Assume the Bush Fantasia and other post election misery

Assume the Bush fantasia and other post election misery

George Bush is our president elect and that is what the American people wanted, so they now have to deal with what they wanted. No need to be petty about it if you voted for Kerry or your political viewpoints swing moderate to center. There is no American center because the right wing has coalesced and bridged all ideological mainstream thought and purged liberalism off the face of these United States. Many may say, that’s a good thing. It’s foul. We will reap what we sow. This President will continue to divide, the power lays with the republican senate and house and the ever changing populous who as of right now, at least 51% percent love the current operation and how it administers it policies.

This operation (the administration), along with the Republican Party mechanism is a treacherous, twisted and diabolical and evil that no description could do it justice. Calling the Bush victory a mandate is another twisted spin tale coming out of the bowels of the Karl Rovians, and sinister Foxfanatisized pundits of right wing morality, spewing more fire to the already burning American landscape. The Democratic Party must learn to play hard ball, as they say in Hip Hop, you have to come correct. The only way to defeat and begin to reconnect with small town and rural America is to revive her, to educate her, to infiltrate her, to deflate her ego and her misguided understanding of humanity and its origins. She has ugly history, small tall America, with her exurbs and rural outposts of tourism and backwater and creek mentality and belief systems that reach back over a century. She never answered her own voice; she listens to know one, but the sly and coy. Remember, when Lewis and Clark ventured across the under belly and through the mountains and hill and valley, small town America belonged to the native. She terminated the native and we warred against the native and destroyed his land and it became a just cause. We will reap what we sow. With our two faced claim as the God led nation, assuming our God is the most holy God, knowing full well that the world has seen and has held many Gods, going against our very own words of declaration, written by men far wiser and craftier, they would have never envisioned our nation as it is today.

Small town America must be invaded for she is threaten by her own homophobia and her lack of understanding of the World stage. She is hated by the World, the Japanese are buying your debt, and your investors are moving their monies and jobs and companies away from you. Coastal America is a but a mere megalopolis of idea and ventures. She goes as America goes, but she no longer leads as if she ever did. So, the Democratic Party must at all cost go on the offensive and attack and demystify the republican deceit machine.

All in a matter of time. The republicans are looking at the last empire, the last ruling class, before the gates are flooded by the single white women, the Africans coming from Africa, the so-called Hispanics, who they have waged deception and venom of politics to create the favorable minority majority of choice for the future, the Hip Hop community and its millions of youth. The soul brothers, the new people of commerce and new marketers of an ever evolving and technological and medical solution oriented future.

The business of divisiveness and deceit has no place in the future of America 100 years from now. But the fight for what is good about America begins now, with the defeat of John Kerry and the reelection thru selection of George Bush. The battle begins as the radicals on both sides of the political spectrum begin to fade and the people will come to realization over the patriot act, the miss-led War on Iraq, the dirty deed of injecting the moral fiber and content into political thought. Again casting thought on the reshaping and retooling of the advantages of marriage for same sex couples, and the maddening fear of the homosexual onslaught. I see a different America evolving out of this divisiveness. In the future we won’t have time to hate each other and stand against one another, because the emerging nations will begin to eat our garbage as they have already begun.

We will not be looking to end evil axis, because we have become our own worst enemy and our very union will be confronted. Fear is what it is. But to use it as this President has mastered so well, it is treason. Iraq will be continued to simmer and the World will not help as a whole. The World laughs at our arrogance, smiles at simple mindedness, for there is no longer a New Deal or a Great Society, but a small ruling class of Americans of maybe 1000, who move and convince the rest of what, is America, that evil and to dispose of it lays at the hands of the liberal. More fabrication and deceit, America will be attacked again most likely under the guise and stewardship of George W. Bush.
100 years from now, when cloning, and stem cell research and homophobia and American racism and economic and wealth inequalities will be after thoughts, Historians will point to this time as turning point. The battle against the so-called terrorists and the fear mongering that betrayed the American mind into a false sense of security. It gave the American small town and rural Americana, the right and strength to exercise her shortcomings and her in ability to gage the World. Remember this is the America created by Americans. With natives on reservations, prosperity and security being above all else the only need, it has created a Bush world of markets and targets. Of Wal-Mart’s and Guns, and televised and radioed and truck filled gospel of hate and rhetoric. And they swallowed it whole. When you see and feel and sense something you don’t’ understand you wage a war against it. You rally your supporters, mainly suburban white males and the white males who make up small town and rural America, you ring the alarm, and this is it. And the republicans did a masterful job at orchestrating a network of deceit, with religious leaders, Network television and programmed radio to broadcast at a frequency that only the discredited could listen. They fractured the word liberal, until no one could see the liberty in liberal. What is wrong with being open-minded? What is wrong with being tolerant? Protecting civil and political liberties? What is wrong with being generous? And so we have a distortion and corruption of our very systems and laws. When one Party cast its shadow over the electorate through fear and doubt, it has eaten its own tongue. I really believe for all her posturing now, the republicans is doomed by their own masterful gamesmanship of the political tide of American politics. The future in America will be marked by changing demographics, red states becoming blue out of necessity, leaders who represent the people and not the corporate interests and so-called special interests, but the biggest change is yet to come, when white males become less the majority and will be the minority. That day is approaching at the end of this century and we will turn many other corners. As this is written, this is a good thing, and it began during a strange eight year period under George W. Bush. A new day is right around the corner, and small town America will have no choice but to live for her children, instead of the government using her children to fight her misconceived wars.

BALL GAME

Ball Game…who’s got next?

Jumping sweet Georgia Brown how in the name of the association do NBA professionals receive the beat down from their international foes? It’s the classic case of the finger stuck up you know where. For so long, basketball an American game invented by a white guy named James Nesmith was dominated by whom else? Americans. The game has developed into a free flying circus, pushed by brothers making more bank than Sierra Leone. The reasons for this fall from grace since using NBA players in all fairness is simple to solve.

Hey I love the NBA like the next guy, but for real let’s get down to the solution. So we don’t suffer another embarrassing NBA moment. First send the best professionals and college players. Second have these guys well coached and trained on international basketball. International ball and NBA ball are two different species. Third, get a Bobby Knight like coach to coach the spoiled ballers. If the NBA guys got to miss some NBA games so be it. The college ballers should be ready to go. Look if the international guys even tries to play NBA ball or make NBA teams, which there are quite a few out their now playing in the league, no way can a collection of divas and Slavic’s are going to beat the association on the regular, on NBA terms. Fourth, everybody on the team has got to be on the same page, with their heads thinking. True, we will never see another dream team one or two. The mailman, Jordan, Barkley, magic those cats were not only professional; they simply played basketball like you are supposed to. You check your man, guard the basket and execute pure passing and cutting. These hip hopers are all show and no play. Hip hop ball players need to reexamine their games. Running and dunking is a great circus act for the NBA on a regular NBA night. Leave it to the NBA to adopt the street playground style game. The NBA of the pure shooters, the grit defense and determination has faded. The Steve Kerr’s can play to. Bob Cousy would have never played in today’s NBA. Walt “Clyde” Frazier would have never played in today’s NBA. And he was defensive specialist; “Clyde” was the ball hawking and theft specialist.
Defense is the last thing you do in the NBA. With scores like 110 to 105 every other night. Fifth, go on a European and Caribbean “Harlem Globetrotters tour a year before and play these bums before the Olympics.

And just because we lost to these guys doesn’t mean are guys sucked. These guys play on the same damn team for 20 years. These guys get so pumped up as soon as they see USA and an orange/brown basketball they lose their minds about it. The Italians, the French, the Caribbean, the sub-Saharan Africans all have leagues and have developed rapidly. The Slavic’s are probably some of the best team players period. The world has caught up to the United States in terms of international team basketball. But, the world’s best ballers usually come to the NBA and American colleges and universities for graduate training and refining of their skills, because they won’t face the same competition at home. And for years are least wanted ballers, who were not NBA material have been abroad throughout the European leagues for decades now. Who’s got next?

