TEXAS’ Widest Circulated and Read Newspaper with a Black Perspective

As Black America’s watcher on the wall and uncompromised editorial voice, African American News & Issues must persistently analyze news and issues, from a common sense Black perspective, in search of issues germane to our people’s survival. This arduous task becomes even more perplexing because far too many of Black America’s miseducated intelligentsia (wont to regurgitate the mainstream media’s news and data as gospel), fail to grasp the concept of being a nation within a nation. Unfortunately, descendents of slaves--indigenous to the Black nation--are in a situation that was aptly described in the mystical Lebanese poet/writer Kahlil Gibran’s great classic, The Prophet, when he expounded on crime and punishment.

One could easily believe that he was talking about the United State’s historical racial problems when he wrote, “You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked; For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.” If that’s too deep, try the old adage,  “We’re all in this together.” In addition, Black America’s spiritual sense of right and wrong is the only conscience that this sin sick nation has ever had. As difficult as that is for history illiterate citizens to believe, outspoken Black men and women like Fredrick Douglas, Ida B. Wells, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were the same as those biblical prophets that always warned God’s “chosen people” to repent when they drifted too far from righteousness.

Sodom and Gomorrah notwithstanding, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that bipartisan “dirty tricks, political games are dragging our nation into the same bottomless pit that the Roman Empire and other mighty kingdoms fell into when their absolute power corrupted evil in high places absolutely. Denial aside, any political astute citizen can foretell where the nation is heading when they read the following article:  “The indictment of top vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby by a federal grand jury struck a serious blow to President Bush's administration and promises more damaging fallout as the case proceeds, experts said Friday. The indictment was the latest in a pileup of difficulties that have thrown Bush off-stride and portend a bleak winding down of his second term.

“Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury.  'This hurts the president somewhere between severely and disastrously,’ said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. ‘The general impression now is that there is corruption, corruption in the White House. For Bush, Libby's indictment ended what was possibly the worst week of the worst year of his presidency.” Conversely, today’s government corruption is nothing new, insofar as the great American journalist M. L. Mencken wrote, “Government is actually the worse failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent,” in 1920 America. And that’s exactly what time it is in 2005 America.

If you’re a Black democrat who’s thinking, “Good, maybe we’ll be able to get those racist Republicans out of the White House now,” you’re part of the problem. We say this because it’s long past time for Black voters to stop supporting bad political parties and start supporting good politicians. In the past, it has always been Black voters that rose to the occasion to save the nation from itself. Need we suggest that you search the Internet for, “African Americans role in US politics,” or do you already know your least chronicled Black History? Then again, if you really want to know how Black power changes things when we vote, you only have to go back to 1991 when avowed racist and former Klan leader David Duke ran for US Senate in Louisiana.

The NAACP launched a voter registration campaign that yielded a 76 percent turnout of Black voters to defeat Duke. Can you even begin to imagine what could happen if a 76 percent turnout of Black voters showed up at the polls nationwide in 2006? Even better, imagine what would happen if we used our common sense and chose our candidates wisely like the “old school” Black voters did. We, indeed, could save America.