…A few Quick Rants…

Living in Vegas now, I see the Sharron Angle/Harry Reid ads a lot. I don’t get how one rich person can constantly point the finger at the other rich person for being rich! That woman makes me itch in a place I can’t scratch!

 

And, why do we vote for millionaires who spend multiplied millions to get temp jobs that pay only a few thousand?!!? Yet they run on TRUSTWORTHINESS!!!

 

Atheism is the coolest — and only acceptable– worldview. If you think a God made ANYthing, you are written off as the very Neanderthal whose existence you deny!!

The talking heads who seem to care about “certain” human rights — poverty, racism, fair access, political integrity, etc. — laugh openly at practicing Christians who claim to be created by Someone who had THEM in mind! If you dare express a thought with which they disagree, you are labelled The Worst Person in the World.

 

The Tea Party (regardless of origin) is the shelter where all the racists ran when that thieving, lying Negro took America from them.

 

When I watch Glenn Beck, I feel cancerous cells forming inside my body from the bile that bubbles up! How dare we sit idly and let him and his insidious ilk co-opt and corrupt the Civil Rights Movement?!?

 

I want to make a significant mark in the world with my life.I want my work to be widely known.  But when I see “The Situation,” and K-Ci & JoJo Coming Clean, and Stupid Fish-Lipped Laid-up Housewives and Gold-diggers of Atlanta or the NBA or Beverly Hills, or

THIS DUDE:

I almost  want to quit the whole shebang! Being famous all of a sudden isn’t indicative of hard work and talent… (White folks reading this… This is not US!!!) Who left the Famous door open?!!?

 

What is comely about a world that claims freedom of speech and thought, but only if you speak and think what I tell you to? Gay people — whom I neither fear nor hate — were once considered sinners and outcasts. Just as others, they once knew their behavior to be wrong. Now that society has, in its inevitable way, relaxed the restrictions and shorn the shame associated with homosexuality, they have banded and forced those of us who disagree with them into the same closets they once occupied. It’s not okay to simply disagree with you, militant gay person, but it is perfectly fine for you to outright hate, and ridicule, and belittle, and oppress me??? Don’t you see the hypocrisy? The irony?

So, we are all forced –at job-point — to become enslaved to lies by nodding our heads in assent! The word, “HATE” is a hammer that makes us all flinch in terror. It’s like McCarthyism, or old Salem, or 1933 Berlin…

 

Sarah Palin. Really?!? Come on!! (Refer to my earlier statement on the inertness of famousness…)

 

I hate that I can laugh so hard at Bill Maher — he’s brilliant — yet become so frustrated at his unchallenged assaults on my Faith.

 

NBA Commissioner David Stern is a serious boil on my unmentionables!! Nobody else SEES this?!!? Classic Napoleon Syndrome!

 

What is up with all these guys cheating around and filming, texting, or voice-mailing the evidence? How can people smart and talented enough to become wealthy be so durn STUPID???

Preachers have enough material to work with these days, with poor and struggling people bursting through the cracks in the walls of this diseased world, without having time to do the sickening things they do in the name of “Thus sayeth the LORD.”

And the people who run to their defense are guilty of aiding and abetting! Pimps would have to get real jobs if the whores got hip to the game!!

 

As always, conservatives miss the mark woefully on love of fellow man, and liberals are wrong on just about everything else. We need rules. Or else, we’re just stray dogs roaming the streets biting people, raiding garbage, and spawning. That’s why the fact that God MADE us and made us with conscience and will matters! But we also need to realize the need for brotherhood and unity. Look at it like this… The stern God of the Old Testament, and the compassionate God of the New are one and the same Person. The unwavering Judge in the O.T. showed a lot of love, and Jesus, while sensitive and tangible, didn’t pull punches. Same God.

So, how can I, living in this paradox of a nation, be all one thing or completely the other??? Much more could be said… and has been, but is not worth recounting.

 

 

 

In the words of the great prophet, Rodney King…

Sweet Jesus y’all, can’t we all just get along this eeenin’?!?

Whether you fall on the conservative side of the issue or the liberal, can we all agree to be at least HUMAN in expressing displeasure? Does it take spitting on people, calling people racist names, and carrying loaded guns and signs about watering trees with blood?