The Red Sox Fan Finally get some real get back

The Red Sox Fans Finally gets some real get back

I was born in DC and spent half of my childhood summers on the streets of East Elmhurst and Corona, New York.
The same streets where Malcolm X’s house was bombed, where Louis Armstrong lived. I’ve got fond memories of Queens, which always seem to linger. My first baseball game was watching the Washington Senators, because Paul Casanova was the catcher and he ate over my great aunt’s home in Mt Pleasant in DC. Then I got to see the Mets, those amazing Mets with Cleon Jones, and Ron Swaboda and Tom Seaver in Flushing Meadows in Queens. Between playing marbles and handball and stickball and fighting off DC hoods in DC, baseball was a religion when you grew up afro-Cuban. La Pelote, the hard ball as you say in Spanglish, you followed it like a river. It was natural to understand the game and its tendencies.

I fell in love with the Yankees. The Yankees, when Mickey Mantle’s career was dieing out, no longer the great home run hitter, but a man fighting alcoholism. The great Thurman Munson, Horace Clark, Willie Randolph, I remember just being mesmerized by Mel Stotlemeyer, the lanky Yankee pitcher in the rotation. These Yankees were not the great winning Yankees of tradition, but a gritty bunch that waged battle to represent the pinstripes in style and grace. Great Yankee teams followed, but always the Yankees mastered the Red Sox. The Red Sox were hated by New Yorkers and Black Bostonians from their treatment of Boston Black baseball players. Boston had a poor reputation as a racial hostile town that treated the Black athlete poorly. Boston was the last of a string of Eastern seaboard towns with blue collar origins and hard core politics and mob ties. When the Yankees beat Red Sox, it was a whole lot of crap going down. It was factions of Irish, Italian, and old ethnic machismo and pride rolled up into a baseball game. The Yankees were hated by everybody. Their wasn’t an American League team that didn’t dislike the Yankees lore. And if you know anything about New York, the most hated fan was the Yankee fan right within the boundaries of the five Burroughs. The Dodgers, the Giants had their own fans and New Yorkers were diced and sliced by their distinctive dialects of the five Burroughs and which team did you follow. Yankees fans were corporate, they had money, Yankee stadium itself was located in a tough neighborhood where you could get your feelings hurt. Brooklyn and the Giants at the Polo grounds as told to me by my uncle, was more personal, more like home, it was a family affair. The Yankees were the big, bad boogiemen who would rip your heart out. With Reggie, and Craig Nettles, and all the muscle and power that comes with Yankee money and Yankee pride.

The Red Sox finally had the lights on. It’s been a full century of disaster and misery for the Red Sox. Now they achieved some true redemption for all these years of futility. They will probably sweep the cardinals and Boston will riot. I kind of feel for Boston, I think about big Jim Rice, Yaz, Carlton Fisk and all those great Boston green Wall machine teams. Finally they beat down the Yankees, in Yankee fashion. They performed the unimaginable, with pitchers ankles soaked in blood, getting out in front of the Yankees after being brutally pummeled in the third game of that series. Baseball is a strange mathematical game, a game of inches and decisions by committee. For over a century an organization, lined up men, held them to high standards, told them about guys named, DiMaggio, Mantle, Ruth, Ford, Berra, Jackson, Munson and many others and told them put on this uniform and good things happen. The only thing is they forget to tell them about a strange team, in a city only fours hours north and east, a place as magical and mystical with its own quirks and traditions. A place that has never experienced the thrill of baseball supremacy but once. Every once in while we know a greater power really does rule. Ask the Red Sox.

When I walked with DC gangsters

When I walked with the DC street gangsters


When I walked on Mt. Pleasant and through Adams Morgan and around Columbia Heights, the junkies scared me; the hustlers stood tall, the alcoholics drank from brown paper bags and smiled at me.

When I remember the Mt. Pleasant hustlers, and Euclid street hustlers and Clifton Terrace and Fourteen street, I remember a gritty, broken glass filled, urine stench and rat filled neighborhood of political neglect and bitter enemies, block by block.

Kenyon Street had hate for Irving Street and Hobart Street had hate for Columbia road, and R Street and S were known as down the hill. I was from up the hill and so I was better off than the band of young gangsters on 11th street and that pugnacious crew of thieves and pickpockets from Ledroit Park. Howard University students would get robed on the regular, because they didn’t understand the avenue. And then I heard gun shots, that I used to think were firecrackers, every Friday night.

So that’s were I learned what a heroin junkie looks like when he needs a fix, on the streets of Shaw, Mt. Pleasant, Columbia Heights and Adams Morgan. When southwest was destroyed, not everybody headed to southeast as is popular thought. A hell of a whole lot of them ended up right uptown. Not bourgie uptown, but dirt uptown. Like Shaw, and Columbia Heights and old raggedy Mt. Pleasant and Adams Morgan. A lot of folks don’t know that Adams Morgan gets its name from the two used to be segregated schools. Adams the white school located on the south end and Morgan, and the original sleepy hollow west end gangsters, whose streets were Corcoran, Seaton, kalorama road and Euclid, adjacent to the kalorama skating rink.

And when I ventured off the turf, when I met crews from further uptown, they looked me in my eyes and they knew I knew. I didn’t have to act like I knew. I had my own style, my own sense of whom I was, where I was going, I knew bullets had no name. So when I met gangsters from Petworth, they showed respect and embraced me and protected me from ill people and ill crews. When I met gangsters from Taylor Street and Delafield Street they had their own internal squabbles, but I stepped around that. The Decatur street gang carried themselves as hard scrabble, but them to be but mere friends and partners. I met crews and sets from Bright wood and Manor Park. They held down fort on streets like Rittenhouse and the most well known, Kennedy. When I moved to Brightwood Park, I knew Riggs Park and Michigan were always beefing. I knew north Michigan Park was known for athletes. And Brookland and Woodridge were quiet havens of well kept families and well kept homes. But you didn’t step to 12th and Hamlin; you didn’t step to hard at Edgewood Terrace, that’s right round the corner where I fell for a little honey on Franklin Street.

And when I hung with brothers from Riggs, from Michigan, from Woodridge and from Edgewood they treated me with respect and admiration, they knew from where I came and I never worried about beefs. Because they accepted me as I was. When I ran across southeast dudes, it was all about what part of southeast. But I was befriended by the dudes who went to our lady queen of peace, and Holy Comforter. Southeast was a beast. They had plenty of good guys in southeast. Plenty of hippies and coolies. My best friend from southeast was shot and killed right where he grew up. Right in woodland. Woodland and Fairlawn carried southeast. I used to party until five o’clock in the morning in congress heights, on the southeast and southwest border by Bolling air force base.

You came into valley green and out. I played basketball with my cousin in Barry farms until three in the morning. Sometimes guys would give you that infamous southeast grit down their, but as long as you respected them and let them know you were a visitor, their was no beef. We played ball and we squashed dumbshit. It was players honor. Now, their were plenty of rumbles with southeast. That’s what they lived on more than the gangsters I knew from uptown. They lived to prove themselves, because a hell of a lot of them was good kids looking for bad. Southeast dudes liked to go to other neighborhoods and play rough and tough and then get back to southeast and get killed. It would happen all the time, if they moved to any other part of town, and suburban Maryland. Often these dudes would go right back to good hope road, Stanton road, Alabama avenue, wheeler road, southern avenue and get killed. You can still read about this shit in the newspaper today. But southeast is deceptive. Some brilliant and well kept kids lived off Branch Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue extended. I had a girlfriend off Pennsylvania Avenue and she was as refined as any girl I knew from uptown. But she had that southeast shit in her too. Her parents were middle to upper middle class, but she had to deal with highland niggers. This is the best southeast story I can remember. I remember going to a party off of Branch Avenue. A very clean and well kept part of southeast. A lot of middle class dudes, but they had plenty of moxie. We came in about four cars from uptown, looking very much the part of uptowners. I was having a good time, all of sudden I heard the sounds of fists and body punches and these two dudes got the shit beat out of them in this elaborate branch avenue home. And I heard one of the dudes who were administering the ass whipping, “these poor motherfuckers coming up here to fuck up our party, send their ass back down Minnesota Avenue”. I had a lot of affection for southeast, my uncle lived their for thirty-five years, he had his home right their off Malcolm X avenue, around the corner from number eleven boys club. I hung with a crazy dude from Linda Pollin apartments, we were bitter rivals. My favorite go-go band was from southeast, Rare Essence. I never understood all the hate they had for one another out their. It was different from uptown. We all knew one another uptown. Or knew of one another. Their it was complete hate from neighborhood to neighborhood. Oh, and I don’t consider Capitol Hill to be a part of “The southeast beasts”.

