Status Symbols

"We shine because they hate us,

floss cuz they degrade us,

We tryna buy back our forty acres...

"I say f*** the police, that's how I treat em.

We buy our way out of jail, but we can't buy freedom

We'll buy a lot of clothes but we don't really need em

Things we buy to cover up what's inside,

Cuz they made us hate ourself and love they wealth

that's why shorties holla where the ballers at?

Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack

and a white man get paid off of all of that."

-Kanye West, All Falls Down (2004)

I have noticed that many of us seek riches simply because we seem to be expected to do so. We seem to have been convinced that money is the proof of our worth, the evidence of our accomplishments. So we seek status symbols. We respond to our social and societal reality by becoming alarmingly ambitious--hustlers.

I challenge my people (the disenfranchised poor all over the world) not to have REACTIONARY AMBITION, not to get convinced that we must prove our worth by attaining possessions, to understand that success is measured by the good one does, to reject the status symbols.

Thoughts, anyone??

The Jump Off

My aversion to the technocrack (Dr. Bryant Marks's term, not mine) knows no bounds. Anyone who has ever Facebooked me knows that a conversation with me is akin to Russian roulette--unpredictable and prone to sudden death (when I respond at all, that is)--especially if I feel myself overly tethered to the incessant beep of the inbox.

Beep. New message, new post, heed the wall, answer now. Yes master.

Slavery is bad.

But I'll try the blog thing. A friend says it's good for letting off steam, apparently "like throwing your thoughts into an abyss and watching them come back in a million wonderful, mutated ways"; let us hope so.

If you are at all interested in what I may happen to be thinking at any given time, or want to stay in touch through a bit of me-approved technocrack--especially if you are of the massive Facebook tribe that never gets a response from me--this may come to be the best way to do so.

I'll read your comments. We'll master this together. Hopefully we'll encounter some good thoughts, and even stumble upon the occasional bit of good writing.

Alas, there is but one direction in which to go from here;

Onward.

First real post coming Oct 29. Suggestions, anyone?

P.S. The title is for the Hip-Hop nation. Everyone else, see Urban Dictionary.