THE RESURGENCE OF AN OLD EVIL…

If every person who claimed they felt threatened by a black man was able to lawfully murder them in cold blood it would usher in the resurgence of an old evil not felt since what might be called, “ THE GOOD OLD DAYS” or “THE GOLDEN DAYS OF LYNCHING”.  These laws have been created with one single minded intent, to strip away the civil rights of men of color.  The Stand Your Ground Law is redolent of the racist practices that typified a time we have nearly forgotten but their alarming revitalization wars of the resurgence of an old evil.  There are many men living today who so still remember the heyday of Jim Crow and the Klan and among them there remain a great deal who would see the injustice of those days return.  Some who have not known those times also desire the resurrection of their evil, albeit in ignorance but this ignorance should not be taken lightly for it is as real as the rising sun.  You see, anyone can claim they felt threatened or were physically threatened by a black man, and if they go so far as to stage the event or call in spurious witnesses to testify in the convenient absence of the dead black man then who is to challenge them?  We have forgotten how many black families have had to accept the terrible news that their men had been brutally murdered with no legal options and no way to physically avenge the wrong they were compelled to remain quiet lest they be victimized by the same wrath as their loved one…  If we allow ourselves to fall prey to the same venomous and malevolent hatred that befell our ancestors without challenging it to the last man then we have truly diminished as a people.   An inestimable debt is owed, to every man woman and child, black and white, who sacrificed their lives for the cause of freedom… and that debt should we become wealthy and free beyond our farthest imaginations can never be repaid.  If we fail now we shall have betrayed our glorious history as an indomitable peoples who have peacefully overcome one of the most evil, racist regimes in these modern times…  You have heard this warning before!  You felt its misery in your chest as a troubling ache awakened by fell deeds of unscrupulous hatred.  The uneasiness either moved you to fight back or to pretend it did not exist…. but the bitter and deadly rumor of it could not be erased from your consciousness, it was a terrible threat that fed upon the peacefulness of your very soul…  But will you take it seriously?  Will you take action?  How many of you black, white, Asian, Native American, or other race has promised that you would never forget or forgive this injustice? 

The media no longer hounds the doorsteps of George Zimmerman, a virtual nobody,  whose murderous act catapulted him to international disgrace but whose racist actions were rewarded by the courts of this country in the inglorious, rebellious state of Florida.  He is of no singular importance, a hapless pawn in the execution of a far more malevolent plan.  His sociopathic act of murder was done in complete ignorance of the Stand Your Ground Law that was clumsily but nonetheless, effectively conjured up to send a clear message to every Black American man that their watchfulness upon the battlements of freedom had gone lax.  There is no irony to this reality at all.  Black Americans who have lived through the days of openly legalized racism will tell you that what happened in that diminutive hamlet known as Sanford Florida is business as usual!  It is the great American way!  The lynching of black men in America has been and apparently still is a national pastime… an American sport eclipsing that of football, baseball, basketball and soccer…  And so it was that when the shameful and grievous lynching of Travon Martin hit the airwaves it captured the attention of Americans during the months of trial until the child slayer was finally released.  During this time of barbaric harvest Americans chose to ignore the pillaging, wastefulness and uselessness of its elected officials in congress while the country plunged deeper into financial ruin, losing its credibility in the international world.  Racism is one of those things that render those under its influence blind to rational thought; they will sacrifice everything in order to sate the insanity of their fears and prejudices.  Unfortunately there is little we can do to change someone who is a racist outside of setting a positive example hoping they will somehow be touched.  Until they can be transformed however it is our duty to stand our ground against racism!  Touché!

Every human being and most certainly every Black American man must vow not never to forget the shameful and racist lesson of the Travon Martin murder and trial but also vow to take peaceful action to do whatever is within their power to have the Stand Your Ground laws removed from every law book in this morally and ethically failing country.  The city of Sanford Florida finally banned the carrying of any weapon or firearms for duty on a neighborhood watch and while this is heartening to know for the protection of future Trayvon Martin’s it is nonetheless an untimely comfort for his grieving parents, family, friends, followers and mourners around the world.   

