The Trayvon Martin Affect

      Trayvon Martin                                     George Zimmerman

Many parents are under the misguided notion that it is their job to protect their children. This might be true for the days before they can walk but after that, the parent role goes from protector to teacher/guide. It is your job as a teacher/guide to prepare your child for life, not the Disney version you have envisioned for them in your mind, but the world they will enter into by themselves one day.  Everything that you know you need to teach them, not from a place of fear based on your own hang ups or by repeating what your parents told you, but from a place of awareness so your kids can learn through the truth of your experiences, along with their own observations and experience which will help them develop their own tools for life.

The Missing Link

Defiant Ones, illustrated by Gustav Rehberger

People don't like to talk about race.  It makes people uncomfortable, angry, defensive.  In the age of the überbrand, and thoughts spelled out in 140 characters or less, race relations is just not sexy, and attempts to repackage it with hyperbole like "the race card" and "reverse discrimination" have enter the lexicon with a resounding thud.  Attempts to whitewash the past by trying to remove what was done from history has brought an unintended lens back to the history and it's explicit ugliness.  Nobody likes to talk about it because no one knows where to start.  The ones who left this legacy are long gone, but the blood-soaked inheritance keeps on giving in a perpetual round-robin system created for the advantage of their offspring.  On the flip side, the ones who bear the striations are endowed with the baggage of pain past and expected to keep up the dwindling flame of a struggle that has become more imagined than real.   Both sides are blinded by their perceived realities of themselves and each other and are chained together on a mental slave ship, rowing face to face, locked in a stalemate of inferior and superior complexes.   What we don't realize is that we are not looking at the enemy of an opposing side, but in the mirror of our opposing self, a cranial confusion of not knowing that one is not outside of the other, but one is the other.

The KONY 2012 Experiment

Joseph Kony

A couple of days ago, a video showed up in my Facebook news feed entitled KONY 2012.  The video is made by an organization called Invisible Children which, according to their website, "is a movement seeking to end the conflict in Uganda and stop the abduction of children for use as child soldiers."   The organization's goal in making this video is to make Joseph Kony, the leader of a rebellion resistance in Uganda and the Congo in Africa, famous. It is said that Joseph uses children as soldiers to help in the rebellion.  Now the only thing I know about this situation is from US and European sources the very system that Kony is fighting so, right away I must question the information.  Based on history, I don't believe anything coming from the US and Europe when it comes to Africa.  The western forces like to paint anyone in Africa with a broad stroke only to find out that that Europe and America have manipulated the situation for their own financial gain. So in terms of the Joseph Kony story, I DON'T KNOW.  But for the purposes of this post I do know the KONY 2012 video is manipulative.