What’s left are the nomads turfs, so hardcore that the only reason your creeping around here is your lost or you got family or you need street narcotics or whores. Sir sum Corda, I had a great friend who grew up their when it was peaceful. It’s the equivalent of Iraq today. Trinidad, I never even dated a girl over their. It was be shot or robbed over their, especially if you came from northwest, like I did. All they knew over their was war. Kenilthworth in its hey-day was outlaw city. Simple City, you had to be packing. And certified nuts lived over in Lincoln Heights and Benning road. These dudes were all country, all uncouth over their. The sharpest dudes for over their were the sheriff road boys going into Maryland, that mob with ties to Division avenue and “the shrimp boat”, the neighborhood landmark.


Honorable mention is all the Maryland bama squabbles. Like the most well known is Kentland versus Palmer Park, Suitland and Temple Hills, Langley Park, just by itself.
Forestville and Oxon Hill, Marlboro Pike and Walker Mill road. Silver Spring and Takoma Park.
Just Maryland boys settling beefs with DC extended or internal beefs that had grown over like weeds in the heat of the summer. You can read about that shit in the paper everyday. Some Maryland boys shot up in DC or some DC boys shot up in Cap-pistol heights, some robbery gone wrong in Shootland, some body crossed somebody or missed somebody in Glassmanor and District Heights. Somebody said the wrong thing, somebody owed somebody some money, somebody killed somebody’s family member and the street code over ruled the judicial system. Somebody was showboating in the club, somebody said something to somebody and somebody finished it.
Maryland squabbles and beefs. Sometimes those beefs go interstate or tristate and revolve into rivalries like the Alexandria, VA boys and the Oxon Hill crew’s beefs from years back.

Beefing is a legendary mark of bamafication. Beefing is the end result of trying to maintain some reputation, or establish some reputation or pretending that you’re down with the crew or know your way around. When you don’t know. Sometimes guys pretend like their down and they really don’t have an idea. Bamafication is when bama’s, those that are not hip, have no reputation, don’t have any moxie or couth, try desperately to defend their honor. Usually it’s over drugs, girls, cars, jewelry, family name, street credit, or neighborhood pride. Sticks up boys are the exception. They flat out have no connection, don’t want a connection, they steal from small hustlers, major players and organizations. In the end stick up boys end up dead. Beefing also turns out to be personal vendettas from some one stepping on the wrong family, somebody finally figuring out who did who to who and paying it back. But in the end there is never, ever any getting back. Brothers will die, Uncles will die, cousins will die and best friends will die. And the bullshit memories will linger. When you see graffiti like “R.I.P pee wee”, “we love you Boo”, “Peaches and friends loved you to”, tee shirts and photographs, pictures and stuffed animals and candles burning. Beefing and all its derivatives don’t play out like the movies. No matter what city, what town, what state. It’s all personal. And gang affiliation is but a fixture on a landscape of rivalries and animosities that sometimes date themselves prehistoric. Beefing leads to inner city drama, which date some 40 years. At the Go-Go, at the basketball game, at the corner store, in the car in the neighborhood, at grandma’s house, in the yard, on the corner, at the playground, in the alley, on the bus, at the metro station, when ever one set’s an enemy tribe. Amazingly post MTV raps and Hip Hop culture has made this attitude suburban acclimation or rigueur for the suburban gangsters 10 to 15 miles outside DC and Baltimore. It leads to drag racing and Friday night brawls and tough guy join my gang rites. The suburban kids act out this shit, while inner city kids are scared to death and just want to be able to get through the day without having some friend killed, mama crying, daddy holding on if he’s their at all. It’s everyday, day to day for the city kid, while the suburbs want to be gangster until the realization hits some upper middle class sensibilities. Suburban, hard core doesn’t count. The Seat Pleasants and Glass manors and Langley Parks are basically DC drama extensions.

The best way to survive this crap is to be you at all costs. Parents have to be strong and rigid. Folks have to set expectations early. Dude might be six-five and 250 pounds and sixteen; he’s still a young man trying to learn his way around. He may be the shortest dude or the tallest dude; he still needs some help to know his way around. Gangs and all their drama can be shut down, but it takes community stepping up and showing the way. Many communities already have the seeds of good intentions within them, but sometimes you need youth outreach and career criminal outreach to be lit up like a Christmas tree. A lot of these cats can’t read or write, and some are so smart and forthright that all they need is a nudge and a push. Each one must teach one. Churches need to combine efforts through interfaith and become less political and open its doors. The contractor community must be willing to open up its doors and put something’s together other than a job. Extend a hand not a hand out. Government programs, that work need to be rewarded, like job core and seed programs. It’s amazing but the answers and solutions are all within our reach, we can begin to reconstruct communities that all but live like the old Western ghost towns. Bars on windows. No one out after dark, just street lights and criminal minds and criminal plans and conspiracies.

Justice is blind ask the DC sniper

Justice is blind; she carries a sword and a scale.

The current U.S. adult correctional population reached a record high according to CNN. According to this report, 6.6 million men and women were incarcerated at the end of 2001. With an increase of 147,000 from the year 2000. We have no room for these two bothers, they must be executed. Sure ya right.

Am I right? No, I am wrong. I am so wrong that I should ask all those so-called Christians in the land of the free and the brave, are you really a Christian? Are you really an American? Or better yet, what is American? And where do we place our values and our beliefs? Are we not hypocrites and parasites caught in a tangled web of misinformation and miseducation, over weight and under nourished, happy with our false sense of superiority and nuclear proliferation. These brothers will pass.

What I worry most about is our growing lack of brotherhood, and our inability to reach out and help the most in need. People we are falling short in this nation. Many of you may look at this as a joke, a riddle or a puzzle. But people, we are on a collision course with anarchy and despair without recourse. All great civilizations come to a close. Look it up. Why aren’t we listening to each other anymore? We can talk all day, Oprah, Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, everybody has a talk show! Rush and the O’Reilly factor from the right or so called right, to Imus and Dan Rooney. Most of us love our country dearly; we would die to defend our rights. Our Patriots resemble the American spectrum, coming from wide views of ideologies and politics and economies. But we must be careful. We must not pre-judge, we must not guess, we must separate fact from fiction, and most of all we must be conscious at all times of subliminal propaganda and dereliction of truth. These brothers will receive the full extent of the law. No doubt.
You do not maim and kill a human being in the state of Virginia. The commonwealth does not play that. You will be punished to the full extent of the law. The commonwealth is second only to Texas in handling its business with murderers. So, all of you out their wishing for these brothers to hang by tomorrow. They will. Trust me.

But the issue is larger than just an eye for an eye or in this case two for ten. Let ask ourselves this. Why do we continue to let our system fail? Why do we accept these aberrations in our American society? Do we not profess these Judeo-Christian values and place them as our center piece to our Americanisms? Our penny says “e pluribus Unum”; do you know what that means? It means, out of many, one. Many cry foul, the blacks, the Hispanics, the whites (Scottish, Anglo, Saxon, Irish, German, and Franco) origins European, the Asians, the islanders. There are only three races of mankind, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid. So lets not go their. Why do we fail to understand the world in which we live? A world that is changing, a country that is changing and evolving into a free spinning, sputtering mess of chaos and clutter. I ask you, can you make a change? A change to speak to your neighbor, a change to better identify with your world. Can you make a change today? A change to understand our fellow brethren, thru interfaith, thru open-ness. The “macho” stance will only continue to deprive our citizens of a true democracy. But has this ever been a democracy? Have gun will travel. Is it not a republic? Isn’t our history as nation full of examples and creations similar to the heinous acts committed by these brothers? Do we not continue to talk out the side of our necks, say one thing and do the other, and then profess our love of God and Country? A good many men and women gave their lives for our freedoms and liberty. To be able to express ourselves, and believe in what we choose to believe in and to think any way we damn well please. Men and women of European and African origin, from all over the globe contributed to the American ideal. So, can you make a change today? Can you dig deep inside that programmed psyche and make a change today? Can you extend your hand, your knowledge, your experience, your wisdom and make a change today? When you see a wrong can you step up? Why does it always end in some one losing their job, their marriage, their business, their children, their health, their sanity, their dreams, their
Innocence? That’s what I am charging you with America. Our inner-city public schools are dysfunctional, without the help of corporate America in some cases totally unmanageable. Our marriages in this country, the bedrock of our society, our foundation for the formulations of family at best have a 50/50 chance. Our youth are drug plagued, or over exposed and under pressure to succeed from aggressive and competitive middle to upper middle class parents, the best schools, my child must do it all, at all costs. Our homes have become huge mini mansions in suburban America, equipped with everything to supply a third world nation, and a gate and cameras to keep out the unwanted. Our very faiths are challenged; we continue to question what is of value? Among us, there are those that believe it’s their way or the highway! But our world is changing. It is a much more inclusive and demanding country and world. The people want their influence herd and when no one is listening, be he or she of whatever persuasion, they try to reach out. And sometimes when they aren’t being herd, they commit violence and they kill other people. And we see this happen continuously throughout our history, be it political or sociopath. So, can you make a change today? We have all these wonderful freedoms, and we forget that freedom is not free. You don’t need to be to the right or left of the political continuum to understand that. Once in this country another man could hold and sell other human beings as slaves, strictly economics. Once in this realm women could not vote, strictly sexism. Once in this country men and women of African origin could not eat or sit next to or be educated or live next to a Caucasian person or person of European descent, once in this country each colony did its own thing, under the rule of a King. There were Dutch colonies, English colonies, Spanish colonies, Portuguese colonies and penal colonies. Once again our country is changing. Our population is more yellow and brown, the roles of women are expanding, our youth ever more challenged and frightened. Our country is entering a new millennium. Still carrying baggage from the last century. Still searching for itself and confused as ever, still pretending and in full denial of its role in the world.