If these paragraphs have made you feel guilty about losing focus on the maintenance of freedom then I have been successful in reigniting your consciousness.  It is unfortunate that human beings do not always desire to do the right thing but that is why we have created laws.  It is unfortunate that the law itself is often profoundly flawed, ineffective and corrupted but this means we must take immediate action to remove those laws and replace them with sound and humanitarian laws that promote the good of all mankind.  We are busy and stressed in this twenty-first century world but we must make time to take time to correct those things which threaten to reverse the great progress that we humans have made.  I know that words are not deeds and deeds may not realize the outcomes they aspire to but the spark must be ignited nonetheless.  This is a spark!  This article is aflame with truth of conviction and by reading it you have been set alight.  When you have taken up the oath to challenge evil wherever you encounter it then you will be a luminary!  You are freedom’s incandescent torch, it’s clarion voice, it’s bladeless sword… you are the very personification of freedom!  How arrogant are those who would assume their racism would go unchallenged!  They did not know that you were here to challenge them!  They underestimated the power of goodness and truth and of the solidarity of morally, ethically strong and peaceful men that will drive them back into their primitive and depraved holes.   Their barbarity and ignorance is pitiable to civilized men but they must be taken seriously!   Such evil does not dispel itself it must be defeated at every front!  The deadly game of racism that has continued to hunt down the black man in America from the moment he was stolen to these uncompromising lands is built upon the corpses and soaked with the blood of millions of men and women who have died by the hands of racists and their evil dogma… they must be stopped!

FIN

Written by David Vollin

A GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES:

12 YEARS A SLAVE: The Story Told As Hollywood Could Never Tell

12 YEARS A SLAVE:

The Story Told As Hollywood Could Never Tell

Written By David Vollin

The closing of the film, “12 YEARS A SLAVE”, was not unlike both the tacit closing of a casket and the emotionally noisome deliverance of a newborn child in the same broad and timeless instant.  The dread and beauty each so substantially and absolutely real, administered a final yet potentially unstable neutralizing effect upon the psyche of each and every person emerging from the last black and white flickers of text as the house lights mustered themselves to amber hues and then sought to revivify our confidence in those random objects which define the tangible world we have come to know as our own.  Watching the film I felt as if I had been washed by and immersed in a rare and sacred ablution, as if I had ingested its clairvoyant potion enabling me to spectate whilst the fell and glorious history of a man named Solomon Northup and his troubled times re-lived their most intimate moments before me; and so by this voluminous liquid river of a film I was thus enchanted…

Very few movies have the ability to sting and kiss their audiences so.  And I say so as a man who, watching this tragic drama play itself out in another man’s life knew it could easily have been his own.  Even worse I knew it had been the despicable and sadistic reality that millions of black men, women and children suffered without resistance until they were laid into their unmarked, forgotten graves. The plot unearthed the foul, decomposing corpse of the very soul of evil, personified in these American lands as slavery.  Slavery was the antebellum curse on America's conscience, a cancer that took root and flourished  in the hearts of the most diabolical human beings and was dismissed by society as the embodiment of divine order of things.  Abolition arose as it's natural challenge, and this film highlights a rare accomplishment of that glorious effort. The film exposes the medieval practices of slaver as a case study in sociopathic behavior.  Revealed was the profane and dispassionate pathology of slavery and of a nation bound with the same chains as its captors; bound both to a sadistic and immoral hell. It is the haunting interstices of the untold story here that chide us the most as we reckon with the reality of what suffering can truly be.   No movie could ever convey the full extent that a man can suffer mentally and physically for the 103,680 hours that represent 12 brutal years of enslavement or for that matter for the totality of a life so enslaved.  The story to be told, the lesson to be learned was not just the vile perniciousness of the practices of slavery but also the willingness of others to defend or to challenge it and the strength of those chained to it, to endure it and to defeat it.

