Another thought, society presses to make us individuals, independent in thought and action. We balance that push with a natural inclination toward the collective. We have had our history burned and were retaught history as a warped paraphrase of unrelated events. Then we are taught trust, faith and to hope with no bases in reality. In the end our collective realm was trashed and our individual person mugged to the max.
We spend the rest of our lives with snippets of truth. As strong individuals we often display what we know, exalting that part as the whole, the fire of rhetoric, the rhythmic bantering, the jive of justice. Of course our discourse is timely but as momentary as fads, fantasy and trends, WHY? Because new info interrupts our mini siege on the world, causes us to reconsider our display until further notice. One of the big problems of Black folk is having to reconstruct our past so that we know how to act today. The other problem is projecting into the future with what we know or think we know now.
If you step back far enough, we are who we are, in our time, the result of all before us. In that sense we don't need to do anything except survive. But there is, at least in me, a pain in the bones, wanting to know what other Blacks are thinking, feeling, how they are dealing, what pieces of the puzzle they realize and do they know that it is just a piece. What happens when the pieces come together from different persons, schools of thought and the misalignments, extraneous thoughts and events are exposed, shaken off? What happens when we the strong individuals connect in a natural collective realm? What happens when we realize our powers are not defined or depended on the system that domesticated us? What happens when we step back and look at us as a collective, regardless of the physical and mental distance constructed between us? Can we come out of our domestication, probably not completely. We might dare to risk a thought life behind the scenes while holding a compliant public face. Soon that too becomes a way of life. Hypocrites are the saints of survival. Don't we live that way? I do!
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