Things we can’t do anymore. We can’t lock up everybody. We can’t edify a few and leave the rest ill-equipped to face the future. We can’t dismiss the hurt and pain we may have caused others directly or indirectly. We can’t simulate to be citizen-passives, but citizen activist. After all it was good truck driver who made the right call. We can’t judge people and have them guillotined or hung; people have a right to be herd, we can’t pre-judge anyone. We can’t defend our interests all over the globe all the time, especially when its none of our business anyway. We can’t require persons around the world to like us when we don’t even like ourselves. We can’t consume and throw away everything just because we have it like that. We can’t burn petrol for another 100 years just because its convenient. We can’t just shove our elderly into retirement farms and hope that they’ll disappear. We are growing older, but we don’t have any common sense.


We can’t expect everyone to respect the use of a firearm or weapon, when we continue to lock up more people than any other country in the world other than South Africa. We can’t continue to be arrogant and ignorant and less tolerant of one another. We can’t continue to believe that our entertainment community can work outside, while polluting us on the inside with concealed messages and disrespecting us and our families. We can’t rule the world and then blow up some ones home and send them care packages, then slowly let our population become expendable. We shouldn’t rebuild another house when our house as grand as it is, is falling apart. How do we justify that? Isn’t that old school twentieth century thinking? Shouldn’t we be about the business of solutions? Why can’t we come to some sort of resolution with our friends? We don’t practice what we preach very well. And it sets a very bad example. The eyes of the world set her sights to us, and we continue on the path of self destruction, with the healing being hard to expend.


No our country is not perfect, but we can do better. Our companies can do better. Our schools can do better, whether university or elementary. Our citizenry can do better. We all are not super rich and leave this country at a moments notice. We gotta make with what we have. And what we have is a changing country. The faces of prosperity and wealth are changing; the old guard leads to a new. Some do not like this transformation, they will fight it with there lives. Some are intelligent enough to understand that change and transition is good. Justice is blind and she carries a sword and scale, and she is waiting on us to make a change. So, can you make a change in your existence? Some of us get it, a lot of us don’t. The majorities of us don’t get it and wish back to the way it was. Some of us want to keep it going as long as it fits their liking. Some of us believe we are up and above the rest, but like that truck driver in Maryland…we know what we need do to make a contribution, to lend a hand.

Why my brother?

Why my brother? A beef that stretches into terror:

Before the mad Caucasians and those that harbor hate get there thrills over some brothers being tagged as “the boogieman who clipped 10 in dc” get there jollies off. Hold up one minute. This brother is a product of the US of A. Like Dahmer, Manson, McVeigh, Karish and Yates, the son of Sam, the zodiac and on and on, like popcorn. For those who have never been to DC, never been to the East Coast, never knew the drama of MLK and JFK and Malcolm and RFK. For those who still want to rah-rah and mad beat “Islam”, who doesn’t understand the difference between fundamentalists and true believers of “Islam”. Hold up, wait a minute. This brother served 10 years in your ARMY America.
Unfortunately he brainwashed his stepson into these evil beliefs. “But the chickens have come home to roost”. This brother served in the elder bush “Gulf War”. They are sympathizers and apologists for 911. Yes, he lost his mind. I repeat, he lost his mind.
But how can one brother cause so much damage and bring down the entire “Bat Masterson-Wyatt Earp crew”? in conjunction with every Mayberry RFD county police officers between Maryland and Northern Virginia. Either, like Hitler, there is a thin line between evil and genius. Or there is more here than meets the eye. Let us thank the good brother, Chief Moose who received so much hate and drama from America and the press for his diligence. Lets us thank the federals, who despite there history of co-option and crookedness and deceit, captured a most twisted scheme of hate, ever played on America.
Let us thank our “new crisis management politicians”, governor Warner of Va, Glendening of MD, Mayor Williams of DC, the county executives of the jurisdictions involved. As Mayor Giuliani demonstrated during 911, you gotta be cool, when your world is coming apart. And how about a shout out to all the “peace officers” who busted there ass, working from sun up until sundown, until the “fed got there man”. Let us thank all the school administrators, whose true professionalism showed in the face of peril and harm. As a parent, the struggle to keep face in spite of the madness is a true measurement of parental guidance and fortitude. Our faith community was alive with vigor and strength, repeating the message “believe and stand with your maker”. The most damage lies with the families of the victims. This twisted, diabolical scheme to create havoc and fear completed its task. There is nothing America can do, but have faith and pray. Like 911, no money, no glory, no rhyme or reason can bring back a loved one, dear to that family. The trick is not over. There is more here, even if brother did act alone. Did brother really mastermind this entire wicked event? You want good America to believe that the road of terror ends here? No. We must be tolerant of others. We must understand that the world is not our world, and we are not the only chosen people on this planet. Brother was on a mission to distort, confuse and terrorize for whatever reason. Expect to see more lunacy. And for those that have never been to DC, you need to hope that these events don’t reach your little part of the USA. And for those who stand by and pledge to your country, I say remember JFK, RFK, Malcolm and martin and medgar, remember the struggles of a young nation. We should pray for the family in Baltimore, Maryland who didn’t receive bullets from a sniper, but instead were killed by “my brothers”, a family of six murdered by molitif cocktail bomb thrown at a b-more row house from drug gangsters. It didn’t make CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC and all the rest of the story tellers. You see, my brother wouldn’t venture and try his madness in the heart of DC or B-more. They caught him sleeping in B-more. But, he wasn’t about to shoot up the “way”. The “way” is accustomed to mayhem and violence similar to beruit and Vietnam and “the Palestine west bank combined. Momma and daddies and workers and everyday Joes die daily around the “way”. No, the “way” was waiting for his ass. His mission was to scare the other America. The starbuck drinking, outback eating, Michael’s store, hobnob and craft and clubby America. And brother succeeded.
In the New Testament, “Psalms and Proverbs”. From the book of Ephesians.

And grieve not the holy spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.
Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice:

And be ya kind to one another, tenderhearted. Forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.