The immediate and permanent effect of 12 Years A Slave is that we know it is real, shockingly real and yet as its centrally sinister and lugubrious plot seizes control of the viewer’s consciousness they realize that the surreal has established itself as a sobering testimony to the human condition.  I tell you as a Black America man who has witnessed the unfathomable cruelty and candor of racism first hand that this story is not unimaginable; it is as real and as tangible as the cold iron that was forged into shackles designed to kill the will of the human spirit itself.  The main character Solomon Northup was very much like the mythical character Jonah swallowed by the most fiendish and random of fates and just as unexpectedly freed from its slavering jaws; the jaws of human enslavement.

The director takes great pains to show how southern slave masters institutionalized Christianity within their slave populations acutely in complete contradiction to the ways in which slavery was actually practiced and enforced.  In theory chirstianity was marketed as a peaceful and forgiving religion but its twisted truths were brutally applied.  The slaves themselves rock back and forth upon a storm wrecked ship between the way scripture has been perverted to suit the argument for the divine right of one race to oppress and enslave another and their inherent sense of humanity, dignity and aspiration for self-determination juxtaposed by their own hyper-literal interpretation of what they understand or misunderstand to be the word of a god that had been forced upon them.  The film exposed religion as one of the primary instruments used to intensify ignorance and thereby achieve docility in slaves.  Its powerful hex of fear and guilt transfixed the tortured population of slaves cacooning them with a diabolically perverted justification for their tortured condition.  In their own twisted way slave masters and their sympathizers had to force themselves to believe the lie of divinely ordained racial inferiority in order to live with their guilt and horror while administering its fell directives.  The film conveys all too well how slave and master became twisted into a Hellish drama set in motion by the desire of one race to have dominion over another.  The director presents Sunday worship as a family event with the master administering holy Zion to his own family, white hired hands and the extended family of slaves under the yawning mosses of the Louisianan clime.  The exposure of religious abuse is yet another difficult dynamic for American audiences to comprehend in this film.  America has historically chosen to ignore the raw and dirty issues defining the institutionalized operant conditioning of slaves via a religion that also condoned the sadistic torture they were obliged to endure from the cradle to the grave…  No one has thus undertaken this task with such uncanny eloquence… no one has dared to imply that the sociopathic trends common to slavers bear horrifying resemblance to heinous crimes committed by the the criminally insane because this would mean that some of the founders of this nation and that many men and women held to be distinguished, genteel figures in American regional history were indeed sociopaths.  

The film leaves us wondering how emotionally moved Solomon Northup was after being heroically freed.  His reunion with a family he no longer knew was private and emotional and appeared to have established a new and far more precious bond between them but one wonders how he was able to face white men again or rather how he equipped himself to move forward knowing that he was both betrayed and championed by them…  The film exposes a great many of these social conflicts and contradictions many of which continue to chide us in twenty first century race relations in America. We in America continue to struggle with race.

The film also delved into the heretofore unexplored realm of interracial intimacies between master and slave revealing an indelicate and treacherous landscape shaped by the divine right of a master to take on a slave as a lover even when married and the Victorian dichotomy of indifference and shame that branded those who dared to delve into an emotional realm that viewed them on the white side as a man and his animal and on the black side as a man and his victim.  The candid and unexpected examination of a masters love and lust for his slave juxtaposed by his obligation to discipline that lover which he deemed to be above all his unequal and his property painted a deranged and socially corrosive picture of antebellum life.  On the other hand it depicted slaves that had enjoyed the favor of their masters being lavished with all of the amenities of a white woman or man but ultimately subject to the dictates of their station as a slave should their benefactor die or fall upon hard financial times, it was a bonfire of vanities never before exposed and explicated with this degree of detail. 

So what adds up to an extraordinary story given the times all begins to make sense once the main character of Solomon Northup is masterfully developed.  Well respected by white businessmen in the north Solomon found that he elicited the irresistible favor of  his many slave masters in the south.  He was indeed an extraordinary man discovering in the south how his genius would be envied and hated by the white employees of his masters who resented his intelligence and how it was acknowledged and valued above their own.  In no other place than this was the bonfire of vanities more heated.  The politics of being smart and playing the role of a slave have been explored in this film with uncanny precision.  Solomon Northup a respected business and family man in upstate New York is tricked, kidnapped and forced into enslavement as far south as can be imagined where he uses his wits to legally escape and be restored to family and home. There are few American stories more amazing and extraordinary than this...  