And when somebody gets killed, it’ll be, as we used to say, a lot folk throwing rocks and hiding their doggone hands!

There are arguments to be made on both sides of the health care issue. I for one don’t want to be forced to buy something if I can’t afford it. Car insurance is bad enough, but I understand that. But I can’t be entirely angry about people unable to be made healthy now getting a chance to walk and breathe without pain.

I have been in the position of needing to go to a doctor and not being able. As a Christian, I cannot just be all up in arms about it. And I have heard too many times that that is the Church’s job, not the government. Miss me with that!!! The Church can do a lot about a lot and still sits idly in many ways! That is just a passing of the buck.

The government had to make Americans let slaves go, and a hundred years later, let them be FREE! While many Christians fought those fights, the majority — as today –  elected to show shameful selfishness instead: “I worked hard and got what I needed! Let them do the same!” (Regardless of the innate systematic inequities.)

Now, it appears that the REAL truth is blooming like turnips. Peoples’ lives are being threatened, and epithets are being hurled in Birminghamian waves. And what worse thing can you do than to spit on a man?!!? Spit on ME and I won’t be able to take Communion! One reason will be because of the pending charges! And all this from the “Party of God.”

I haven’t read the thousands of pages in the bill, and neither have you. We listen to Rush (is he gone yet?), Beck, Olbermann, Maddow, Boehner, and Clyburn and we believe the way we are inclined to believe, and we run out and pass it along.

Forgive me if I take it a LITTLE personal when I see the black first lady compared to a chimp, and when I see the first black President called all manner of animal and devil spawn. All this talk of “Taking America back…” from whom? From WHOM?!? Who took it? You mean black folk? Surely not! I know that Evangelical, Christian, God-fearin’ folk would not resort to such thinly veiled rhetoric…

But here we are. And believe me, I live right in the middle of a nest of white American conservatism! Across the street from me lives a (purportedly traumatized) Vietnam vet who claims Christ.

When it looked like Obama was going to get elected, he came to me in a hushed voice and asked if I had enough ammo, guns and fresh water, because an economic collapse and anarchy were in his words, “a mathematical certainty” based on what he had been reading and hearing on conservative talk radio. He has hundreds of gallons of water stored in his back yard. He has been driving around town for a little over a year with a beg tin sign hanging from his back bumper all about Obama and how he is going to bring about Armageddon or something. And he put four huge hooks in his roof and put a sign up there bigger than a taxi cab ad, saying, ”OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST” Now, HE is the one I’m watching! Not the liberals! I would not be surprised to see him coming out his front door with a duffel bag full of mayhem. And I got a wife and three babies to protect, so…

His next door neighbor is not much different. He’s a perpetually angry little fella with a hair-trigger temper! I see it all up and down my street.

What about God? Isn’t He our portion? Our strength and refuge?

How can those so supposedly at odds with the government so fearful at the “loss” of it? Who scares me more, my own NEIGHBORS, or a bunch of folk who want to send the poor and the sick to a DOCTOR?!!?

And don’t give me that “Isolated Incident” junk! EVERY incident is isolated unless you back up to the doggone moon to get some freekin context!! (I laughed when I wrote that…)

Words are more than just words. To educate you Word of Faithers out there who misuse the quote, THIS is what was meant when God said that “the power of life and DEATH are in the tongue”!

I yield the balance of my time…

‘Res’dent Obama

I just thought this was funny, so I put it on YouTube so I could put it on the blog. This is Max showing me he knows who the new president is. (McCain was, “BoCain”) Kathy and I laughed and laughed!

The last word is not necessarily a commentary on his views, he is just in perpetual potty training mode.

Got a Brand New Funky PRESIDENT!*

Here we are. The world has not cracked in two. The stars have not refused to shine. Life is as it was. But…

NOW, as I shake off a headache from so much unexpected, hard crying, I feel that after two hundred and thirty two years the final missing piece has been found and placed into this American puzzle.

The long cracked foundation has been sealed. A black face is the face of America!

