State Of The Union PT 2

Before i write on i have a confession... I am actually not a reader. I HATE reading because i actually do have trouble concentrating. I profess to be a writer in some capacity but in the same light, i find it hard to write.

So that is just to get that out for a couple of reasons. One being that in the last post i advised you to read. The reality is that i have read little, but drawn a whole lot back to my experience and the common sense that comes when you have allowed yourself to share in valuing the experience told of others. In essence, i can attribute any knowledge i have to my love for life and people. And my WILL to trust my conscience and follow the wynding road.

When you FEEL people strengthening themselves and accepting their capacity to grow, you know that you are being someone special. So i do what i do because it is the only way i can exist and feel real. The only way i can tolerate taking up life, time and space in a humble enough manner to understand that i am doing it as an extension of all three, more so than for just me. Therefore i am eternal. You are eternal as well.
And the struggle is just something passed on to you for you to pass along the same...
as we shape-shift and mold ourselves a nature which is truelly a reflection of our creator. For just like a work of art you may create, and how you understand that if up to par with the finest of the fine, that it will inspire art to branch from it forever before it dies. We will someday find ourselves having escaped the notion of an end. I truelly believe that before that day we would have formed to perfection.

whether in 50-100-150 or 50,100,150 years!


That being said, it is apparent that i have a utopic vision. It may take awhile because nobody is going to take us there. We will rise and fall as we slide along learning and building through trial and error; losing it all on the ground and gaining that much more as we confront the challenge to build and destroy again. Over and over. You are powerful beyond words. So if you do not understand exactly what the fuck i am talking about it is because what i am saying may not be strong enough to penetrate your senses. But just know that if you allow yourself to listen enough you would have found yourself having transcended a couple of lifetimes within a year, ten years, or three decades. Because i am speaking of responsibility not only over self but of your kind. And there is nothing ordinary about that in these times.
Someday you will bring it back to me... in some conversation that will make me feel absolutely stupid. And then that is when finally.. finnnnalllyy... i will tell myself "Cono, i'd better go back and read again"

Haha

............................................................................


Anyway.
Moving right along.

We pass another Labor Day and although the name is self-explanitory i checked wikipedia to see exactly what the holiday was all about. And indeed it is a celebration of the working man, specifically the labor movements of unions and workers uniting to implement measures that will celebrate their work as well as set standards for workers rights (establishing the 8 hour workday for example). So the last blog was entirely fitting. As will be this one. I figured i continue on in this theme and drop another little history lesson, to sort of take advantage of the current events.
THIS TIME
I am bringing it closer to home.
I can recall learning this all in an Urban Studies class at Hunter College. The teacher was one who spoke a mile a minute, dropping dates, occasions, Acts/Bills, people in lectures that went on for an hour. Im pretty sure the guy contributed to what someday will result in carpel tunnel, then athritis in my wrists (AND I KNOW SOME OF YOU ARE BEING PERVERTED AT THIS POINT, like: "Naaaah nigga, that's not what gave you arthritis" JUST STOP!)
I scored 100 on his midterm and finished the class with a B+, mostly because i lost focus to the point where i wound up taking an incomplete for failing to hand in the term paper (which i eventually did hand in).

Anyway.

As people of color it becomes easy for us to look down upon ourselves as violent, as lazy, as stupid when we walk down the block between projects and witness the poverty and all the bullshit. All the images are negative, while on television sh!t is squeeky clean.
I KNOW! Up until the age of 7 i was raised in Fort Greene Brooklyn *BEFORE THE YUPPIES SPREAD FROM PRATT LIKE A BAD CASE OF THE CRABS. This was the Fort Greene you hear about in tales of the origional 50 Cent (a Fort Greene folk figure) robbing celebrity rappers. My memories are of a man named Micky who was shot and left a chunk of meat for me to stand over on the side walk... Of the Ocasio boys which became a negative allusion to be compared to in my home if we begun to misbehave. Of the public City Pool across the street from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where we once had to jet from when i was like 6 because my step father was being chased.
After Fort Greene we moved to Sunset Park, where between the years of 1989 and 1997 i lived the majority of my rearing under an over protective mother, yet still got to witness murder which in the real hood sense means actually knowing who the murderED was and knowing who the murderER was and doing no justice by having to keep that shit to yourself, reguardless of the fact that you were practically best friends with the children of the dead. I witnessed like half a dozen people on my block contract HIV and wither away! Then we moved to Coney Island.