The question has been raised so many times by critics regarding whether or not the film was an “American” film or foreign.  The film was actually a British-American effort but it is truly only an American film in theme.  That being said it is my opinion that not being a Hollywood “Baby” 12 Years A Slave, which has had a limited distribution in America was perhaps better suited to be made outside of Hollywood.  American made films of this sort often get too watered down as an accommodation to avoid offending white audiences but an insult to the intelligence of its enlightened and informed white and black American audiences.  The result often becomes a bland soup of mediocrity ultimately failing to convey any verisimilitude at all.  But not this film! 12 Years A Slave is raw and uncensored, I was surprised at its candor and breadth realizing immediately that it was truly not conceived in the tradition of the American made film.  If 12 Years A Slave had been made in Hollywood tradition it would have been censored to the point that the story would not be worth telling at all because the central and ugly truths behind it would not have been conveyed. 

To its credit the film was beautifully acted, the set, costume and screenwriting were historically accurate and detailed with a painstaking perfection.  The camera and musical scores were perfect. Every detail of this film was exceptionally executed.  One of the most moving scenes was the burial of a slave man who dropped dead in the middle of the cotton fields, a reality supported by slave narratives.  The slave was beaten even after he had keeled over and died and when he was buried that evening the most soul rending blues/gospel hymn intercedes to calm our passions… One of the hallmarks of this picture, and a most effective conveyor of mood, a credit to the detail lavished by its producers, was the use of pause, deliberately extended moments of emotional contemplation expressed before a character responded or interposed within a conversation.  This masterful and unique technique served to pull the scene out from the film itself and lay it upon the table in effect to magnify the poignancy and gravity of what was being said.  As I said, it was masterfully executed as a cinematic technique sometimes with the cries of locusts, crickets and all of the beasts of the Louisiana Bayou in full concert whilst the viewer waited for the actor’s weighty response…  To say that I had not at first expected such wittiness and craftsmanship or such unexpected artifice in a film charged with explicating such a sobering theme would be an understatement were it not that I was so magically overwhelmed by the product as delivered.  The film was a success because the actors truly became those men and women, villains and heroes they portrayed characterizing the truly acid pathology of a culture that is now little known save by historians of the antebellum south.  If anyone desires to understand why racial tensions are what they are in twenty-first century America then surely they must understand what happened to Solomon Northup 174 years ago in 1841 and also what fate befell those like him most of which were never refurbished with their freedom. 

I will not waste your time regurgitating the plot of the movie 12 Years A Slave as an enticement to provoke you to see it instantly re-served.  You have seen the same theme many times before, “a man overcomes his obstacle”, it is a cliché, but this film is not! Ultimately you must make the decision whether or not to go to see it for yourself!  The intent of my review is to point out the finest elements which make this film unique, to excite the sensibility of human curiosity and to promise that it will be artistically satisfying if one is so inspired to venture there.  If it were not great cinema I should not bother to even mention the film and in fact I find it to be a jewel of great beauty.  The movie, 12 Years A Slave is tremendous and it treats an uncomfortable aspect of  American history that heretofore has been avoided because of the obvious human rights issues and contradiction to the egalitarian ideals of American freedom that slavery and racism represent.  Therefore, if you go to see this movie do so not to prove or disprove what you have read here, rather do so because you desire to be enlightened and extract your own interpretations of what you have seen to play out before you. 

Written by David Vollin

FOR THE BROTHAS INTELLECTUAL/CULTURAL SALON

WWW.FORTHEBROTHAS.BLOGSPOT.COM  

NEVER GONNA QUIT!

NEVER GONNA QUIT!