I had never felt fully part of the American family until now. I had always looked at history from the perspective of a mistreated child. I had always wondered how the words of that founding father, Patrick Henry:

         [ "It is in vain, sir, to extentuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace--but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" ]

could be so hypocritically immortalized in light of the fact that these very men themselves owned human beings! I could never fully reconcile the brutal irony.

Tonight, though, it has been made manifest that no more American doors are locked to me and mine. As I held my son as he held me and asked what was wrong, I told him that I was happy. Happy that now for him greatness not only included intellectual achievement or financial success, but also the highest office in the most powerful nation on the earth.

I was happy that now his maternal great-grandmother, who fought the Klan for the right to vote, and who hid freedom riders in her home on “Number 8″ in Jim Crow Mississippi, had not fought in vain. I was happy that his paternal great-grandfather, who genuflected and called eight year-old white boys, “sir,” and lived a life of menial servitude while raising seventeen kids to honorable adulthood, had finally won.

I was happy to know that the last time black people collectively cried this hard was when, forty years ago, a bullet burst open the face of the face of the search for equality, and that now his sowing bore African fruit.

African! An African name! After so many African names went unremembered and changed. An African man who came to America not in bondage to anything but hope. The way it should have been. The way it is. An African man willingly cleaved in a Godly manner to the hand of a white American woman and produced a descendant not steeped in the brew of oppression, and destined to caulk that fundamental crack. 

I did not know this would mean so much to me.

I care about the plight of the unborn, and about the tenuous religious freedoms we have. So, how can I be happy knowing that innocent babies will continue to die?

I can do so the same way I did it the last eight years when “immorality” and infanticide increased in the last eight years. I can do so by praying to God that He work through His body, the Church, to effect change in this culture a heart at a time.

Obama’s election does not for me signal the end of all hardship. His election does not mean that all problems will be Divinely washed away.

What it DOES is symbolize the fact that there is hope that in this country, with its keloid scars and twisted sinews, people of ALL races — primarily black and white — can grow past ingrained adversity and see each other as the same. But different!

We have loved and desired to be loved in return. We love those who love us. And those who don’t. We embrace the white guy who plays basketball like we do, or who dances like we do, or sings like we do, or swaggers like we do. All we wanted was to make it known that we are worthy of humanity, and the fact that so many NON-black people had to come together and lift this symbolic individual to the highest human height, means that we are getting it!

I remember when, in 1988, Doug Williams lead the Washington Redskins to the Superbowl championship.  was so proud to be black that day. His win meant that we could do it, whatever IT was. There have been a number of those moments, where door after door is knocked down, and this is the last one.

Some racists have said things like, “I’m scared if Obama wins, the BLACK gone take over!” I submit that this sentiment comes from those who know that they have not done right with the power they have had and are projecting their own unGodliness onto us.

Obama’s election does not mean that white folks have to stay out of the fast lanes on the highway, and give up their floor seats and fifty-yard-line spots in sporting events. We will not raid your country clubs with booming music, spinning rims, gold teeth, and chitlin’s. We have just been allowed an invitation to the American house party, and are glad to not have to any longer stare through the window.

So, rather than be defined by the thug image, the gang lifestyle, we have President Obama — cool, dignified, brilliant, clean-cut, erudite, straight, true to who he is, and in love with one dark-skinned, kinky-headed woman, and living in the same house with his kids.

50 Cent, you don’t define me! You never did, but I shake you off! P.Diddy, Pacman, T.O., O.J., Li’l Wayne and the whole Cash Money crew, Flava -Lord hammercy!- Flav! Snoop Dogg, American Gangster, drug dealer, dropout, deadbeat baby-daddy, you are not who I am. You never were, but you never will be.

Get off the stage! Put the mike down! Pick up a book!

My son will not emulate YOU. My daughter will not desire you!

‘Cause we got a brand new, funky, President!!* Gimme Five, America! On the Black hand side!

 

*James Brown

Caught Between Iraq and a Hard Place…

Just as I began to berate the Republicans for “enabling” racism, the word came that noted militant, arrogant atheist, Christopher Hitchens has endorsed Obama, ridiculing Palin for her Christianity!

I’ve always said that I can’t fully embrace the GOP because they give “aid and comfort” to racists. And Hitchens’ endorsement reminds me that the Democrats also provide God-haters a soft spot to land.