Madness at the helm

Madness at the helm

Another presidential race is about to close out and were still debating over the fate and ill will and missed opportunities of the current policies of the current administration. The United States is a divided nation, crushed by the weight of her own arrogance and lacking direction and currently being led by someone who plays cowboy and looks and appears as if he is running the greatest nation on the planet as if it the equivalent of a cruise ship. Let’s lollygag and bullshit. The gap between rich and poor continue to widen, even more since the arrival of the cowboy. The shrinking and subliminal and distraught white middle class is confused, lacking center, looking for answers in popcorn and crackerjack Reality shows presented to us by the corporate media right. An entire cottage industry has sprung as ideologues match wits and ideas against deceit and underhandedness. The creators of all this hate laugh in their sleep. As dumb Americans fall prey to the melodrama political fray of the “good guys” versus the “bad guys”. The problem is that good guys hang with the bad guys, and we can’t really tell apart the good guy from the bad guy. But we do know that concentrated wealth in the hands of a few powerful people is a bad thing. We do know that being rich in America came at the expense of exploitation and disruption and conniving. And once you become rich and I mean “I don’t give a fuck rich”, and have the brains to go with my richness, I can promote, support and convince and contrive enough bullshit to fool even the most well fed, best educated people on the planet earth. And that my friend is what we have deceit and fraud. To think that the grand old party, the republic orchestrates such wicked strategy to organize themselves as soccer moms, country clubians, nascarians, struggling white middle class zealots and professional corporate pirates. Sprinkle a few confused African-Americans of high achievement or jaded patronage or Hispanics not Latinos of Cuban or Mexican origin by roots of Spain. You’ve got division my friends. Not to mention the destructive policies laid out by these “people”, they honest believe they know what’s good for the rest of us. Problem is they don’t. They never have. Their greatest hero Ronald Reagan just died and they used his death to illuminate their status. Well, I never liked John Wayne and no man is a superman or a rich boy trying to be cowboy or flyboy will fool the real people of this country. The Vietnam veterans whose mind and bodies were torn apart the last time we were divided. The world war two vets who saved this country from greater threat than osama and his gang of henchman. The civil rights and human rights people who have led an unwavering battle in the face of hate and prejudice. The white women along with many other who battled for the right to vote. When folks sense the urgency to make a change, we the people make that change. Not the privileged few. And the change will take place this November, when the dumbshit comes to a close.

Justice is blind

Justice is blind; she carries a sword and a scale.

The current U.S. adult correctional population reached a record high according to CNN. According to this report, 6.6 million men and women were incarcerated at the end of 2001. With an increase of 147,000 from the year 2000. We have no room for these two bothers, they must be executed. Sure ya right.

Am I right? No, I am wrong. I am so wrong that I should ask all those so-called Christians in the land of the free and the brave, are you really a Christian? Are you really an American? Or better yet, what is American? And where do we place our values and our beliefs? Are we not hypocrites and parasites caught in a tangled web of misinformation and miseducation, over weight and under nourished, happy with our false sense of superiority and nuclear proliferation. These brothers will pass.

What I worry most about is our growing lack of brotherhood, and our inability to reach out and help the most in need. People we are falling short in this nation. Many of you may look at this as a joke, a riddle or a puzzle. But people, we are on a collision course with anarchy and despair without recourse. All great civilizations come to a close. Look it up. Why aren’t we listening to each other anymore? We can talk all day, Oprah, Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, everybody has a talk show! Rush and the O’Reilly factor from the right or so called right, to Imus and Dan Rooney. Most of us love our country dearly; we would die to defend our rights. Our Patriots resemble the American spectrum, coming from wide views of ideologies and politics and economies. But we must be careful. We must not pre-judge, we must not guess, we must separate fact from fiction, and most of all we must be conscious at all times of subliminal propaganda and dereliction of truth. These brothers will receive the full extent of the law. No doubt.
You do not maim and kill a human being in the state of Virginia. The commonwealth does not play that. You will be punished to the full extent of the law. The commonwealth is second only to Texas in handling its business with murderers. So, all of you out their wishing for these brothers to hang by tomorrow. They will. Trust me.

But the issue is larger than just an eye for an eye or in this case two for ten. Let ask ourselves this. Why do we continue to let our system fail? Why do we accept these aberrations in our American society? Do we not profess these Judeo-Christian values and place them as our center piece to our Americanisms? Our penny says “e pluribus Unum”; do you know what that means? It means, out of many, one. Many cry foul, the blacks, the Hispanics, the whites (Scottish, Anglo, Saxon, Irish, German, and Franco) origins European, the Asians, the islanders. There are only three races of mankind, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid. So lets not go their. Why do we fail to understand the world in which we live? A world that is changing, a country that is changing and evolving into a free spinning, sputtering mess of chaos and clutter. I ask you, can you make a change? A change to speak to your neighbor, a change to better identify with your world. Can you make a change today? A change to understand our fellow brethren, thru interfaith, thru open-ness. The “macho” stance will only continue to deprive our citizens of a true democracy. But has this ever been a democracy? Have gun will travel. Is it not a republic? Isn’t our history as nation full of examples and creations similar to the heinous acts committed by these brothers? Do we not continue to talk out the side of our necks, say one thing and do the other, and then profess our love of God and Country? A good many men and women gave their lives for our freedoms and liberty. To be able to express ourselves, and believe in what we choose to believe in and to think any way we damn well please. Men and women of European and African origin, from all over the globe contributed to the American ideal. So, can you make a change today? Can you dig deep inside that programmed psyche and make a change today? Can you extend your hand, your knowledge, your experience, your wisdom and make a change today? When you see a wrong can you step up? Why does it always end in some one losing their job, their marriage, their business, their children, their health, their sanity, their dreams, their
Innocence? That’s what I am charging you with America. Our inner-city public schools are dysfunctional, without the help of corporate America in some cases totally unmanageable. Our marriages in this country, the bedrock of our society, our foundation for the formulations of family at best have a 50/50 chance. Our youth are drug plagued, or over exposed and under pressure to succeed from aggressive and competitive middle to upper middle class parents, the best schools, my child must do it all, at all costs. Our homes have become huge mini mansions in suburban America, equipped with everything to supply a third world nation, and a gate and cameras to keep out the unwanted. Our very faiths are challenged; we continue to question what is of value? Among us, there are those that believe it’s their way or the highway! But our world is changing. It is a much more inclusive and demanding country and world. The people want their influence herd and when no one is listening, be he or she of whatever persuasion, they try to reach out. And sometimes when they aren’t being herd, they commit violence and they kill other people. And we see this happen continuously throughout our history, be it political or sociopath. So, can you make a change today? We have all these wonderful freedoms, and we forget that freedom is not free. You don’t need to be to the right or left of the political continuum to understand that. Once in this country another man could hold and sell other human beings as slaves, strictly economics. Once in this realm women could not vote, strictly sexism. Once in this country men and women of African origin could not eat or sit next to or be educated or live next to a Caucasian person or person of European descent, once in this country each colony did its own thing, under the rule of a King. There were Dutch colonies, English colonies, Spanish colonies, Portuguese colonies and penal colonies. Once again our country is changing. Our population is more yellow and brown, the roles of women are expanding, our youth ever more challenged and frightened. Our country is entering a new millennium. Still carrying baggage from the last century. Still searching for itself and confused as ever, still pretending and in full denial of its role in the world.

Things we can’t do anymore. We can’t lock up everybody. We can’t edify a few and leave the rest ill-equipped to face the future. We can’t dismiss the hurt and pain we may have caused others directly or indirectly. We can’t simulate to be citizen-passives, but citizen activist. After all it was good truck driver who made the right call. We can’t judge people and have them guillotined or hung; people have a right to be herd, we can’t pre-judge anyone. We can’t defend our interests all over the globe all the time, especially when its none of our business anyway. We can’t require persons around the world to like us when we don’t even like ourselves. We can’t consume and throw away everything just because we have it like that. We can’t burn petrol for another 100 years just because its convenient. We can’t just shove our elderly into retirement farms and hope that they’ll disappear. We are growing older, but we don’t have any common sense.


We can’t expect everyone to respect the use of a firearm or weapon, when we continue to lock up more people than any other country in the world other than South Africa. We can’t continue to be arrogant and ignorant and less tolerant of one another. We can’t continue to believe that our entertainment community can work outside, while polluting us on the inside with concealed messages and disrespecting us and our families. We can’t rule the world and then blow up some ones home and send them care packages, then slowly let our population become expendable. We shouldn’t rebuild another house when our house as grand as it is, is falling apart. How do we justify that? Isn’t that old school twentieth century thinking? Shouldn’t we be about the business of solutions? Why can’t we come to some sort of resolution with our friends? We don’t practice what we preach very well. And it sets a very bad example. The eyes of the world set her sights to us, and we continue on the path of self destruction, with the healing being hard to expend.


No our country is not perfect, but we can do better. Our companies can do better. Our schools can do better, whether university or elementary. Our citizenry can do better. We all are not super rich and leave this country at a moments notice. We gotta make with what we have. And what we have is a changing country. The faces of prosperity and wealth are changing; the old guard leads to a new. Some do not like this transformation, they will fight it with there lives. Some are intelligent enough to understand that change and transition is good. Justice is blind and she carries a sword and scale, and she is waiting on us to make a change. So, can you make a change in your existence? Some of us get it, a lot of us don’t. The majorities of us don’t get it and wish back to the way it was. Some of us want to keep it going as long as it fits their liking. Some of us believe we are up and above the rest, but like that truck driver in Maryland…we know what we need do to make a contribution, to lend a hand.

chill bill

Did Bill need to chill or did Bill put it down like it ought to be put down….