A man calling himself AHusbandsman1on1 went online and posted this ad on several social media sites.  The ad was eventually removed after it became the focus of a great deal of controversy:

“I am a handsome, intelligent and successful Black professional who is looking for a husband.  I can work with a brotha on the husband thing, but I need you to know that is where I’m heading if we start a relationship.  Right now I’m not going to make any special requests of my future husband, I just want to see who responds, what they respond with and take it from there!  I am not making any promises to anyone right now except that if you sound, look and feel like somebody I think would be right for me I will devote my undivided attention to you in the hope that we might discover something truly remarkable.  I ask that you send your name, general location, list your favorite thing to do (honestly), and leave your cellular number with a time that you can best be reached.  If I do not respond within 12 hours of your post please continue living a beautiful life.  If I respond within minutes please be ready to at least receive a call so I can hear your voice”. 

PS… just let me convince you that I will make an excellent partner and husband for you and I promise you will not live to regret it!

Sincerely,

AHusbandsman1&1

The man known only as AHusbandsman1on1  woke up early one morning and realized that he was growing old and lonely.  He feared that if he did not cultivate the relationship that would one day lead to the companionship which would see him through to the end of his days he would die a bitter and disappointed man.  AHusbandsman1on1 had so much to offer the world, everyone who knew him said he was a true renaissance man but he knew that the world was not currently or presently having a renaissance, everybody was just trying to survive to the next goddamed second of the next goddamed minute of the next goddamed hour of the next goddamed day… Notwithstanding the shortcomings of the world he had managed to somehow exist outside of, he was really a grand old gentleman.

AHusbandsman1on1 trembled as he watched the posting affix itself to the expressionless membrane of his computer screen watching as the prompt populated in the form of a cartoon bubble, saying, “your message was successfully posted”! He had not been quite that excited about anything for as long as he could remember.  It was at that instant that the gravity of his desperation really hit him, he realized it was purely likely he might not ever get a response.  He referenced the clock at the lower right corner of his computer, it was 2:00 A.M.  For the first five minutes after posting he stared at the dumb glow of the unchanging screen daring it to notify hi of a response… but the screen just glared back at him emptily and began to go into sleep mode.  It was as if the screen refused to validate the shimmer of hopefulness which had ignited the purpose of his very being.  About 4:00 A.M.  the room began to light up  with virtual feedback from AHusbandsman’s cellular phone.  He had programmed his email address to play, “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Barry White when a new email hit his in-box.  The computer, which had also been programmed with this feature, began to echo his phone.  The room was awash with competing bursts of Never Gonna Give You Up at different points of execution but he lay motionless sleeping through the entire cacophony of thrill. 

A week later AHusbandsman1on1 was found dead in his small apartment.  There were no relatives to manage his affairs and he laid in the morgue until money was raised by some residents of his apartment building to have him humbly funeralized by manner of cremation.  One neighbor remembering he was not religious decided to hold his memorial services in her living room and after the ceremony she poured some votive essence of his ashes into the terra-cotta pots of the flowers on her balcony.  Her balcony which was really nothing more than a fire escape was where they would sit and talk about life but often they just sat noiselessly listening to the resonance of the outside world as it riveted off the walls of the narrow alley into which the fire escape encroached.  AHusbandsman1on1 had loved her plants many of which he had given to her over the years.  Before his belongings were removed to be set out on the sidewalk as if AHusbandsman1on1 had been evicted she confiscated his plants, noticing the landlord had left the door unsecured, and set them beside her own..  And there the plants flourished until she died five years and seven months, ten hours and  fifteen minutes, twenty-two seconds later…  

Written By David Vollin

REMOVING THE OLD SLAVE CEMETERY

“There used to be an old colored slave cemetery in Arlington Virginia at the terminus of the “Pike” but it was dug up in the early 1970’s to make way for a new hotel.  Many of my ancestors were buried there it being one of the few cemeteries for colored folk in the area.  Nobody knows what happened to the remains of those men and women…” D. Vollin

There used to be an old colored cemetery there,

Underneath the waist-high weeds… the empty eye-sockets of slaves,

looked up to the heavens from their graves,

though no reference remained to mark just where.

So long that field had lain without ceremony or gathering,

whilst poke weed climbed and quickly ripened in the spring,

when its sanguine berries swayed on withered stalks as the land was autumning,

and when the smooth snow leveled it, hiding it away from reckoning.

