Message from Dokota

"Hey... thank you for the compliments. Lol---no, I do not hear such things said about me..but that may be because I am constantly in seclusion. Lol! I'm coming out though. You know, I am glad that I met you. I told you before I have not met anyone who seeks knowledge as much as, if not more than, I do. It’s truly refreshing to find a similar soul. I respect your opinion and your beliefs profoundly. Honestly, before I wrote you yesterday-- I was in my tub attempting to wash away my sorrows, literally, and I ask God to give me someone to talk to. And you were the first and only person that came to mind. God does work in mysterious ways. I am glad that you see in me what I knew was there, but forgot b/c of the people I had enclosing me. I am ecstatic that you foresee greatness for me. I needed to hear that b/c as I said: I am usually surrounded by negativity--including my family. And I'm sure you know that you are a great man and will be even greater with time. It’s astounding to me--really--because I began to think that I was the only person with such a high regard for knowledge, understanding and God's word. I am not as religious as you are, but I am very spiritual and you inspire me beyond your awareness. So I should be the one thanking you. You have help to awaken and restore a part of me that I thought I’d never see again. You seem to have come into my life at pivotal moment and I can’t help but feel that God sent me a friend to help me realize, appreciate and cultivate the talents He has given me. I have taken them for granted for too long. I no longer feel the need to castigate myself and be remorseful. Today is a new day and I have learned a lot. I am still learning. My journey has begun and I look forward to many enlightening conversations with you. And as I wrote in my journal after I talked to you, I just hope I will one day be able to help you as much as you have already helped me! Thanks…"

Amazingly Paraleled

I spent hours with Dokota yesterday. She came by my house and chilled right before her 6 o’clock summer school Spanish class. She speaks like one in a classroom who had been anxiously and eagerly awaiting their turn to voice their thoughts. She speaks as one who had their voice taken away from them for years and just got it back. So much on her mind, so little opportunities to voice them. So after her class, at 8 o’clock, she sent me a message on Facebook asking if I wanted to ride to Winston with her. She told me she had to pick up something from her moms house before she leaves to SF over the weekend. I happily obliged. She came and scooped me up from my house and since she was hungry we rode to Wendy's. We went inside to Wendy’s and stood in line behind a homeless guy who was arguing with one of the workers there. He wanted a baked potato and the lady who worked there told him that they didn’t sell them anymore plus he didn’t have any money anyways. Dokota interrupted and asked the man if he was hungry and that she would buy him something to eat. She talked with him. She sympathized with him. He told her that he had just found his friend dead behind a building. As she was talking to him I studied her. Because if you want to understand someone you have to study their actions and their words then do some cross referencing. It’s how you discern the spiritual essence of a person. Many young and attractive black females (and whites for that matter) are too pompous and pretentious to actually talk to a homeless person. But she is different. When we sat down, she ate and we continued our chat. She always speaks with such passion and conviction that you can almost see her words coated with sincerity as she lets them carefully escape from her mouth. She told me about her first encounter with overt racism when she was in middle school and that it came from her own teacher. A young black male came in the classroom being a little loud and the racist bigot of a teacher turned to Dokota and told her to control her friend. She said she looked around in a bewildered state. There weren’t many blacks in her school. She was one of the token Negroes that they requested to attend so that they could lie and say there's cultural diversity here at our school because we believe in liberal rights and equality in all that. She said she was exposed to the racial tensions and sentiments of America at an early age and that this, coupled with her mother constantly teaching her of the struggle, prepared her for the next level of consciousness later in life. We left Wendy's and headed to Winston Salem. On the way we talked extensively....well she did most of the talking. But I didn’t mind listening. I know that to have someone whom you trust to release too can be quite the cathartic experience. It also gave me more of an opportunity to study her and what makes her who she is. She talked about everything from career plans to religion to family issues. I could tell that she has a multitude of feelings thoughts and opinions with which she had nowhere to displace and no one to express them too. When we got to her mother's house, which was incredible nice, she unfortunately was not home nor was her sister. Just her mom's new white husband (her emphasis). Before we left the only thing she grabbed was her shades out of her mom's car..."hmmm"... I started to think. Maybe she just brought me to Winston because she wanted me to meet her mother? I wouldn’t be so presumptuous to say that is the reason though. 