This is not some kind of claim to hood credibility. It is just so that you know that i have been there, in that mind state of wanting to get the fuck out the hood and of acting all proper around white people to over compensate for what i looked at at the time as a savage existance. Also it is an admission in the face of my own incompetances; incompetances i forever challenge to overcome. Like i said, i have to always be extra vigilant to keep from falling off of my plan. And my upbringing (constantly moving, going from emergency state to emergency state with the gas going off today and the light tomorrow) is indication of why it is extra hard for me. I along with my siblings have had to build the discipline within us. And they have done a better job at it than i have.

But yea... if you are Black or Latino or Southeast Asian or even Ethnic White in some cases you may have felt like you didn't stack up. We have internalized our oppression. To the point where some stop eating their ethnic food because it might sound weird to others, stopped wearing your hair a certain way or have become over conscious of your facial expressions and accent because it feels dirty to be yourself. To the point where you deny that ever was you, that you have found the real you, and that you are finally comfortable.. because now you pass.

Well check this out.
I am about to list specific events and people
that engineered the conditions under which we cultivated
this sense of self denial. And hatred for our own.

If there is any sense of value in your people it is in the elderly, am i not right? It is in your sweet grandmother who couldn't have done wrong! Not this woman who cooks for the fam.. Not this woman who sheds such wisdom and sense and makes you feel easy when the shit gets tough. It's in your grandfather who never means harm, and is as warm as milk in a babys stomach when you sit by him.
What is your image of your grand parents?
Well i can basically go straight for the head by putting it in the words of a great Puerto Rican poet (yes we have a few) named Pedro Pietri in his poem "Puerto Rican Obituary" which opens:
They Worked!
They broke their backs and read the bible and while yes they had their vices and drunk their spirits and had their dirty laundry as we do today, they as a community served the suits and shiny shoes that roamed this city. They hustled and bustled under the watchful eye of the old jewish supervisor lulling around with hands folded behind the back in the factory.


So what happend?
Have you never wondered?
What happend to get us to a point where
our communities assumed what we've viewed as an ugly reality.
When did we begin to set the conditions that make such tongue and cheek jokes as:
"15 minutes late: Puerto Rican time"
"carrying a knife"
"stealing hubb caps"
"babys out of wedlock"
"beating their wives"
etc...
That wasn't the dear abuela and abuelo we see!


If you read the last blog posting i wrote you get a headstart into the story. I encourage you to read it because i will not do so much to repeat, but i will be touching on some things. Let me start here though by reminding you if you do not remember or do not already know, that before WWII we had a VERY different culture than we have today. There was no such thing as a teenage culture! Teenagers worked. So much so that eventually the government had to pass child labor laws to make sure they at least didn't work as much. Eventually though, teenagers stopped working entirelly (for the most part). Only then was there a vested interest in creating movies for teenagers, in creating MUSIC for teenagers to dance to at proms, in creating teenage fashion, cool burger joints and drive ins. Before this of course the teenagers didn't have too much time on their hands.
So what happens after 5, 10 years of teenagers kind of sitting around waiting for parents to get home? They hang out, and this is when small neighborhood gangs begin getting popular in the 50's. Now.. im not necessarily talking about the Bloods and Crips. These were just a bunch of boys who ran with each other and set up a heiarchy in their hoods which they warned people from other hoods to respect. In fact, we are talking to a large degree: young white people, which might sound crazy because we are made to believe gang means mexican, black... but look at the wiseguys movies (like Bronx Tales) and it will occur to you what time i am talking about.

BOOM!
So now what do we have: Parents that work, their children (in some cases) looking for trouble.