I read the Clarence Page piece and I read the excerpts in the Washington Post about Bill Cosby’s comments about the plight of lower income blacks. Bill can say whatever he pleases even if it was in the public domain. The sense I get , and I am a Cosby fan, going back to the NBC shows, Fat Albert, the Sidney Poitier flicks and of course I Spy. See Bill is a trailblazer and a Philly guy from North Philly and Germantown Avenue. Bill knows bad, he knows ghetto, and he knows Coke, and he knows Jell-O too. But he truly loves education. He always seems to represent the grace and ease of the old school, the original old school, prior to 1964. The school many modern African-Americans did not attend. The post integration schooling, post Jim Crow, post the worst riots of the 60’s and massive economic shift of African-American prosperity in a generation. Bill didn’t receive his first 16 years of education under the difference and politics and misery and subliminal programming of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.

No scourge was as destructive as the crack epidemic of the 80’s. The already fallen people, who barely survived the heroin induced haze of the free spirit 60’ and 70’s, were already marked for extinction. The inner city which gave us shaquanda, Keisha and Boo were already knocked out cold by 1975. If you were an honor member of the black bourgeoisie or part of the striving middle class, you knew your place and shaquanda and tariq and friends never entered your world anyway. In that world you didn’t drink coke, you smoke it. And Jell-O was something for old people and kids. In Bill‘s case you never forget where you came from, it’s the place that where you came from makes a change and you just don’t get it, that takes you for a drop. And Bill and his wife have done so much to help inner city kids and aspiring college kids and historically black colleges, that we owe them that much. Wasn’t the Cosby show of the eighties the last real family shows? Bill was about teaching and giving lessons. Bill hasn’t changed, but the times have. I can’t blame pee wee and Charlie Brown and skebop if they decided that education and old school values of less bling and more hard work and resilience are what’s rewarded by the so called majority culture. If they decided that hustling and killing to get what ever is they deemed important enough to do that, made them act on it, then let the lord judge them.

If their parents were divorced, drugged and aids riddled, illiterate, uneducated and trifling. If your brother went to jail, your uncle went to jail, your cousins went to jail, and you knew they had room for you to. If you can’t read the number on the bus or the train, you never had a home; you don’t know how or where your next meal is coming from. You mother is the father, the uncle, the man, the only deterrent from you and the concrete sidewalks of death and peril. If all you had in your home of educational value is some stupid video games, the TV, the radio blasting the latest poop song. If no one never attended college in your home, if no one ever explained to you that manhood doesn’t equate with ending conflicts with death, but resolving them instead. If your neighborhood church is preaching about money and most of the congregation don't live in the neighborhood anyway. If the school you go to has got anti-drug trespassing signs in the front of it and metal detectors in the front. If all your friends by the time you reach fifteen have been involved in gangs, drugs, death, and mayhem. Well you get the picture.

It’s okay to vent our frustrations at all the knucklehead influences of the last thirty years. The truth is black people didn’t import and export the drugs, they didn’t make the killer guns, they didn’t approve the federal budgets, they didn’t cut back programs that worked and programs that didn’t. They didn’t build all these jails so some women’s or young girls child could go to work in and lose the right to vote as a convicted felon. They didn’t generate aids. They didn’t promote homelessness in our inner city. Black folks had nothing to do with all these record labels promoting negative images and cartonish images because Madison Avenue marketing types don’t know how to sell a car, liquor, a home, a record, an act, a book to black people. We don’t control those things. Black folks want quality, in education, in transportation, in finance, in community, in spiritual matters, but that’s from being delivered. So brothers like Bill, get frustrated at all the madness taking place. Where’s the respect and where’s the love for all the sacrifice being made over the years. I’ll tell you where it is. In somebody’s back yard sipping a coke and a smile. Just thank god we made it. By the grace of god go I.

Bill can say whatever, he‘s smart enough, and forget being “PC”, hey don’t feel bad if your from less than average circumstances. Bill says you got to own up to your end. Sometimes you got to do it in an unconventional way. You got to do it your way.

The DC you don't see...

I am not one to write to reporters or call radio talk show hosts or spin my wheels worrying about things that are out of my control. For years I have read your columns in the Washington Post and for a while they just dragged me down. Not that your opinions and stories were not on point and well written or well thought out. I used to watch your television show with the various brothers discussing the topics of the day, that to was informative and balanced. Still you sometimes seemed to go on these long missions about the state of the District. I am still looking for you to discover that the District has never been what it appears to be. Let me share with some of my personal experiences that dramatically changed my opinion mainly on the plight of African-American children of the District as a focus during this holiday season. I respect your talent and outpourings that you dedicated over the years to the District. But the mission is so complex to solve that neither the politicians, the business community or the District Government itself have a clue as to how to solve for a solution that lays out of their control.

I would like to begin by asking you to look further and deeper into the historical and political positions that have always clip the progress for the District. From slow rule, the overseers at the capital building and the fact that the states of Maryland and Virginia practiced and still do to some degree, de facto segregation. Maryland and Virginia both held in abundance if not the highest percentages of African slaves. Our founding fathers all held slaves, indentured servants, they also freed men. Many of these freed men landed or ended up right here in the capital region. They worked the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers right along side the natives of the area. Once President Lincoln emancipated the slaves, the African population around this region grew in overwhelming numbers. Ever since that time it’s been an effort to rid the area of the African slave. Facts and circumstances point to the migration of freed men from southern rural Virginia and the out migration from North Carolina in the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s. The first migration took place during reconstruction and Jim Crow, the second right during and after the Second World War. Washington at best was about 200 Negro families at best. The freed men bureau was the key step in the outgrowth and potentially the greatest island of black professional prosperity in the United States. The creation of Howard University and the formalization of Hampton Institute were central to the expansion of the Black middle class. Since those attempts along with the civil rights movement itself were all middle class revolts. From John Brown at Harpers Ferry, to the denial of Jefferson and Washington illegitimate African offspring the search for the condition of Negro or African American political and living standards have always come under attack.


Integration, psychological damage caused by the 400 years of being captive slaves, the Jim Crow laws and the color line and class issues that resulted in unfair and unbalanced representation of the freed men. The huge dependence on a selected class and never receiving the neglected class under its breasts has probably been the most challenging concern facing the advancement of Americans of African descent.

All these reasons and countless others are the scars and cancers that haunt the march of progress towards better and stronger communities. The further you draw back on the timeline, then and only then can you connect the dots. The flight of the black middle class from the District, not the flight of the white middle class was the most damaging concentrated movement that hurt the District. The neglect of the neighborhoods such as Shaw, Trinidad-Ivy City, Fairlawn, Congress Heights, Columbia Heights, Upper Cardozo, Benning Heights and Marshall Heights at the expense of the revitalization of Downtown Washington is principally the mark that has arrested development. How can a depressed neighborhood recover after 30 years of neglect, losing three to four generations to drugs, organized criminal activity, poor schools, malnourished children, dilapidated housing, and ill functioning public housing? Add to the mix political mis-management, Governmental denial, both federal and local, inadequate heath care and an exploding population of foreign immigrants who have faced far worse in their native countries. It’s a recipe for disaster. But the opposite message is being sent from the power structure. The current Mayor’s answers are short on damage control but long on misguided substance. As we saw during the control board take over, the real power is in the hands of the federals. And no one concedes power, easily. The current Mayor's focus is primarily to complete the project begun some fifty years ago; two dissect and autopsies the District. Yes, the District died and has been given a new life for the last ten to fifteen years. What does this say to those that some how managed to survive the suicide of a charismatic council member, the image of a drug induced mayor, a homicide rate that fluctuates like seasonal winds, strapped services that neither function. Hideous customer service skills to its constituents. Currently a maniac is torching homes in the District and the District extended and the months add up in an attempt to apprehend this fool. But the current power structure is obsessed with changing the income, the image, the removal of those that will not be around to benefit from this new District. The writing is on the wall. The new convention center, with its monumental bearing, has crushed what once was Shaw. The revival of Adams-Morgan, Mt. Pleasant and Columbia Heights, crucial to bring the new prosperity, is still unbalanced. With homes soaring above 300 hundred thousand dollars, who is going to by those homes? The extermination of Adams-Morgan, Shaw, Mt. Pleasant, Columbia Heights, Petworth, Trinidad-Ivy City, Anacostia-Fairlawn, Capitol Hill, the East end of downtown Washington, Bloomingdale, if it’s five to six miles east, north or south of the U.S. Capitol it’s going, going gone. Look it up (see Southwest Washington, see Georgetown and Foggy Bottom).

