not expect a violent response. How audacious to deny others what you have and expect no response. Actions/deeds/words have consequences. If we were truly civilized, we would recognize the humanity in each of us and work together so all have the basics. But we live in a zero sum society/world. I have and you don’t and that’s the way it will be until you have the power to take what I have from me. With that attitude, there will always be wars. Earth will be a forever battleground. The cessation of a great war to prepare for the next great war will be the definition of a Golden Age.
Why can’t our politicians at least reach young adulthood? Your party voted to impeach my master. Now that we’re in the majority, we will do everything…legal, illegal, unsubstantiated…we can to impeach the current president. Tit for tat….the toddler mindset of our current politicians. Doesn’t matter if there is no evidence… your party did it to my master, now I’m going to do it to you. Na, na, na, na, and you can’t stop me! When will we get some grown-ups to make grown-up decisions about this country? Always talking about wasting money on the citizenry, but the politicians have no qualms about wasting money on retaliatory investigations.
There is nothing that has been invented by man that has not been used for evil. So, if man had wisdom, he would be very careful of the inventions he loosed upon this earth. But wisdom is not a factor when greed is the king.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale I don’t know that much about the Kardashev scale of civilization. Really, only how various science fiction writers have used it in their stories. It seems to me that we are not at level 1, but we are at the point where social conflict can destroy sentient life and maybe all life on Earth. Unfortunately, the group(s) that controls this Earth is motivated by greed. That is across nationalities. Greed has no future sense. We see it in the animal kingdom. Either through their own actions or a third party, once their habitat is compromised and/or destroyed, they die.
A long time ago, over fifteen years ago, I told a group of friends about Willie Lynch. They didn’t want to hear it. Some years after that, I told a different group about the creator of Kwanzaa and his criminal record and the horrible things he did to Black women. They didn’t want to hear it. They said we should ignore his past and celebrate this good (Kwanzaa) that he had created. Even then, I was against this wholesale mindset of forgiveness.
Forgiveness in this place where we are only gives the perpetrators the validation to continue their evil. Turn the other cheek does not work when the person slapping you will take great glee in slapping the other cheek and kicking you while you’re down. If we lived in a civilized world, forgiving might be an option, but not when dealing with barbarians.
And this meme about “Blacks don’t read”. That is recent. Think about post-Slavery. Our Ancestors, young and old, crowded the schools that were available to them, albeit, many of the adults just wanted to read the Bible. During Reconstruction and Jim Crow, we created schools and, if no school was nearby, we would send our children to live with relatives who lived near a school. (That happened in my family. There was no high school in my grandparents’ community at the time my eldest aunt was of age. My grandparents sent her to live with a relative who lived in a town with a high school and paid that relative with a pig.)
Up until integration, being smart, in our communities, was admired. But, in the South, and I am a product of this, there was something called “Tracking”. Most Black students were tracked out of the college prep and business tracks. We were in manual skills like cosmetology, woodworking, mechanics, and the grades in each track were weighted, i.e., the grades on the college track were given a greater value than the grades on the lower tracks. So an A on the college track might be worth 4 points, while an A on the lowest track might be worth 2 points. (That was my understanding of the Tracking system.)
That’s just to say that reading, writing, and arithmetic were not emphasized on the lowest tracks where most of us were. And reading became another point of division. Being on the college track was yet another point of division. Yes, Willie Lynch was and is alive and well and I will repeat what I have written before. Integration was one of the worse things that happened to my generation. I think it is my generation that initiated the rejection of reading, being smart as being wholly Black.
I just recently found out that some of my elementary school mates graduated from the same high school and in the same year that I did. Now, my graduating class was one of the largest that ever graduated from my high school because of school consolidation, but I never saw them when I was in high school. I did not know they were there. I never crossed paths with them in P.E., in the halls, at lunch. I never realized how separated we were.
I also never realized that this country is reeling from its own foray into disaster capitalism. (See, Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine) It wasn’t something that was only practiced in Central and South America and other countries of the world. Beginning with Reaganism, this country has been deep in the throes of gutting the middle class, transferring wealth from the middle and lower classes to the one percent, creating a culture that caters to the corporations, promoting the gig economy, destroying the government backed safety net. No wonder there’s so much resentment. There’s no where for us to go and there certainly is no place for white people to go where they will escape the consequences of their pillaging greed. We can’t immigrate to the U.S. like the people of those countries whose economies that the U.S. has destroyed.
Have you noticed that these second and third generation descendants of immigrants who are running for president have no sympathy or empathy for those who would like to immigrate to the U.S.? Why? Why don’t they want others to reap the benefits/opportunities gained by their immigrant ancestors? Could it be that they don’t want to extend the “white brand” to other groups because in their small xenophobic minds, it would diminish the “white brand” and, within that brand, they could be “othered”?
Sarah Rector was a Black Oklahoman who owned land on which oil was found. She became very rich, To show how fungible the term “white” is, the Oklahoma legislature declared her to be “white” because of her fortune. See, second below cited article. That just shows that, in Rector’s case, the assignation “white” is used as a signifier of wealth and white people always want to be the known as the only ones with wealth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/03/sarah-rector-richest-black-girl/
It’s reality. Crime is glorified in the culture of the United States. Look at the protection given to the January 6th insurrectionists by the current speaker of the house. Their faces will be blurred so they cannot be identified and held accountable for their crimes. What is the message? Committing a crime is not an actionable offense; being identified and held accountable is the crime. Look at all the book and movie offers that criminals receive. Look at the notoriety. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johnson-says-blurring-jan-6-footage-rioters-dont-get-char-rcna128181
It’s a sad reality when a culture glorifies what will ultimately destroy it. Is catering to an individual’s egotistical, self-serving fifteen seconds of fame worth a society’s slow decline into chaos? But, this is a society that prioritizes entertainment over substantive issues. A riff on Pogo’s famous quip…we are the enemy whom we refuse to see.
Good news! After stormy and tornadic activity this past weekend, the sun is shining on a chilly, late autumn day. And my sister actually remembered the tornado that made landfall in the C’ville area in the mid-to early 1960s that destroyed our elementary school cook’s house. We had just returned from BTU at church and were standing on the porch with Dad opening the door when it landed. The roof of the house appeared to rise, the wind was howling, and the door did not want to open. This all happened in seconds…so my sister does remember some events from our childhood!
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