I have many, many problems with Palin, but her professed faith is not one.

…On the Other Hand…

“Sarah Palin doesn’t reflect the views of most women! She is not in favor of abortions even in the case of rape or incest!” (Most Democrats on many cable news shows)

I ask, “How is this a bad thing?” These women act as though it is traitorous to womanhood to not believe in killing a baby! Let me ax you this: “If YOU  were in the womb as a result of a rape or incestuous act, would YOU want someone to stab you in the back of your skull and suck your brains out?  Or would you want to live?” (Hospitals are so full, doctors are so rich, because people — fetuses, too — want to LIVE! That is the default position.)

Wouldn’t YOU, as the viable fetus, want the CHOICE(!) to decide for yourself?”
Pregnancy may be about the woman, but abortion is about the baby. It is about the BABY.

I know it may look as though I’m contradicting myself, but I’m not. I’m with Palin on this one. If we were picking a President based on the issue of abortion solely, I would surely side with her.

Democrats don’t endear me with this kind of argument. Neither do they when they say, as they so often do, that, “She has some awfully extreme views, like Creationism…”

Whoaaa! Hold it! It is far more plausible — and provable — that somebody created something, than to say that something created itSELF! 

They kill me acting as though their extreme, radical views on life and God are shared by everyone — at least everyone rational.

Once again, if we were choosing Presidents based on how the world was made, I would be a Republican. But to choose that party would be like trying to eat ice cream after it had been dropped in a sandbox!

I’ll Just Stay on the Couch.

My pop called me yesterday and told me that NBC (msnbc) had demoted Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann for, I guess, inordinately biased commentary during coverage of the Republican National Convention. They did this at the urging of the GOP. Wow.

So, Republican officials are so bothered by partisan coverage that they go to the trouble to (and have the power to) have the two top msnbc anchors publically embarrassed in this fashion?

I don’t deny that they are, in many cases over there, in the tank for the Democrats — and Obama in particular. The aforementioned, as well as Rachel Maddow, David Gregory, and many of the guest pundits, don’t hide their leanings.

But my point is this:

FOX News does the same thing! Hannity, O’Reilly, Brit Hume, FOX and Friends, and practically all their guests don’t just lean TO  the right, they lean ON it. Heavily. In fact, Hannity has basically said that it was his job to make sure McCain gets elected. In order to get a real picture of how the race is really going, you have to do your own homework and look at all of it.

I have a point of view. YOU have one, too. Being on teevee doesn’t excuse one from being human, it seems.

For me to join a party — either one – means that I have to swallow a lot of stuff I wouldn’t eat at gunpoint. To call myself a Democrat, I would have to be cool with folk like Maddow and Maher ridiculing me for my hard and fast stances on Creationism, God, gay marriage, and abortion. I would have to deny the very existence of “sin” and play ball on a team populated by atheists, anarchists, feminists, and folk who have no moral compass whatsoever.

To call myself a Republican, I would have to be at ease riding on a bandwagon alongside people like this. And with people who live on my very own street who drive by me while I work in my own yard and stare at me as though I am made of the stuff I am spreading on the grass! To call myself a Republican, I would have to align myself with many people who would claim to serve God while harboring hatred in their hearts for anyone of a culture or ethnicity different than theirs. I would, generally speaking, have to be like the Jesse Lee Petersons, Ken Hamblins, and Larry Elders of the world and act as though racism is either non-existent, or entirely black folks’ fault. I would have to look the other way when they do things to people that I find heartless and un-Jesuslike.

 Yesterday’s move crystallizes the problem I have with those in power on the Right. They spent months decrying Obama’s lack of experience, and in a purely — transparently — political move, selected a very nice lady with five children and conservative views who had presidential qualifications slightly better than my high school guidance counselor! And just as they tried to make me think that stuff running down my back was rain (Iraq being part of the search for 9/11 justice), they tried — with astonishing, dismaying success — to tell us that Mrs. Palin was the absolute best choice to very possibly be President. I like her. I really do. But I like my mama, too, and she ain’t qualified to run this country!

