DC Talks

No one should be stunned in the latest turn of event with youth turning anger, rage and violence into a pastime.
I am not.
This is a society that is beginning to reap what it has sown. The kind of animal behavior being acted out in “Fight Clubs” in Arlington, Texas, Irving, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Texas and other cities among Black youth (White youth too) is a reflection of the greed, the glut for money, the unsuppressed appetite for video games, violent movies and music and thrills of reality television and living on the edge has heaped “garbage” into the mind of youth by the truckloads.
These fight clubs are being blamed on Brad Pitt’s 1999 movie, “Fight Club”, but I see it as parental neglect combined with the deeper exposure to the “Fight-Violence-Gang-Thug Culture” in video games like “Fight Club” named after the movie, that trains and develops the mind of a youth to be selfish, to beat your opponent at any cost and destroy anything, anybody and everything that gets in the way. Parents are you aware of the open invitation and the subliminal messages contained in PlayStation 2’s Fight Club and other games like it?
In the introduction to the game it says,“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? In the gritty underground world of Fight Club, the fight isn’t over until someone taps out or is beaten senseless…If you don’t claim your humanity you become just another statistic. If this is your first night at Fight Club you have to fight!”
How brutal is it when you examine the “real” rules of Fight Club? The rules appear to be to land as many blows as possible, fight hard, be ruthless and unforgiving until you know your opponent down, bludgeon him and or knock him out. It doesn’t matter if you maim him for life or even kill him… It is all apart of the “game” culture.
Think about this being planted in young minds and multiply it hundreds of times with thousands of immature, underdeveloped African American youth at a critical time of life when learning, experimentation and exploration are at all time highs. Many of today’s youth are living in a make belief world with a video game psyche that has desensitized them to the real life and issues.
How did we get this way? Just stop for a moment and think about how some poor, middle and upper class Blacks are living in Arlington, Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. It is time to put the blame where it belongs. “Fight Clubs” and other shocking and illicit violent and sexual behavior flowing from the imaginations of youth are a combination of the failures of parents, churches, the government and society.
However, it all starts with parents. Let me be frank and point out that living in a $100,000 to $300,000 home and driving a Lexus, Cadillac, BMW and giving your children the latest of everything is not the right way to raise a child. Even without the affluence, the desire to make youth happy by spending thousands of dollars on tennis shoes, clothes and video games is not exactly the best medicine either. Giving your child PlayStations, X-BOX, I-Pod’s, computers-Internet websites (My Space for example) and cellular phones without supervision have been breeding grounds and exposed youth to information overload… It is irresponsible and simply more than many immature youths can handle and this has proven to be an unmitigated disaster.
While African Americans comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population, 45 percent of all murder victims in 2002 were African American, 91 percent of whom were killed by African Americans. Nationally, homicide is the leading cause of death for Black men and second leading cause of death for Black women ages 15-24, according to government statistics.
Black on Black crime via “Fight Clubs” gang or drug influences are serving the purpose of steering Black youth further away from viable competitive leaders of the future and towards a more subservient slave mentality status created in modern times by the criminal justice complex. Putting children on “automatic pilot” while you parents pursue careers, “riches” and materialistic goals has left many of these youths open.
There are huge vacuums in parental guidance, an absence of critical supervision giving youth more time on their hands to do whatever their heart desire, opens a Pandora’s box that leads to permanent injuries, gang violence and more Black on Black crime. We have in essence allowed our youth to become “jaded” human beings, trained to love and worship violence and mayhem, disrespect rules and laws, and when possible, to thumb noses at authority and live, bathe and gloat about the experiences until reaching some kind of personal “nirvana”.
Being raised on a farm, my grandfather often took time with us to teach us how to grow our own food, how to care for farm animals and the ins and outs of good and bad decision-making. He wanted to make sure that each of us was ready for the tough life world that was ahead of us at the time. He even warned that times and things would become more complex and stressed the importance of not relying on others to do any job that was your individual responsibility to do. He said his ability to say “No” set guidelines and hold and maintain the standard and rules of the household in the home for every family member was one of the best ways to teach us the values and character we needed to learn how to think. It also shored up the will and helped to render the mind mentally capable to handle tough situations and temptations.
One of his main philosophies was that it was the primary role of parents, not television, school or church to train and teach those basic life lessons and to pass on vital lessons needed to survive real life. Parents have to learn to say no sometimes. Saying no and setting limitations, rules in your own home are the kinds of training tools youth expect of you as a parent. It is not good to “buy” the love of your child and your child or youth cannot and should not go through life thinking that he can just pull out a $100 or $1,000-spot and solve all his problems in life. It is good for a child to be “in want” of some things. It’s good to leave children with some goals to shoot for in life. Giving a child everything he or she wants is only feeding this beast.
Black parents need to reevaluate priorities and spend more time at home and involved in the lives of their children. Remember, idle hands are the devils’ workshop!!! A lot it being lost thinking on kids when you think that you can parent and govern a home by “osmosis.”
You only have a few short years to teach and impact these young lives before they move to the next level. We have damaged our own future and opened the door of the criminal justice system wide to convict and lock up our Black youth because of our own negligence as parents to do the right thing first concerning our children.
Our children are not animals or savages and we do not need to help advance these stereotypes by allowing the influences of Black on Black crime, “Fight Clubs”, hip-hop celebrities or television to dictate to and dominate the lives of our children.
Saving Black communities in Arlington, Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, and Garland, Austin and Waco and other places starts at home and in the family first!!!
Stop “giving your child everything”… It makes a “bad hustler”. (It steals the work ethic). It is time to return to the “Old (ancestral) Paths” of spending time, doing some one-on-one values and character development and basic life preparation and training in the home.
If we are going to save “Black Rome”… it won’t be the school or the government that will get it done… IT WILL BE YOU PARENTS… and you know what I mean.