O’er time I imagine that every plot had been filled,

It being the only place around for burying the colored dead,

the land climbed a steep embankment flattening as the slope came to a level head,

but remained untended by the colored folk still living near that hill.

When time remembered where my father’s lay,

it knew their families had not died out or moved away,

we all watched as the green hillside was cut down deep beneath the clay,

so the wheels of progress could have their way.

By David Vollin

GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES

I HAD TOUCHED THE FACE OF SLAVERY…

I HAD TOUCHED THE FACE OF SLAVERY…

Yesterday I took a trip back into history.  I visited three Virginia Plantations upon which Black men and women were enslaved from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, nearly 200 years.  As I approached the grounds as a free and enlightened Black man I realized countless of my ancestors had trod the same steps from birth till death without any hope of escape.  Today we have no idea how they were actually treated, but as certain things emerge from the dust we catch a glimpse of the perverse hatred and mistrust that surely existed between slave and master.   One example was a relic plate used for slaves to serve their masters because it was considered to be socially degrading for a white person to take a cup or a glass, a book or pen or anything directly from the hand of a Black person or slave.  Yet in striking contradiction Black women were trained as midwives to deliver the offspring of their masters in one of the most personal and intimate rituals known to man, childbirth.  Such instances fully expose the superficiality of classism and racism.  The absurdity of such a practise is again exemplified by the fact that Black slaves prepared the food by hand having first grown and harvested it by hand only to serve it in its final form on a silver tray to create the ridiculous appearance that it had not had contact with a Black person and that there had not been any actual physical contact between slave and master in the merest of things such as the handing a drink of water from one person to another.  While musing over these and other peculiarities I was reminded of the hilarious British comedy, “Keeping Up Appearances” wherein the main character, Hyacinth, is eternally obsessed with the public affirmation of a her fantasized nobility.  The zaniness of Hyacinth’s pretension is justly mirrored here save that it is not just a harmless sitcom it actually played itself out in the enslavement and degradation of millions upon millions of men women and children.  In order to understand and appreciate slavery for the horror that it truly was one has to be able to measure it against simple, rational and ethical standards.  Simply because these were the established standards of the day does not absolve them from being wicked and evil practices because the standards of human dignity are universal and this is precisely why slavery was abolished with the American Civil War.  In simple, common terminology racism is “Doing Too-Much”!  Racism goes all the way across town and back to do something rather than just reaching out and doing it in a few seconds.  Racism expends unjustified resources in order to appear to prove a point that really does not exist.  Racism is all smoke and mirrors, hocus pocus, a mindfuck, a hoax a scam!  But when I think of the countless lives that were wasted just to prove a point that was never valid I cry tears of pain and sorrow. 

Visitation of America’s Plantations by Black Americans is a necessary pilgrimage that will serve to cleanse our hearts and souls of racism by bringing us full circle, face to face with the dirty, unfiltered truth.  Only time can hide the outrageous atrocities witnessed by these silent temples of inhumanity now calm and soft in the brilliant sun.  The stocks and whipping posts are long since rotted in the moist southern air, trees bearing the whips lashing are felled or dead.  Every eye that witnessed the horrors of slavery and every tongue that might have told its nightmarish stories has long since died and been buried in the wet sanguine clay.  What we now have to rely on for understanding are our instincts as human beings.  When we see the harsh relics of slavery no matter how gold or silver gilt they might be we see a mortal struggle between master and slave crushing and extinguishing any hope of dignity or freedom in Black people, a despicable war in which any means necessary to subdue a person of color was ethical.  When I return to those hallowed grounds, hallowed by the pain and sacrifice of Black slaves and I will return, I will do so to properly mourn them.  I will touch the face of the living earth and knowing that my ancestors remains are lying someplace beneath my feet I will touch my heart and then reach up into the sky to symbolically release them, a gesture I know is merely a personal sign of humility and understanding designed more so to free my own mind for surely they have already been set free by death itself…