And so what does this say to the children of the District? It says we don’t care anymore, if we ever did. It says this isn’t Petey Greene’s Washington and hasn’t been for quite sometime. That the great flight to Prince Georges County wasn’t such a bad thing. It says you were never welcomed in the first place. Just keep on killing yourselves like animals in the jungle, keep fighting amongst yourselves, keep your vision short and forget about a future. It points out that despite residual efforts from wealthy patrons, religious organizations and community activists alike, it’s to massive a problem to solve.
The breakdown in community policing, community insight, the once proud local African American community is reduced to self indulgence and band aid therapy. For example, take the plight of juvenile delinquency and truancy, out of control. Another example is the great fear in the community not to get involved in the prosecution and conviction of neighborhood criminals who prey on the young and the elderly. The overwhelming and sometimes numbing experience of crime committed in the community. The years of blood and gore and violence on the streets has a strong physiological effect on young and old alike. The huge amount of ignorance and intolerance between blacks themselves on how these issues could be mitigated and resolved are seldom even bridged, everybody has a piece of the puzzle, but not a clue as to where to begin to solve the puzzle. The problem is you need glue in 21st century inner-city America. Glue to make the puzzle stay together and progress measured and tracked. Is there a model to end street gang violence and reduce criminal activity on the Eastern seaboard of the United States? You could look at Boston, I believe the Mayor did. You could look at Manhattan, which is what the District will eventually morph into, but more of San Francisco. Less the population. The foundation has been grounded and the base is set for the District to resurrect itself into something few people will even recognize in years to come. And if far southeast and northeast don’t want to change, a change is going to come. Once the reconstruction of New York Avenue for example is complete, the Eastern gateway former warehousing district will become a major revenue and artery for the new District. Once the building of a new hospital in conjunction with the Howard University community is set into place, in near southeast that will begin to put a band aid on the health crisis. Eventually a major employer, primarily the District Government or the federal government sell out and shut down St. Elizabeth’s hospital campus complex that will create the catalyst to continue to build and develop on the rolling vistas of St. Elizabeth’s. This also includes the Camp Simms sight. Anacostia and Good Hope Road are going to see better days. No question progress is needed, and the revitalization of this area’s is crucial to the rebirth of an anacostia waterfront and the extension of Pennsylvania Avenue going into Prince Georges County. The old housing projects disappearing are part of a larger plan, the abolishment of the public dole or aid. But, where does this leave the children while the next twenty years take a dramatic turn?

God bless the child who has his own. The children who compete and excel will be the future of the District. With college a rite of passage and the military service a stand by option or trade school experience possibly waiting in the wings. The children who have a sense of direction and parental involvement will excel in the District. Any young man or women graduating from Banneker high school, with its old school emphasis on the three R’s will certainly be able to compete. Even if it is elitist. The charter schools and academies will continue to flourish and those children should also be able become competitive. If you are a child currently in the District and not grounded, not holding to any educational, vocational, community or church sponsored activity. You’re treading water. Those children are the children of the lawlessness, gang and crew affiliation, drug money influenced, strife induced and drug abusing and possibly gun recklessness we read about everyday. These are the children of ill-equipped parents, young teen aged mothers who gave birth to a whole flock of children in the 80’s and 90’s. These are the children of street hustlers and gangsters, who fall into the gap with the children of the housing projects and homeless. These are the children of abusive and sometimes neglected circumstances. Victims of the spinning venom poverty and despair, couple that with lower middle class children who were raised by their grandmothers, whose options for being caught in between are you either do or you don’t. Add to the equation these could be everybody’s child. These children are in abundance. Their parents were riddled with aids (take example former University of Maryland’s basketball star, Juan Dixon). Is it any wonder are jails are over populated with young african-american males? Divorce rates among African American men and women sky high. Again the answer lies with the compliance and ability of the African –American middle class to answer the call. To reestablish the inner city even if your removed by thirty years. To become entrepreneurial and network on building partnerships and foundations and trusts that will become conduits and lifelines to the inner city and rural community affected by the same nonsense the District has suffered politically. Because we must save the children as our ancestors did. We must save our children despite all the misogynistic Hip Hop and sex and gun and diet depraved influences from corporate America. The business of saving the children is tantamount with the District evolving into something more than a scripted theater play. The greater community each year is so focused on saving the children, that we sometimes don’t like to admit that a whole bunch a folks spend a lot of time trying to be creative and looking for ways to solve these crisis. But as we know it’s to late when it has become as crisis. When it becomes a crisis that means it is a failure. And the policies toward children and teenagers in this country don’t help. Policy’s directed toward the young and the old alike don’t help to solve. Chances are that if don’t focus on the solutions or gage solutions for the children of this beloved community, we will continue to lose countless lives, year after year.

Leadership. Leadership and willingness to work the dividing lines. Only Walter Washington worked the divide of Washington. He was as we sued to say around the way” People”. Barry, Dixon, Williams, all were and are polemics. Dividers, not unifiers. Barry sold out the working people of the District; Dixon was the old school “Uptowner”, who couldn’t relate to Barry Farms. Williams is the corporate cold bean counter and over educated and aloof. He looks bored. His mission is to turn around the direction of black Washington at the expense of the remaining citizenry that was Black Washington. He knows most of influential White and Black Washington doesn’t even live in the city. And if they do, we all know where, it’s either Georgetown, who should succeed from Washington and elect its own Mayor. Somewhere in ward 3 or 4 or 2. He is well educated and very astute that in order for him to create his vision, he will need to gut the confidence out people. He will need to add centerpieces of accomplishments, the convention center, a new public hospital, school vouchers, superior snow removal. And the technological upgrade of all the District systems. He doesn’t care if he can relate to Barry Farms. The future of Barry Farms is suspect; the future of any Black neighborhood is suspect. Even Kenilworth and Marshall Heights. Because he understands that if you can make small changes it will in effect change and create commerce and possibly revenue. Williams will go down as the wonk that rewired Washington. And he has the blessing of the power structure, the Greater Board of Trade, Council of Governments, Congress, and most of ward 3. With no one is willing to give the Mayor a run. He gets to put his policies and mission to work and close the damages created by Marion Barry. In turn crushing the Barry legacy of a bloated bureaucracy and the pimping of the District Government to local contractors and sham artists. Leadership was crucial to the District. As a teenager I supported Marion Barry. He was cool. Some how the Mayor lost his grip of himself, and if your personal affairs are a shambles, than your business may be next. And if your business was to run the Nation’s Capital, manage the budgets and control the spending and delegate your responsibility, then you just mucked it up terribly. On the other hand a handkerchief head like Walter Washington who loved this city and understood it with his style of grace and ease, put folks at calm. I was a child during the 68’ riots. The worse riots ever in Washington, it destroyed the neighborhoods where I grew up. Walter Washington wasn’t afraid to step to 14th street, when 14th street blew up. He approached northeast the same way I heard. I recall Walter Washington, coming up to 14th and Irving streets during a free Trouble Funk and Rare Essence concert that grew into a mass of four thousand young people , in the dead heat of the summer of 78’. At night. He stepped out of his limo, looked back from Park road to Irving street, and I heard him say to the riot geared policemen, “Don’t touch any of these kids”, their just having fun”. They policemen were lined up in riot formation as if they were going to punish all the kids who were into this “go-go music junk”. They cleared the streets. The kids from southeast and northeast got back on their mopeds and headed home, all the uptown kids went their way, and for whatever reason the policemen went their way to. I was nineteen years old and ever since then, I never talked bad about Walter Washington again, to anybody. All I knew was that Marion Barry was going to be the new Mayor and all the okey doke crap that represented the petite bourgeoisie of old black Washington was going to disappear. It never did disappear. It became a contest of the neighborhood that gentrifies the quickest. Any one with any ounce of intelligence at all recognized during the Reagan era, the whole process was a joke; most of all D.C. became a national joke. It became embarrassing to excuse Marion Barry for all his shortcomings. He couldn’t even clear the snow. The “Mayor” was always out lollygagging out of town. Word spread that he was a Rayful customer. As in the master hustler of that era, Rayful Edmond. And Rayful himself proved that Harvard business school could have recruited him and presented him with a Masters in business administration. Rayful as legendary as he became on the streets of Washington, was just another low key gangster. This guy had people kill people to kill more people. He recruited people from all over the city, including David McGraw who I grew up with in Mt. Pleasant. McGraw is now locked up until the sun burns out. And David was a basically a nice guy who could ball. The secret to Rayful’s success was that if you could ball, he was looking to have you on his team. But neither was Rayful the only hustler. It was almost if at one point the entire law enforcement community thought if we lock this guy up, all the craziness would end. Leadership. During this time chief Turner and Chief Fullwood didn’t understand how a “Mayberry town “ like D.C., where everything is personal and cliquish, could come to a street infested-drug corner market-seven –eleven battle of marketing share and networking. The best leader in town was a local drug lord. He made things happen. He had recruited guys from all over the city, including the adjacent Maryland suburbs. He had his lieutenant out in the unsuspecting Arlington County, Virginia. And all during this period in the late eighties. The emergence of la Mara salvatrucha was brewing in the streets of Columbia Heights, Mt. Pleasant, Adams-Morgan, and Shaw and Langley Park, Maryland. Not a soul caught to all these Hispanic guys running around with tattoos and bandanas in their pockets. When the Mt. Pleasant riots took place in 1990, no one listened to these Spanish guys. Now everybody is listening. Because Leadership was to busy running on empty promises. Marion Barry after being locked up for a minute, came back and routed ward seven and eight for their votes. Guess he won and the community lost. The Mayor knew everybody. His favorite line was, “hey, call me at 202-727-DCDC”. I’ll get you hooked up. Hooked up to what? The community “the uptown Hispanic community “saw the Mayor as being out of touch. He knew the “Carlos Rosario” community. But the “Carlos Rosario community” was dieing out. The original D.C. Hispanic community had begun to move itself out of the barrio. The eighties brought in a new immigrant, mainly ignorant, illiterate, and with loyalties to the pueblos that they coyoted from. Much different than the small Dominican, Puerto Rican and Venezuelan and Cuban and Panamanian communities. The civil war between the contras and their rival countrymen in El Salvador brought to D.C., cheap labor but a divided and undereducated population. The Mara had to form out of necessity. Because the first stop for this huge migration was Los Angeles, home to the original Chicano zoot suit warring traditions that go back some seventy years. As one Salvadoran explained to me, quite well in plain English. These gangs had to form because they were picked on in Los Angeles, and even worse picked on here once they got to Washington, that is black Washington. Leadership was missing. The community was divided amongst income, race, neighborhood affiliations and the war against street crime. The city council for all its posturing and bearing couldn’t handle the constant turf battled between the Mayor and the council and rule for power. As of today, their still is a “beef”. A beef between Williams and the council and the soon to be out of business school board. These are my suggestions to save of what will be remaining of the once proud “Chocolate City”. Now basically known as truffle town. Chocolate on the outside with a white chocolate middle and growing.