We continued talking all the way back to Greensboro; I looked out the window as we passed the exit to my place. lol she stopped in mid-sentence and was like "oh do you need to go back home because I was on the way to my house to pack" I was like oh no that cool I’ll stay with you. So we got to her house and sat in the living room talking for hours. We talked about the books on her bookshelf, we talked about fraternities, we talked about race relations in America, we talked about Kenyatta, we talked about her last relationship, we talked about Bob Marley, her dad, everything. She went and fetched her poetry notebook with poems in it that she had written since her freshman year of high school. She told me about old friends whom she grew apart from and about her quest to self-discovery, escaping the image that she was forced into by others expectations of how she should be. We both talked about our childhood experiences and the effect it had on our development. Eventually we both realized how late it was, and the fact that she wasn’t going to get any sleep considering her flight was in Raleigh at 6 am. So she drove me back to my house and when she pulled up to my house we continued talking. We talked so long that she pulled into a parking space and cut the car off. It was amazing how paralleled our lives were--not so much in what happened in our life but more so in how we overcame the societal influences to become the people we are today; both admirers of wisdom knowledge and understanding. We began talking about our business plans when we both move to California. Her dream is to start a new type of bookstore. One that exerts cultural expression in various art forms such as spoken word and classes for the fine arts. I told her how it would be an excellent branch to my idea of a nonprofit organization to give black youth outlets in which to keep themselves occupied and at the same time promote growth intellectually and culturally. At one point in our conversation she became so passionate in what we were talking about (which I won’t disclose here) that it seemed as though she was on the verge of tears. Deep in my heart I felt the pain that I heard coating her voice. In that instance a thought arose out of my brain that I wanted to make sure she never felt pain again, at least that kind of pain. I know this sounds cliché' but she is too good of a person. She has the heart of a redeemer, and Allah gave her that kind of heart: one of patience, kindness, humility and long suffering. It was incredible to me that our worlds were so paralleled in that the world has always seen us as peculiar and awkward for the same reasons:  being removed from the interest of the world. She told me that in her youth, her school friends looked at her sideways because she sat under a tree during recess and read a book rather do "normal" teenage black girls do. The world doesn’t understand us because our hearts and are minds are not of this world. God has elevated our thinking into the heavenly realm where our thoughts are not the thoughts of the world because worldly people only think on the horizontal plane. It’s a rarity to find our women like that---nearly uncorrupted by the world. If you know a little about geometry, the beauty of parallel lines is that they never cross one another. They head in the same direction at the same rate but never intersect. It is the likeness of mind that has caused our lives to run so parallel and now that Allah destined us to meet and become friends, the two lines that were running side by side heading in the same direction at the same rate are not cognizant of each other’s existence. We sat in that car for another hour and a half before finally she left around 3:35. I walked all the way up the stairs smiling.

Pseudo-intellectuals and the Language Gripe

What is a pseduo-intellectual? Well, the formal definition is "one who engages in false intellectualism or a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship." However, for the purposes of this piece, i use the term colloquially which carries a slightly different meaning. That being said, I will quote the definition from a dictionary that defines slang terminology and the colloquial meaning of formal words:

1. Typical cases of pseudo-intellectualism involve pre-pubescent 15 year olds that think they have everything figured out, including, but not limited to: life, religion, politics, education, and sex. Ironically, they have never quite experienced either of the aforementioned

2. Posseses a severe tendency to blindly and wholeheartedly believe any bullshit they hear, only to subsequently regurgitate the misinformation to anyone they see in an asinine attempt to appear more intelligent than a used, broken condom.