Written by David Vollin

A BLACK AMERICAN MAN’S THOUGHTS ON THE 4TH OF JULY…

A BLACK AMERICAN MAN’S THOUGHTS ON THE 4^TH OF JULY…

The fourth of July is always a bittersweet day to me.  On July 4^th, 1776 Black people were effectively written out of the great socioeconomic promise of this country.  It took Black Americans 188 years to finally change turn the nation’s policy in the direction of their favor, an accomplishment earned with the most intensive of struggle… 

I like to believe that the founding fathers, enlightened as they were, embedded the kernels of freedom in the Declaration of Independence knowing that one day the hidden argument for freedom would finally be successfully argued.  But that is at best a poetic leap of faith, a romanticized maybe because at the end of the day it was only through struggle that freedom was finally achieved.  On July 4, 1776 the founding fathers opined not to invest in an historic opportunity to thoroughly realise their vision of freedom including their brothers in struggle who had fought beside them during the difficult American Revolutionary War, turning their backs on the Black American man.

Emancipation day appears to be a more appropriate time for Black Americans to join in celebration, with food, fellowship and colorful incendiaries… Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown and other activists rather than the founding fathers appear to be the appropriate icons for those votaries of freedom who trace their ancestry back to free African slaves stolen from their homes and civilizations and thrust into a hellish cycle of fear and inhuman brutality.  The sociopathic nature that characterized the enforcement methods of institutionalized enslavement continue to affect the psyche of Black Americans traumatized by centuries of abuse.  Likewise, the insanity and pathology typified by those who enforced institutionalized slavery upon innocent men, women and children continues to haunt the psyche of white Americans who must divorce themselves from the sociopathic traditions of racism.  Emancipation Day completes the bright but underdeveloped promise of July 4^th 1776 as does the Civil rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 bringing true freedom in America full circle... 

To a Black American man who is enlightened the fourth of July is represents a critical date in the evolution of human freedom, the culmination of centuries of social debate and evolution known as the Enlightenment but yet another stumbling block for the Black man in his continued struggle for freedom and equality in a land he has now earned the right to call home…

Written by David Vollin on July 4^th, 2013

HOUSE OF CARDS…

HOUSE OF CARDS…

When we met it was as if I was finally getting to know someone who might at least end up being a dependable friend.  Though our differences were pronounced I perceived that we had the maturity to balance our philosophical differences.  So we talked and talked and talked until we had virtually run through every possible scenario in our mutual lives but of course this was just the groundwork… nothing had been built, we were still in the conceptual design phases of our association.

We knew there were some challenges to our association but after a couple of years we revisited our interests and the very first layer of structure had got erected.  It was a delicate balance at best, we were wholly unfamiliar with one another so we had to literally hold the cards in place so that the occasional breezes and bumps of the table, the wind caused by casual passers’ by, etc., would not disturb what we had so patiently built.

It was a promising enterprise; we had developed a philosophical connection and a sexual sophistication that allowed us to construct additional levels above the ground floor of our relationship of cards.  The weight of each new level acted as ballast to hold the lower levels in place but the lateral forces pushing our eloquent but delicate structure ever so gently and at times with brutal strength threatened to overturn everything we had invested in.  Notwithstanding, it was still only a skeletal structure, a flimsy edifice composed of the singular paper cards.  Each card was an element of critical importance in our relationship but the only cement binding them together was the gravity of our compassion and desire to come together. If one of us let go the house of cards, vulnerable, would collapse leaving all we had painstakingly built in ruin.

We never had a chance to complete the wonderful edifice we conceived, only its skeletal frame, a wish, a desire, a dream but one utterly unfulfilled.  I never did figure out why you left the structure incomplete but I thought about an ancient building left by a civilisation that mysteriously disappeared in Pre-Colombian Latin America and I thought about a fabulous temple in ancient Khemet that had been revolutionary for its time but lay incomplete and ruined for thousands of years.  We never got to enclose our structure with any skin, there was no façade and no roof, no foundation, no interior rooms, all bare all empty all unfinished!  So as I looked through the fragile house of cards I realized it was now doomed to failure, it would inevitably fall and in time be utterly forgot… I realized then that what we had built was not love… it was only a house of cards…

Written by D. Vollin