TEXAS’ Widest Circulated and Read Newspaper with a Black Perspective

Woebeit folks are usually shocked when a 10-year old boy blows away his father, or a five year old wastes his two-year old sister, but one has to be in denial to not realize that random, mindless mayhem has been a normal course of action for humankind every since Cain picked up a rock and knocked Abel’s brains out. In addition, anthropologist and other social scientists wont to study maladaptive human behavior have known for a very long time that aggression and violence is hotwired into Homo sapiens. Created in God’s imagine notwithstanding, humans have a propensity to indulge in unconscionable and/or evil acts. What up with that? That’s a good question. And I’m glad you asked. Even so, I’m as clueless as Sigmund Freud was when he linked the evil that lurks in the hearts of humankind to an unrequited lust for sex. Yeah, I hear those “God is good…All the time” brothers and sisters mindlessly reciting that cliché too. Then again, unless I’m misinterpreting the good book, the great I AM is the creator, thus, the buck stops at his throne when his creation goes off on each other. The Devil made me do it aside, you can queue up The Twilight Zone theme all you want to, but this time I haven’t drifted into The Outer Limits of religious history. Verily, verily I say unto you... it is written: “I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me…I form the light, and create the darkness: I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:5-7, 22). Okay, if that’s too deep for you bible thumpers, let’s revisit my youth when those movies about men playing god were popular. Remember the chiller, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? But, mayhap, that’s not a good example, because the Scottish writer, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) simply dealt with suppressed evil in his book that became a movie in 1931 America. I missed the one that Fredric March starred in, but I was in the front row (at the Lyons Theatre in 1941 Houston, Texas’ Fifth Ward), when Spencer Tracy played the good doctor. As I recall, albeit most of us failed to grasp the concept of man’s darkside, we didn’t consider it a scary movie. Hey, our drunk fathers raised more hell than Mr. Hyde every Friday night. Truth is, we liked the “tripping” Mr. Hyde better than the perplexed doctor. Not so with that monster Frankenstein.
Hey, the very thought of using spare parts from dead folks to make a man was kinda far out. Even for our young, malleable minds. Furthermore, I never figured out why everybody wanted to kill the monster, rather than Dr. Frankenstein who created him. Then again, history has a way of repeating itself, because that’s exactly what time it is in 2005 America. I don’t know what moved the sophisticated, very cultured 16th century English writer, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly (1797-1851), to write the gruesome novel, that was first turned into a movie by Thomas Edison in 1910. However, sisters dealing with dope headed children could write a book that would make Shelly’ Frankenstein novel an Aesop Fable. Hello crack monsters!
Lost generation aside, as I’ve reiterated before, fruit don’t make trees and kids don’t educate themselves. I’m talking society’s shameless predilection to blame the victim here. Shazam! You might as well pray with be brothers and sisters, because I’m going to tell it like it is, because it’s like it is, whether I tell it our not. Hence you can blame all of the outside influences in this sin sick world for your corrupt, bad ass urchins, but I tend to agree with the Lebanese poet, Kahlil Gibran who wrote in The Prophet, “And as a single leaf turns yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.” If that’s over your head, mayhap I should harken back to the ‘hood and recall what my pal Ester King once said.”
“Sisters don’t realize that they create monsters when they leave kids at home alone and go party. If a babies wake up and starts crying (but nobody is there) they shut down after it becomes apparent that nobody cares about them.” King, an old freedom fighter pontificated while visiting me when I was Counselor of Trouble Youth at Rev. Ray Martin’s PABA. “Man, those babies usually grow up to be mean, cold blooded kids, because they’ve learn not to care about nothing, or nobody.” In essence, society’s problem isn’t pubeliscent monsters. The problem is a none caring society that created those monsters. I wonder if anybody knows where I’m coming from?