The thing is, when black folk down the line have been up for high-profile positions, the first and last thing brought into question was their qualification. We have had to jump through a million hoops (even to the point of having to take tests in order to vote!), to become coaches, general managers, business owners, college students, and doctors.

You can say whatever you want about whether Obama has the right political positions as far as taxes, abortion, homeland security, or health care, but you can’t argue (convincingly) that the man isn’t qualified through his education and public service history to be President.

No one was talking about “Executive Experience” until Palin got selected.  Republicans say it so much that they forget that McCain himself  has none. By that reasoning, Palin should be running for the head job!

Another thing: I am 6′ 3″ tall, and over 240 lbs. All my adult life, I have had to play the role of “Mr. Nice Guy” in order to put white folks at ease. Black folk are generally not intimidated by size. When I go into a store, or into a business situation, unless I am in a hostile environment, I make an effort, mostly unconsciously, to not be mean-looking. I don’t want to perpetuate any stereotypes.

Obama has had to run as well as he has without resorting to the same tactics Hillary and McCain used against him. He has the added burden of being tagged with the “Angry Man” label. Michelle, his wife, has likewise been hit with the “Sassy Black Woman” tag. While both sides use ads that exaggerate the position of the other, there has been that extra little bit of spice in the GOP spots.

And the convention was filled with the kind of divisive rhetoric that makes a lot of people like me not really feel welcome at the party. I know this was just fine with some on the convention floor…

I’m sorry. When I close my eyes and think, “Republican,” (not “conservative”) I see “Sean Hannity” with his “Great Americans” and his leading questions designed only to corner and squash his opponent. I see Karl Rove — who should be in jail — Ollie North — who should be in jail — and that racist Mark Fuhrman — who shou — you know what I mean. How do they always end up as guests on FOX?

The Democrats had their share of ad hominem stuff, too, but as objectively as I tried to be, it seemed that the Republicans shoved the knife in deeper. I want people to deal with the issues, not see who can make the snidest, cleverest remark. Especially when one side cries “foul” and has people on the other side fired for trying to play by the same crooked rules! And they call the Democrat thin-skinned.

The extreme jingoism, masked as patriotism, was unsettling to me. “DRILL, BABY, DRILL!!!!” “USA! USA! USA” “GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!” (and NOplace else) They claimed Obama had a Messiah complex, but it suuure looked like there was some flag-worship/monument-idolatry going on in Minnesota. And what was up with the 9/11 video in the background?  Would a Democrat have been able to use that footage as a badge of honor in that fashion? Rhetorical. Don’t answer.

It was all “win at any cost.”Why else would the party of traditionalists and evangelicals who think that a woman’s place is best in the home raising her kids choose a woman with a whole slew of young-uns and the busiest job in her state? For the first time in history? When the other side had millions of angry, disenfranchised women with nowhere to go? That was a brilliant, slick move. And it is working. I don’t fault you for supporting her. But if Obama had a degree in journalism and mayored a town of five thousand, he wouldn’t have made it past Iowa! Can you say “flip-flop?”  Maybe if he pronounced his name, “O-Bamma” like Alabama…

It is as though there are two separate countries at war with one another to decide who will get to exercise power. It really saddens me.

Yes, Olbermann makes me cringe. But Hannity makes me want to fight!

The point is that to get into bed with either party means compromising certain of my “Essential Issues.”

So, rather than do that, I’ll just stay on the couch.

Furr’n Policy

I could have been dozing, but I thought I heard President Bush say this on the teevee during his taped speech at the RNC:

“And what’s all this about Sarah Palin not havin ‘foreign policy experience?’

“Hello?!? She was guv’ner of Alaska!”

Kathy and I were talking:

As we were watching the RNC on teevee,

“McCain’s mom sure looks good to be as old as they say she is,” I said, when they put the camera on her.

“Yeah,” Kathy responded.

“They call HIM old, but if HE  was on the Mayflower, SHE  was on the Ark!”

“Naw,” Kathy replied, “She was back there wit Eve!”

“Shoooot!” I said, “She IS Eve! That’s why his name is McCAIN!”

 

 

Sorry, y’all… Christians can laugh, too, right?

Oh, yeah… and Palin looks like Tina Fey.