The Darker Side of the “Obama” Effect
I try to be an optimist, but I think I’m really a pessimist at heart. When Obama got inaugurated I was in awe. I can’t lie, I never thought I’d see a black man as president of the USA during my lifetime. This country’s come a long way, but I hadn’t seen anything to make me think we’d come that far.
So when it happened I just felt strange. The best (but craziest way) to describe it was the opposite of what I felt like when watching footage of the people suffering at the Super Dome in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.
My fiance thinks Obama’s election is going to change the course of black manhood. ‘Think of what it means for all the young boys’ she says, believing that they’ll be positively influenced by the images of a black president. I grunt, change the channel, and she swears I’m a hater jaded by my childhood in Boston. If you don’t get it, look for any references to black people in The Departed.
But what my lady and so many other people never think about is the other side of what Obama’s presidency has done to our country. Bush had to weather the storm of late night hosts criticizing him, nightly, but he never had the likes of the Tea Party. Has race ever been such a hot button issue when people weren’t rioting over assassinations or verdicts? Not that I recall.
The darker side of the “Obama” effect is the reality of how far we truly are from a post-racial society. Today, ANYTHING involving race is big news. The New York Times has an editorial about how Obama doesn’t have enough black people in his white house that can keep him in touch with the black people that his racist critics think he represents, but that educated folk know the pres knows little about.
All of this hyper-sensitivity cant be good for the kids who were supposed to see this presidency as a beacon of hope. If anything, all of the criticism will stop them from seeing that the pres has done more than any who held the office since JFK, and make them think they can look forward to marches by people holding signs of them with bones in their noses or Hitler-styled staches.
11:57 pm • 28 July 2010
Play Nice Nice…
Got that phrase from Marcia Cole of Amber.com years ago at an NABJ conference. My boss/mentor, Gary Dauphin was getting in a heated discussion with Gil Robertson, a panelist about the press & their relationship with sources, or something like that. It got to the point where Marcia was damn near a referee.
But they were just passionate journos who soon put their differences aside and enjoyed the rest of the conference. When we got back to Boston Marcia’s “nice, nice” phrase & her efforts to keep the peace stuck with me. She was much more seasoned than me and had presumably watched many a bridge burn before her eyes over less. Not that I’d ever been a war monger, but the deeper I got into the game the more I realized how important relationships were.
All four of our paths crossed more than a few times over the following years. Gil even had me as a panelist at one of his events for the youths at the Schaumburg in Harlem.
I was reminded of this when I got a call from an industry friend that was bitching about a mutual acquaintance. This guy is a straight up snake, and his reputation precedes him. But he has talent & has produced works worthy of respect, in the past. My friend and I are similar in that we believe in giving people chances, so we kind of dismissed all of the warnings as hate — because hate is real & must always be considered.
But fuck hate. We should’ve both heeded those warnings. We both had horrible experiences with dude, just as our people predicted we would. And while I’m all for playing nice, nice, it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t give anyone I knew fair warning before doing anything with this cat.
It’s a small world, so looks like the lust of folks who haven’t heard anything bad about this dude is shrinking. But it’s true. Playing nice, nice pays.
3:11 pm • 7 July 2010
When All Drugs Are Legal, Privacy Policies Won’t Concern Us
Sounds like a strectch, I know. But I started thinking about it when an NPR piece mentioned how National Guards on the US border did nothing to lessen the US demand for illegal drugs.
Everyone’s got an agenda, churches, states & even companies. Facebook’s agenda is to gather as much info as it can about it’s 560M+ users that can be leveraged into lucrative relationships with advertisers. Your info, as a Facebook user, becomes the networks info to share for targeting, etc, at a cost. More users, means more info, which means more revenue. Besides, your info is the least you can pay for this wonderful service they’ve created that let’s you keep in touch with friends and family. It’s not like you have a phone, or email or anything like that.
The government’s agenda isn’t so simple. At its core it’s about keeping the US a float and in power. That means keeping people employed, having rules in place that keep society in order, and always having the upper and on other countries.
The US demand for drugs has made warzones out of more than a few beautiful countries. We’ve got the problem, but they pay the price. You want aid from the US? Then we better be convinced that you’re doing all you can to be sure our citizens aren’t getting the drugs they want, and you have. We don’t want anything else you produce, but it’s pretty here. Keep the peace so we can visit and you can serve us while we sun. WTF?!
Who wants to be a servant instead of a salesman? And as our nation’s capitalist mindset spreads, how are we going to convince countries that they shouldn’t supply our demand? Especially when we don’t have any lucrative alternatives to offer besides tourism. A recession hits and countries depending on tourism are crushed. Vacations are canceled and everything grinds to a halt. A recession hits and countries depending on drugs are only slowed. Like a beer, the person who normally buys high-grade will downgrade to something cheaper — but still make a purchase.
[this was published before it was done on 5/29 because the iPhone thought I hit publish.]
Just think about the taxes money we could get from countries who wanted to import their now illegal goods, and from the stores that sold them.
Unfortunately none of this will ever happen. It’s too much of a perfect world scenario. (I’m not advocating that something like Meth be legalized, there’s really no benefit in that for anyone but biker gangs.) It would call for people to be responsible, kicking their habit all together or practicing the restraint necessary to be a functioning user. It would damn near stall the prison industrial complex, as fewer and fewer inmates would find themselves behind bars on possession charges. It would eliminate underground economies in disenfranchised communities. And who knows what more than half the rappers who claim to be drug kingpins would talk about then.
Like I said from the start, the connection between the legalization of drugs and social networking privacy policies is a stretch, but there is a link. The more information we share the more valuable the internet becomes. It’s like instant crowd sourcing about every element of our lives with little effort. But that’s another perfect world situation.
For some reason, makes me think of “everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.”
11:21 am • 29 May 2010
