I had been thinking on this for some time now, but a Facebook post set me off again.
The comment stated, in essence, that no child should be raised in the “city.” All children should be raised in the country for their own sanity and safety’s sake.
I remember transitioning from the country to what was supposed to be a better life, with all kinds of “stuff” and amenities, and automatic everything.
Well, turns out that was a big humongous mistake of the worst kind. The city is a “witch,” even worse a “bitch” who plays deeply into the passing theory about the United States of America’s and its “whoredom” as foretold by the Book of Revelation Chapter 17.
It’s easy to reminisce about something “back in the day,” and I remember my own never-ending “quest for the better life.”
Back in the day, as we like to say, we used to be able to sleep outside and no one would bother us, there were clouds all day and stars all night, crickets chirping and little boys getting in trouble for digging up watermelon patches at the neighbor’s house. But they knew that CARROTS CAME FROM THE GROUND, not a plastic package in the grocery store.
Grandparents, aunts and uncles sat on the porch stoop and shelled peas and pecans, picked collards, and Google and Facebook was called Ms Geraldine and Mr. Frank.
Food security and food safety? We didn’t need it. We grew our own.
TV was only allowed during certain times of the day except for those who didn’t own one, and there were only 1 or 2 telephones within a few blocks of each other; but we didn’t need them. WE TALKED TO EACH OTHER FACE TO FACE.
We owned houses, not projects; we owned land and businesses, not patches in a subdivision and the privilege of shopping at WalMart, where we get “always the low wages; always.”
The ‘big city’ carried promises of a high-classed education, the big house, the big fancy car, the “stuff” of being able to prove that we had “arrived.” But arrived where? To what?*
The Big City delivered all that we asked and paid for, but for what reason? To what ultimate end except to come back to the fact that the aims and goals of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s were never completely achieved.
The generations before us decided that “something better” in life meant a big city apartment over a shotgun house in the country. I’m not too sure about that any more.
The upside is being able to have more than one bathroom; but hell, we could have built a second bathroom and added it on to that shotgun house and kept it moving from there.
Most certainly, when the day comes that we are watching children on Netflix documentaries who don’t know carrots come from THE GROUND, something is deadly wrong. When the hour comes that our Black farmers can be driven out of business in preference to white farmers who are paid big government subsidies to GMO our food (thus separating our food from the good stuff and using our children for ‘crash test’ food cases), the something is deadly wrong. They use the code word “organic” to upcharge more poison to go along with the GMOs, and then call what we used to call “fresh food” organic, and still, something is deadly wrong.
We need our farmers. Our lives depend on them.
Children should NOT be raised in the city, ever. There is nothing there for them but death and destruction. I am a witness and a testimony. If they choose to move there later, at least they go with the experience of actually having been children and with an education that only living it can give them.
Education can be obtained on all levels in the country, grade school all the way through college. Greater things can be achieved in the city, but only AFTER children learn the hard work and sacrifice and solitude, peace and quiet of country living, where nothing can be taken for granted.
My children were born and raised in the ‘country’ (or as close as we were getting without moving all the way back to Uchee Hills and Fort Mitchell, Alabama) and the biggest mistake I confess to is leaving it and uprooting my sons. Huge mistake.
Black people, please go back home to your ROOTS in the deep country, and rebuild there. It’s okay to ride on the back of the bus, as long as you OWN it; which is volumes better and more empowering than riding on the front of someone else’s.
Don’t come back to the city until you are better prepared to control your own conversation, as an indigenous race of people, about the direction and path of the future for yourself and your children. We may need to step toward what looks like “backward” for a moment in time just to retrieve what rightfully belonged to us in the first place.
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*Good Fences, starring Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover
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Prince Rogers Nelson: “Ultimately, we all got to come back home…”
Breathe the fresh air, kiss the free ground, leave your dark shadows behind … “Freedom” by Wayne Watson.
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