Now just to give you a CRAZY moment of clarity, if you can even imagine it. SUBURBS haven't always existed! You heard it right! Before WWII the only ones who lived in the suburbs were pretty much hunters and hermits. It was Woods. It was not developed. They hadn't cut trees down to build anything because there was no reason to be out there. Factories, military bases, bars, churches and schools, offices, were all in urban areas, urban centers. There WAS something like an outer ring of meager suburban housing right outside the urban centers, which grew after the 1934 National Housing Act was created, but it wasn't until the Housing Acts of 1949 and and 1954 along with the the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that America really spread out. After the highways were built people had access to vacant land far away and trees were cleared to build up property.
SO NOW YOU MAY BE ASKING: OK.. WHY DO I NEED TO KNOW THIS?
Well. Here is why. You may have spoken to your grandpa and grandma and they may have told you how back when they were your age their neighborhood was mostly German, or Jewish, or Dutch or Irish... ACTUALLY public housing (Projects) before the 60's were filled not with Black or Latino people, but with ethnic europeans such as the ones i have just listed. But eventually, your poor abuela and abuelo wound up surrounded by their own people and all of the people with white skin had disappered. And you need to know that this was no coincidence. This was ENGINEEREd by the Federal Government.
((By the way, if at any time you find yourself saying: SHUTT UPP.. here you go with that shit! Do yourself a favor, and google the Acts and Bills i list and read about them. What i do is i use Wikipedia just to give me a general idea. And after i read i scroll to the bottom to see what sources they have that prove whether or not there was good research done. If at the bottom there are links to credible sites and articles from recognized scholars -shit i google the scholars too- then i know that i have just learned something valuable!))

The Federal Housing Administration in the 1930's and 40's was giving loans to subsidize people who wanted to move to the suburbs. Namely, loans were given to solders, and cheap mortgages were given to regular citizens. ONE PROBLEM though... It is a problem that history treats as a minor one but is a major one for any of us who know what a crack head looks like because the gates that let the zombies in would soon open! These loans and mortgages were only given to Whites! History shows that at the time the Federal Housing Administration was practicing racism and actually stated in one of its manuals one year that racial integration would cause disharmony! Such practices as Redlining (in which real estate uses maps marked with red lines separating black neighborhoods from white neighborhoods) was used to promote segregation. Redlining along with Restrictive Covenants (which were agreements between real estate agencies to keep minorities away).

Slowly whites moved out and minorities would remain stuck where they were. What happened next would take jobs away, as factories, businesses and politicians loyal to their white base would follow them to the suburbs. Along with them went the Large Tax-Base they generated. So now you have minorities living on top of one another, fighting for jobs that have left, with the few who actually have jobs only combining for a small tax base. The tax-base is where money is pulled from to fund schools, sanitation and police, public hospitals, etc... What does this mean? That the schools get worse, the garbage doesn't get picked up, the police dont get paid enough to care and if anything become stressed and begin having fun brutilizing the people (take this you lowly Spic!), and hospitals deteriorate. It was the Housing Act of 1949 that gave money for Slum Clearance, which used eminent domain to move people from their residences, often times into public housing, for the sake of development *Urban Renewal* or as Iconic Writer James Baldwin called it "Negro Removal". A famous case was Lincoln Center, which is now a luxurious entity above midtown manhattan. Residents were moved to the South Bronx from that area (which was the area West Side Story was about), creating further poverty as minorities were squeezed together, and more projects were built to squeeze them in **and if you research to find out when most those projects in the Bronx were built you will see the years being in the mid 50's to late 60's**.

So where are we at? It's 1960 and people who a generation earlier had the priveledge of moving to the suburbs are now sending their kids to colleges, and building up wealth in the family. While minorities stuck in urban decay see their kids doing things that people do when they live stressed, with access to bad education and little work opportunity under poverty: They began selling drugs which were brought in and controlled by the Mafia who saw an opportunity to cash in, And so that the police don't fuck with their business the Mafia pays them off, And ultimately people begin fighting over turf and guns are introduced so that while only 10 years prior people settled beef with a fist fight, now they were shooting!