Before I continue I want to make it clear that you can have some quality of pseudo-intellectualism but that doesn't make you a pseudo-intellectual. It's similar to how you may have lied before and occasionally do but that doesn't necessarily make you a liar. Therefore, it is not my intentions to be so presumptuousness as to label anyone mentioned in this blog as a pseudo-intellectual. Now that i've gotten that out of the way...*cracks knuckles*

I was having a debate via facebook with my friend Dedrick regarding a note which he posted. The note had a youtube video link of Obama discussing the requirement imposed on us today by an ever diversifying society to learn other languages, namely spanish. In the clip Obama says "you need to make sure your child can speak spanish"(http://youtube.com/watch?v=BZprtPat1Vk). This was a message given by Obama in response to those saying we need to pass laws for "english only". Dedrick wrote in this note about how Obama is planning to implement the North American union and this clip of the speech is evidence of this grand conspiracy. I know all about the NAU. I know that Bush signed a formal agreement with former Canadian Prime minister and president the Mexico in a meeting held at Waco Texas. What I don't know is how Dedrick drew a correlation between a statement of our children needing to become bilingual and this North American Union conspiracy. So when I challenged Dedrick on this he had the following to say:

"i understand how helpful it could be to speak another language. but the problem is the choice of words obama used. he didnt say, "To make ourselves more marketable in an evaporating job market we should be increase the number of languages we know how to speak. Namely spanish." he said "you NEED to make sure your child can speak spanish." If he would have said something along the lines of what you said, i would have shut the fuck up. lol. This guy is inferring that something is coming in the near future that is going to mandate a need for an English speaking country to become bilingual"

In my book, the major and foremost characterstic of a pseudo-intellectual is to try to rationalize away the existence of God. However, Dedrick exhibits what i have coined the "language gripe", seen above. His self-professed problem with Obama is Obama's diction. I understand how one's choice of words can take away from one's message. But an intelligble and discerning reader can sift through and look past language they may not agree with and reach into the core or essence of what is trying to be conveyed. Obama is not interested in FORCING everyone's children to make them speak spanish--like Dedrick is proposing. Obama is not saying, covertly, that this is a part of some grand conspiracy to destroy the soveriegnty of america by letting the big bad evil illegal immigrants flood our country. Only crazed red-neck ultra-conservative partiotism-drunken nut bags think like that. I made it clear to him that illegal immigrants are being scapegoated as the source of the domestic problems in America while virtually ignoring the greed of multi-national corporations who seek cheap labor. (not to say that illegal immigration is not a problem, because it is). Dedrick has swallowed whole ever ounce of Alex Jones material on the NWO and the one world government. I'm by no means discredting all that Mr. Jones says as false, however one must be able to separate the wheat from the chaffe. In other words, you have to separate what is true from his own interpretation of it. Alex jones, as others do, has his own "spin" on the truth, if you will. And after listening to Dedrick in our discussion-- he didnt sound like an intellectually independent thinker, despite his rejection of conformity or non-conformist views. That there is the sad paradox, the dampening irony in this particular case. His skepticism of Obama has turned into a paranoia and a distrust that resembles the typical negro-distrust-negro syndrome originating during and perpetuated since slavery. I have not heard Dedrick utter ONE word of praise or congratulation of what Obama has been able to acheive. Additionally, i have not heard one word of criticism even CLOSE to the degree of severity of McCain that he is dishing toward Obama.

Dedrick doesn't understand that his views, at least on this particular issue, are political religiosity. He reminds me of the legalists of Jesus' day: the Pharisees, Sadducees,  and the scribes. They were the type to be nit picky language gripers. Called themselves correcting Jesus for working on the Sabbath b/c they were so obsessed with the fine points of the law. So jesus said to them, like i said to Dedrick, you're straining a gnat and swallowing a camel. Jesus told them that they were neglecting the WEIGHTIER things of the law: truth, justice, mercy etc. Dedrick completely ignored and disregarded the core of Obama's message then based his rash conclusions on a SOUND BITE. The link, as i'm sure you've noticed by now if you watched it, is only a minute long. I'm willing to bet anything (if i was a betting man ofcoruse) that he didnt bother to try to see if he could find the entire speech or at least the transcript so as to try to put some CONTEXT behind Obama's words...since he felt so strongly about them.

