What gives us the right to be mediocre?  Everyone has reason or purpose for his or her existence.  We should strive for excellence, so that if we miss our mark, we still wind up being extraordinary.  We cannot allow ourselves to embrace the banality of mediocrity.   Our children have to get beyond the mind-set that being smart is un-cool.  We need to challenge ourselves to raise the bar of achievement.  According to a 2008 report prepared by the Federal Project in Education Research Center, almost half of all public high school students in the fifty largest cities in the US fail to graduate. The national high school graduation rate is only 70 percent.  Through the promise of our newly elected President, I hope that our youth become motivated to seek higher ground and raise their level of academic achievement. 

 

I am proud of President Barack Obama and what his achievement means to the greater African-American community, but we need to hold him, as well as ourselves, accountable for what we do from this day forward. Will we press to re-commit ourselves to serving the greater good of our community, or will we follow a path of recalcitrance and ignore our responsibility to be productive members of our society?

 

We can no longer afford to be detached from the responsibility for our own personal actions and the affect it has on the greater community.  Without accountability we cannot have order, and without order we have anarchy.  Our communities have been victimized by anarchic behavior due to the lack of accountability at every level of our society.  We cannot glorify street life and then not accept a level of responsibility for its actions.  It is time for our music to stop reporting the problems of our society and begin offering solutions.

 

Although we have lost much do to the brutal effects of racism, it does seem as though we are beginning to redeem the time.  It took over 400 years to end slavery in the US, an additional 100 years to gain civil rights, and only an additional 40 years to get an African-American elected as President.  As we move forward, what will be our enduring legacy from this day on?  We have officially run out of excuses for a lack of progress.  We can no longer blame “The Man” for our shortcomings because the headman in charge is one of us. 

 

Hip-Hop now stands in a position to take the lead in pushing a new agenda among our youth and being the vote of change in our communities.  In its ability to influence young people to vote, Hip-Hop has proven that it has the ability to affect change and lead people to positive outcomes. Let’s begin to take that initiative to ebb the tide of hopelessness and advocate the virtue of social progress.