Bobby Kennedy would come along recognizing that the nation had failed us and promised to address poverty, but was assassinated! (by the mafia?)
Lyndan B. Johnson would come along with The Great Society which poured money into such programs as Head Start and Job Corps, and created Medicaid and Medicare. But couldnt afford to continue putting money into Vietnam and the ghetto at the same time so when inflation happend it was blamed on The War On Poverty rather than the War in Vietnam and those funds got cut. Besides that, the programs were a quick fix. The policies of the prior decades had not only generated poverty, they had INSTITUTIONALIZED racism and poverty and poverty became generational. You had children whose parents could not read, and whom could not read themselves, now being introduced to programs that were SUPPOSED to funnel them into the mainstream...
like colleges and wall street were just going to open the flood gates because a law that has been passed tells them to lol! No sweety racism doesnt just vanish like that. So we were STILL denied opportunity and the few who made it out to the suburbs were the few 'disciplined' enough to stay in their place. Just enough were let through so that things didn't get uncomfortable.
Meanwhile the drug trade is growing and basically keeping people alive while killing others. It was more than an underground economy, it was a supplimental economy, as the 1970's saw factories that left the urban centers in the 40's leave AMERICA all together for Asia and Latin America. And things get out of control. Prisons become a place to warehouse those in the 'slums' caught breaking the law, as such laws as the Rockafeller Laws which gave extremely harsh sentances for small amounts of drugs, were implemented, along with laws that arrested anyone packed up in a group of any certain amount of people.

Measures became Reactionary rather than Preventative! The focus switched from "We set them back by discriminating so lets create initiatives to get them back on their feet" to "Just punish them and send them to jail" ...Let's remember how i mentioned the police working with the mafia. These guys were REALLY CURRUPT back then, making money off the struggle and countless movies, from 'Serpico' to 'American Gangster' depict that.
As a result families were broken up, and a cycle of young black and latino children were raised throughout the late 70's and early 80's in single parent homes. And the worst was yet to come as the 80's would bring the crack era. And all you have to do is watch the movie "Traffic" to get a sense of what that might have been the result of. Or a wonderful documentary called "Bastards of the Party" which you can watch on Youtube in parts.


These are historical facts!
Not everybody got to be Obama. I was raised on welfare myself and can tell you that because of that i can NEVER look down on someone who receives it. Because i would be in aweful shape if the tax dollars of my fellow citizen didn't give me a chance. It kept us juusssst above water enough to give us a chance. And i should hope if anyone reading this whom is in their 40's or 50's are not resentful but proud for contributing a bit to my development.
That is not to say that i do not get frustrated with my people at times when i see that in fact they ARE taking advantage, ARE NOT trying the way they could. But i feel more sad about that than mad. And more determined to do what i do. Because that person has given up. That person was a child who dreamed of lights and some form of power. But for too long that person has been powerless. Most of the time in fact, they watched their parents, who faced much of the forms of disenfranchisement i listed above, give up and didn't have the best role models. So they dont realize they must Fight when their eyelids get heavy
as i have realized it and continue to fight through procrastination...
That they must come back to work the next day with a plan to get over the hump they faced yesterday, adapting continuously,
as i have done when i recognized that i was falling behind and becoming dependant on someone or something else to do my job...


Poverty is material
but it is also psychological
It is a mentality! That a child can only silence slowly..
it is a delicate mind state that can take over when you shoot that young man/woman down and reaffirm his belief that he or she is not able!
Because they WILL fail... as i HAVE failed!
and telling them that THAT IS TOO BAD FOR THEM... is like telling them they should have known, that coming where they're from, and being whom they are... that they would fail.
At the end of the day i do not wish to have a system which provides entitlements and money for nothing! I wish to be in a system where money IS nothing!
I do not believe it is a good idea to be dependant on anyone or for anyone to be dependant on me. But i do believe it is essential for us to understand that we are Co-Dependant on one another.
I will not follow any type of 'leader' which rises from the depths to 'save' me or my people. I will follow a code of solidarity/involvement in building resources together and sharing spaces where we can collaborate on plans for community development.

I will work
hard
to get others to work
for our collective youth and elders
for our collective self


*****
___Happly Labor Day___