Happy Xmas Celebrations & a Great 2011!
I have had a good two months-plus break from bloggin. I really enjoyed it. It helped me stand back and see the work from another perspective especially look into how I can be more efficient and effective rather than do same ol same ol.
It was good to see that BWE has reached a point where some of us can take ourselves well needed breaks, and the message keeps powering through! For me in this was particularly gratifying because it shows the word is out and saturating the atmosphere and the key points and messages of BWE are out there and generating the required discussions. I contrast this with five years ago when just a few were doing the work and how we almost were too afraid to be gone too long.
Efficient use of time will be the name of the game for me in the coming year. We are in lean times and thus we all have to be judicious users of time and resources. Which leads me to my next point:
Things BWE want you to know
Catch a fire for yourself
This time off blogging has helped me also identify and sound out a few more ‘black female life schema’ that is, mental sets, patterns, and attitudes, influencing the way black women approach life.
Last week I was over at actsoffaith blog where a discussion was ongoing about Obesity. One of the comments sent in, got me thinking for a while. I tried to respond but i am happy I didn’t, because I needed to mull over the comment a bit more.
Sometimes people say things and it isn’t really about what they are saying but how the comment is being generated from an ’expectation’ they have on you. One such comment popped up during the discussion and had I hastily replied, I could have stopped my own deeper and expanding understanding of an issue which I think is one of the corner stones issues to black women’s plight.
The first thing I want black women to let sink deep down in their spirit is that nobody is responsible for you.
No one losses out if you never fulfil your potential in life. Well let me be even more blunt and say, if you fell of the edge of the cliff today, I am sure one or two people would put a rose on your coffin, but that’s essentially it! Does that feel deflating? I guess we all want to feel that we are important but there is another side to it that we have to be grounded in reality.
I keep hearing these sentiments from black women. ‘Aren’t you gonna make me like your message?, Aren’t you gonna make it appeal to me?, Aren’t you going to make me want to get up and save my own life?’
These sentimenta are buried in black women’s comments and responses and seems so very strange given that it isnt about choosing the next shoe or handbag or film but about how to take their lives into abundance.
Apparently there are some black women who feel that ‘we’ (other bw or BWE who have come out as bw champions), will be sorry, if ‘they’ don’t make it! Twisted isn’t it. I came across a kids program the other day where a ‘character’ was ranting and stamping his feet about how, ‘Y’all will be sorry, if I run away (or did something which in essence had a net negative effect on him not them)’.
Some black women even go further and seem to have this funny notion that by withholding their acceptance of the commonsense notions BWE and others are trying to pass on, they are denying us something key, some victory, maybe pinching us and confirming their importance in our lives (as if this is about social endorsement and status games rather than their abundant living)! I guess because we have a declared interest in seeing black women win, by withholding their own ‘winning’, they are taking something from us or something!
There seems to be a weird and misplaced boyfriend-girlfriend/you have to court me etc dynamic underlying some of the responses from certain black women.
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| I might be drowining but ask me nicely or I wont come! |
One of the key things I want to pass on to bw as we enter a new year is that you have to, ‘catch a fire’ for your own life and your own future. The idea that someone else would/should care more, or would be hurt by your destruction is the height of delusional thinking. When we become adults we understand that ‘life will go on for others even if we die today’. The notion that society should care about black women falling by the way side, and we should devote our energies into making them care and making them (read: government) do right by us rather than ‘sort ourselves out’, is an idea that all empowered black women should leave in the dust.
Does it mean we should not work for a better world? No but we are wise, we know that if white women or Asian women can rely on ’government’ responding to their plight, government has not shown itself to be ’sympathetic’ to black women's situation. We black women ’work out our own salvation’ and we will continue to have to do so for the foreseeable future no matter how unfair that might seem to you.
1 Corinthian 9:24 says:
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize!
Another translation ends ‘So run to win!’
When you see a person who understands that no one is beholden to them in anyway, they have a particular attitude to life. You will notice that they are ‘up and doing’ and laying hold of every opportunity, looking out for an opportunity to prosper themselves, not waiting or thinking someone should ‘do for me‘.
The attitude of ‘society owes me’ will not serve anyone well in these lean times, so you better flee from anyone or anything reinforcing such expectations in you. Note that many of the liberals urging you to ‘demand your rights’ from society (meagre rights at that) are doing so from the comfort of rewards reaped from applying themselves or rewards from legacies of antecedents that applied themselves often shunning their rights and shunning shame etc. Thus they can afford to talk that way, they have a safety net.
But anyone who is lethargic rather than striving in these times will be caught between a rock and a hard place. In case some are unaware of how these things work, you can be all about ‘social justice’ but you must continue to feather your own nest. You cannot let yourself be lulled into any complacent place, feeling that an equal and just society will provide all your needs. It will provide just the basic if anything and at any rate, a just society doesn’t exist. If you want to live above subsistence you must strive.
I want to point out another key thing here. Most BWE are themselves running their own track to get something out of life. Most of us if not all, are coming out of the ‘indoctrination of black women into community service’ program too. Many of us have paid and will continue to pay the price of lost time and lost focus. So stop resenting BWE writers and thinking they by virtue of their ‘better placement’ (so you think) are obliged to chase you down to ‘hear’ the message of commonsense (indeed a lot of this ‘appeal to me’ ‘appeal to me’ stuff demanded of BWE comes from resentment). We are sharing sideways not from above. So if I am a black woman like you, simply ‘running my own life race,’ why should I be required to go out of my way to save you? This is indeed a borrowed attitude often seen displayed towards those who the black community denotes as having, ‘made it’, and thus should, ‘give back’. The black community however does not have genuine intentions towards those giving back, instead it fosters a toxic attitude towards those itemotionally blackmails into ‘giving back’ where the aim is to frustrate them and play sick mocking jokes on them, toying with their genuine desire to ‘give back‘. Indeed the intention has never really been about being lifted out, but dragging these ones down and back to the gutter. Its all a sick sick joke!
The world has shown it is averse to pushing resources black women's way and in additon BWE do not have the extra resources themselves to expend for 'rescue operations' for individual black women who expect to be courted into living well, even if BWE wanted to. We can only put the life saving information out there for you to take charge of saving yourself.
The case of 'living well' is not one that anyone should have to make for another and if such is the case then it reveals the deep damage on the part of the one demanding 'an explanation' or an incentive so they can take up the charge of living well. Purge yourself of any attitude or belief or mental program or peer pressure that makes you place so little on your own salvation that you are willing to joke about with it or become complacent and lethargic about taking conceret steps towards abundant living.
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