Language gripers do not have DEPTH of mind. He/she usually only sees on the surface. They don't bother to plumb the depths of words and their meanings, nor do they take the time to analyze that which is trying to be conveyed. They are too busy getting hung up on word usage that they disagree with. Dedrick was guilty of the same offense. He took Obama's words for face value because of a predisposition of DISTRUST and MISPLACED anger. It's not Obama's fault Dedrick, that you've been lied to your whole life as you have often said in our discussions over the matter. Nor is it his fault that your family business went bankrupt. This bias he has is like a lense that causes him to see only what he is looking for or what he wants to see and then ignores the rest. Its really a fallacy in reasoning, because to those who lack powers of discernment, what he says would seem convincing due to its quaility of being logically compelling. But something being logically compelling does not qualify it as TRUTH.

Let me provide an example.

"its bigger than religion--hip-hop...its bigger than my niggas--hip-hop...its bigger than the government."

This is a line from a song called The Healer off of Badu's latest album. A language griper will look at the first 4 words and create a conclusion just based on those words about the whole song. They dont' examine the content of the song, but because they may think they are religious or because they don't like hip-hop they may dismiss the song. "How can you say hip-hop is bigger than religion when religion's objective is to save souls and return man to God" is a logically compelling comment that a language-griper might make regarding the song. But Hip-Hop IS bigger than religion because when the old folk that are filling the churches die out who is going to run the church operations? The youth are out on the streets blasting 50 cent and kanye west on their speakerboxes. The youth are not listening to the preachers--they are listening to Lupe & Jay-z. Therefore hip-hop has become a bigger force (whether its a negative or positive force is irrelavant in this case) because it has captivated the mind of the youth of America. Something religion has FAILED to do. Though, those exhibiting the pseduo-intellectual trait of language griping wouldn't understand this, would overlook this. So this is a message to all those aspiring intellectuals and scholars...don't strain a noun and swallow a malignant verb otherwise you'll be on the road to become----a pseudo-intellectual.

<The pseudo-intellectuals who read this blog, i don't expect you to get it. Therefore, don't bother to post comments. Thanks>

Salat

Murder Murder, court cases for Turner

Mass culling, mass distribution of burners

Point fingers at the indigenous for atrocities

Call Saddam & Mugabe a monstrosity

Fostering fear in the hearts and animosity

But sliding checks under the table as generosity

“You lost me b, back up, I need clarity

I need it like the poor be needing charity

And I need it like the rich be needing sincerity”

 Aight son, let me break it down real real clear

You see Rothschild, a jew, helped bolster Hitler career

And in Europe they’ll kill you if you call the holocaust a frontier

They say “we don’t need any new pioneers over here’!

 This is salat nigga and we pray it 5 times a day

To keep our minds on Allah so we won’t go astray

And we make the devil nervous when we pray for the prey

Especially when we speak cuz it’s the truth we convey

Divided we fall (unedited)

Divided we stand

The united snakes of America. the divided states of Niggatopia

They gave us cars, money, jewelry now we think we living in cornucopia

They scoping ya, every time you make a move to help the hood

Showing niggas step by step how they can get up out the hood

Pooling economic resources and not being niggardly

Painting a picture in our minds of what niggas could really be

Successfully working together eliminating bigotry

But niggas set traps that they get from the enemy

Breathing envy and hate like Beethoven breathed the symphony

And these the niggas wif the highest level of sympathy

Working against their own salvation for favor with the enemy

They sit with me

Plotting for hours on how they gone get to me

Knowing that if they do that day’ll live on in infamy

The feds and the cops, they all got it in for me

Just because I teach about revolution and entropy

Just because I’m preparing the troops in my infantry

For a day of battle that was foretold by a kin to me

Let the weak say I am strong and prepare for the takeover

America the great is fallen, that means game over

Divided we stand, Divided we fall

When we work against each other, the engine stalls

Falling out of the sky like a star in heaven

Freefalling faster than the towers on 9-11

Nobody bothered to listen when the angel blew the horn

Now judgment is here and all you can hear is mourns

Little children and widowed women destroyed and battle torn

But it’s too late now, cant’ say that you were never warned

Shoulda learned from Nicodemus what it means to be reborn