The top ten issues to rescue the District, and maybe give people some hope.

Number one; obtain some form of full representation, other than an elected delegate. Nobody works harder than Eleanor Holmes Norton. The District needs a Governor, and two representatives in the house.

Number two, get rid of the school board and let the city council handle the schools not the “Mayor”.

Number three, build a lot more affordable housing throughout the city, that means ward three, and spread this housing evenly. This means tear down what doesn’t work anymore and build up. Save all the historic buildings, especially in the “hood”.

Number Four; build a light rail system amongst the three major urban avenues, Georgia, Minnesota, and New York. All connecting to metro rail stations. Metro doesn’t work for the city it was built to take people from the suburbs into town, not through town.

Number five, community police stations in every crook and crannies and pocket of Washington. With working communications and a staging area where the police can become active in the community. Not just in Georgetown. But on Whaler road, south east, Morton street northwest, Orleans place, northeast. Open small two men or three men operations and give incentives for landlords and realtors to give space for these facilities. And man these staging area’s 24-7. Get the hell out of your patrol cars and walk amongst the people.

Number six, if you begin to repair lamppost and create brighter street lights throughout the city, increasing the lights, especially in far northeast and southeast will slow down the drug use and drug selling. This needs to be taken seriously. Lights should be brighter after 9:00 pm and 5:00 am daily. Parks should be well lit, shrubs trimmed, debris removed. Streets should be seen for blocks. Alleys should never be dark.

Number seven, aggressive panhandling, loitering, littering, jaywalking, spitting, should be taken seriously. Fine these folks. Curfews for youths under eighteen should be taken seriously. Fine the parents if underage youths are loitering out on the block. Community policemen should know these youths, where they live, who the parents are. The District needs to be Manhattanized.


Number eight, some form of a commuter tax needs to be levied at folks teetering in and working for the federal government and all these law firms , non-profits and lobbying groups downtown. Take this seriously. Northern Virginia and Maryland for to long have taken DC for granted and have used the District as selling and marketing tool.


Number nine, change some laws. Gun control; explain fully to folks that if you do a capital crime in the nation’s capital, you will receive the death penalty. Make DC unattractive for criminal activity or enterprise.

Number ten, pre-natal care and expectant mothers need to be educated as part of being young un-wed, teenage mothers. Young men need to be trained as early as 3rd grade on the misadventures of sexual promiscuity. Education is the key, not giving away condoms. Some of these youngsters won’t wear one because of the stigma attached to ritually having to practice safe sex women between the ages of 18-25. We shouldn’t be surprised at the rising AIDS rate amongst young men and women.

Special number eleven; establish an award ceremony for youths in the District on a regular basis, throughout the entire school system, on kids making their marks. Kids going to college, kids going into the military, kids going into the work force. Track and measure the progress of these children. Build spirited corps of achievers, strivers and alumni, creating data bases of student achievers.




In conclusion, the District is evolving and changing faster and quicker than ever before. I suspect that my cynicism and anger towards the District Government and the federal government make me out as a mad radical. But I will always be radical and progressive in terms of the future of the District and its children, its seniors and its street drug addicted community. Sadly, I don’t believe this current or any other early millennium city government administrations will address the displacement of poor people, the abuse of the moderate income neighborhoods and the dumping of its seniors. It’s become fashionable for the condominium and row house revitalization gay community to over power and block out voices in the inner city pocket neighborhoods of the district. Yes, no doubt the early pioneering white and black gay male and lesbian communities projected their interests on to and innocent and unsuspecting black community. But during this twenty to thirty year transitions directly after the riots, this community has trumped and integrated their vision of what the District should be and is becoming. Along with the greater Washington Board of Trade, the Council of Governments, the Federal Government, the three major suburbs that experienced major growth and traffic and cost of living and housing issues. These counties are Montgomery, Fairfax, and Prince Georges, with Alexandria and Arlington counties as benefactors and despots, to undermine the creditability of the District and make it difficult to have a strong functioning urban core. I do agree with the current Mayor on this issue entirely. These counties should be working with the District on job growth and regional transportation issues. Not just crime related and criminal border crossings. It will be a sad day once the full revitalization and commercial efforts capture the city and price out the firemen, the policemen and teachers and government workers grades two to ten. The metro bus drivers and the nursing aids and food service workers and restaurant employees. Once in the district, African-Americans used to drive cabs, own carry-out shops, work in the local Giants and Safeway. African-Americans in the District still rely on the phantom three, liquor stores, funeral parlors and churches. But those are becoming dinosaurs with histories. Liquor stores should be history, with all the damage and cancer associated with them, their toxic. Funeral parlors are the service providers that we can do with less fan fare, they should be regulated and held accountable, and most are corporate now anyway. Ah, the churches, they have begun to move out of the District, to where the majority of their congregation has mustered to, suburban Maryland. The last hurrah is the future of the Latino population. The Latino population has arranged itself in the nearby close-in suburbs, causing havoc with gang strife and gunplay. But they also have nested in the District, settling into factions, with the main branch being the El Salvadorians. The question is how long will this community be of the body of the District and when will the Salvadorian community receive their dues. The future will result in battles between the surging El Salvadorians, the childless double income folks, the valiant gay community and the weaning black community, who in thirty years time will be based primarily in wards, seven and eight. And wards eight and seven will be struggling to maintain their historic identifies. Yes face the music, the future looks bleak. Unless we expedite change and political will and understand what is of value to the black community. We must be willing to understand ourselves better and resolves are differences. It’s now or never.