LESSONS IN TRAGEDY AND VICTORY
Life is not a bowl of cherries. And, even if it were, all cherries have pits, to avoid, to spit out!
Pressure shapes and molds people as it does the earth's mantle. With heat and friction and time and water, treasures are wrought. Though wrought, they still must be retrieved, dug up and fashioned into usefulness. If not, treasures are just dirt, dross.
These examples apply to black boys and girls living in America, particularly--although they may be as applicable more generally.
My focus is local. So is our future.
Each of us must teach our 16-year old and younger black boys and girls about the just-released black man, Prince Johnson, who spent 44 years in jail, after having been tried as an adult and convicted of murder at age 16, in Florida. At 16, he was once just like them, when in jail!
This man did not pull the trigger of the gun that killed the wife of an ice cream vendor during a robbery. All agree on that.
But, that fact did not stop him for going to jail. His fingerprints were later found on the stolen cash box. His fingerprints were in the system already for possession of a weapon in another incident. So, they convicted him by reason of his circumstances and by reason of his presumed associations--his friends or his friends of friends !
There is a lesson there for our youth as well and their friends. Any Negro will do when lynching parties were formed in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Guilt or innocence did not matter to the mob; nor did facts, family or alibis--only race!
Anything that may persuade them to do that which is right, and to dissuade them from the company of undesirables, must be done!
Thereby, they might learn that there are traps in American law lain just for them, specifically for them, sometimes only for them!
There are lessons and morals even in tragedy, as there are in victory, for them, youth at/under 16, indeed, for us all of any age
http://kulturekritic.com/2015/05/news/man-jailed-as-teenager-for-murder-he-did-not-commit-released-after-44-years/
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
LESSONS IN TRAGEDY AND VICTORY
LESSONS IN TRAGEDY AND VICTORY
Life is not a bowl of cherries. And, even if it were, all cherries have pits, to avoid, to spit out!
Pressure shapes and molds people as it does the earth's mantle. With heat and friction and time and water, treasures are wrought. Though wrought, they still must be retrieved, dug up and fashioned into usefulness. If not, treasures are just dirt, dross.
These examples apply to black boys and girls living in America, particularly--although they may be as applicable more generally.
My focus is local. So is our future.
Each of us must teach our 16-year old and younger black boys and girls about the just-released black man, Prince Johnson, who spent 44 years in jail, after having been tried as an adult and convicted of murder at age 16, in Florida. At 16, he was once just like them, when in jail!
This man did not pull the trigger of the gun that killed the wife of an ice cream vendor during a robbery. All agree on that.
But, that fact did not stop him for going to jail. His fingerprints were later found on the stolen cash box. His fingerprints were in the system already for possession of a weapon in another incident. So, they convicted him by reason of his circumstances and by reason of his presumed associations--his friends or his friends of friends !
There is a lesson there for our youth as well and their friends. Any Negro will do when lynching parties were formed in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Guilt or innocence did not matter to the mob; nor did facts, family or alibis--only race!
Anything that may persuade them to do that which is right, and to dissuade them from the company of undesirables, must be done!
Thereby, they might learn that there are traps in American law lain just for them, specifically for them, sometimes only for them!
There are lessons and morals even in tragedy, as there are in victory, for them, youth at/under 16, indeed, for us all of any age
http://kulturekritic.com/2015/05/news/man-jailed-as-teenager-for-murder-he-did-not-commit-released-after-44-years/
