Hope Mongers, Take A Seat.

Hello Liberator Readers,

I received the following anonymous email response to the Sean Bell shooting verdict, which I think we can all agree is shullbit, but not surprising:

What I'm tired of is people reacting to tragedy with false hope... with lazily organized boycotts and protests, etc...Quit being so reactionary people. Make a plan for 50 years and execute that slowly and steadily. If every time a black man gets killed we reinvent the wheel we ain't going no where for a long ass time. Stop pushing hope like it's crack... We need plans... history... insight... identity... not another protest and corny ass boycott that's organized via email or yahoo groups.

Bitch ass bitches.

Well, that letter is quite a doozy. And according to Dudley Did Right/Diddly Squat/Whatever Sean Combs Is Calling Himself These Days, bitchassness is totally out of style, so I agree that the people who think doing the same ineffective things over and over again is going to solve the rampant police brutality in this country, need to do this, immediately.

Now look, I'm not saying this because I'm apathetic and think that we should just sit on our hands in the wake of this verdict. I already posted here about how hurt I was at the outcome of this tragedy. And I was not hurt because the verdict was shocking. I was hurt because, well, I was not shocked. Everyone played their roles to the T and at the end of the day, we have a system where a man can immediately go to jail for torturing animals, but somehow police officers are almost always justified in killing, beating, or maiming unarmed human beings.

Not to say Michael Vick wasn't dead wrong. Torturing animals says a great deal about someone's character, or lack thereof but come on. If we can have months of moral outrage over that unfortunate incident, surely more people can muster up the energy to tell the police you cannot come into our communities and kill a whole generation of fathers, brothers, uncles, nephews, husbands, and cousins simply because you feel like it.

Which leads me to why hope mongers (a.ka. hype mongers or BS Artists) need to sit the eff down and stay down. We're in dire straits, people. We're at the tipping point. I strongly believe 2008 can either be the year we say enough is enough and, like anonymous reader said, make a plan and execute it slowly or it can be the year all hell breaks loose. Kind of like 1968.

The choice is yours, readers. We can either keep doing the same ish that hasn't worked in years---boycotts, rallies, candlelight vigils, everything else that looks sexy on a TV screen and can be reduced to a cause on Facebook or a 30-second sound bite on someone's iPhone OR we can strengthen our communities. Get to know one another. Start caring about each other again. Make the police scared of us, instead of the other way around. How do we do that? I'll give some suggestions:

1) Start a book club. And don't feel like it has to be some humbug nerd session. Definitely read the classics, like DuBois and Ellison and hooks and Camus and Hemingway but don't think you can't throw in a little Zane every now and then. (But for the love of God, no Omar Tyree or Eric Jerome Dickey or Terry McMillan or Street Lit. Unless it's Iceberg Slim, so you know how not to live your life.)

2) Start a movie night with your friends. Again, don't feel like it has to be all arthouse, all the time. Get a Netflix subscription (or support a bootlegger, because if Hollywood still doesn't want to tell the stories of people who aren't Patrick Dempsey, Katherine Heigl, or Scarlett Johansson, then eff 'em and stop giving them your money), invite people over to your house and have fun! We can learn from art, no matter what form it takes.

3) Volunteer. Don't feel like the only time of year to volunteer is the holiday season. You can do something as simple as donate supplies to a local public school, which my mom has been doing for the grade school she went to back in the day. Just wait for all the back to school sales to start in September, and you could help ensure at least one class will have all of its students prepared and ready to go. It always starts with something small, folks. Don't try to take everything on all at once, even if it looks good as a photo op.

4) Donate unused, unread books, or maybe just books you're not interested in anymore. Lately, I've been mailing books because I'm weird and still like to send people things via USPS but you can always go to your local library or nearest school and brighten another bookworm's day.

5) Reach out to family members and friends. I know this is tough, because anyone who doesn't have some kind of family drama is either lying or...well, they're just lying. But we really need to build family networks again. John Donne said "no man is an island" and lately, I've been taking that to heart. Be the bigger person, reach out to family members and old friends, because when we feel like we're alone and no one has our backs, that's when the madness starts.

That's all I have for now, but feel free to leave comments and suggestions for real community building. Because if we want to survive, we need to do the work where it might take decades to see results; work that can't be boiled down to a pithy one-liner. We need to be more like Gus and less like Templeton. And if you get that reference, you're already 50 percent there.

And remember, if you have any personal grievances, or feel something or someone else needs to take a seat, send it to nomorefoolishness (at) liberatormagazine (dot) com. XoXo!