Yesterday evening, during our R3 study group, among other things, we discussed and searched for the origin of the apparent disdain among "our" people for books, reading, and, indeed, learning or studying as prevailing values.
We attributed this, in part, to our transition to and acquisition of materialist values at every level of "our" society. We posited that knowledge and wisdom were essentially spiritual values, which have fallen into unspoken disfavor.
As we resolved to investigate the causes of this cataclysmic shift, and when, where and how it first began to manifest among us, we sensed, rightly I believe, that the answer to this question may also supply a solution to its harmful effects.
Such effects/affects include the usual litany of woes paraded before us in sociological studies, epidemiological forecasts, police blotters, and daily media reports. The true story, however, we came to recognize, during our discussion, is that similar forces and conditions produce different outcomes among neighbors, relatives, even siblings. As an instance of this, we looked at how certain uneducated parents emphasized the value of the acquisition of knowledge in the upbringing of their children, and how their children prospered in accordance with this emphasis. We also looked at its predictable parallel: Where education was not a value, and how this led to prison, deprivation, early death, exceptions notwithstanding. The marvel is that we are yet alive and see each other's faces, http://www.lyricstime.com/hymn-and-are-we-yet-alive-lyrics.html given our historic oppression. It did not kill us, so it made us stronger, whether we realize this or not. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Where_does_the_saying_'What_doesn't_kill_you_makes_you_stronger'_come_from
Frankly, we don't know our own strength.
"Exceptions" are the key. The exceptions are the "whosoever's" mentioned in the Bible. Because everything and everyone that God made was and is unique, and because God is no respecter of persons, I propose that we cast our net to "whosoever," rather than simply to "us." Who really is "us," anyway? Is not limiting our net to us limiting us?
"Our" people are so heavily invested in and bonded to others, especially "our" former oppressors, that separating "us" from "them" will be like separating "the wet from water, or the dry from sand," to quote Smokey Robinson. Better to let the "wheat and the tares" grow up together "until the harvest" when angels can distinguish them. Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.
Our spiritual reach (knowledge and wisdom acquired from, and through, reading, writing and arithmetic) should spread to, and enrich, all in its wake, "whosoever" they may be. That is the very definition of "choosing the better part." Luke 10:42.
Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
