07.30.09
Posted in Personal Commentary at 1:06 pm by Travis
We have a credit union here that has a nice little feature that most banks have, overdraft protection. If a a transaction comes in for more than you have in your account, they transfer from your saving the balance and charge you $5.0o. This sounds great until you have an item come in, they transfer the money, but the transfer fee causes your account to become overdrawn anyway! This is just wrong. How about this one. If you have just enough money in savings to cover the balance of the item that will overdraw your account, but you don’t have enough to include the $5.00 fee, they don’t pay the item and charge you $25.0o.
They counter by saying we paid it for you. It was a debit card transaction. It would get paid regardless except they would still charge you $25.00. Now, you know that no “person” is manually handling these transactions. It’s all done by computer, so how is it costing the bank anything to justify charging customers fess that keep going up. Am I shirking responsibility? No. I should have been more careful, but don’t offer me a service that is designed to keep padding your pocket as you act like your doing me a favor. This is why I don’t bank with them regularly.
We need serious banking reform.
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03.08.09
Posted in Personal Commentary at 11:40 pm by Travis
It is becoming a regular occurence day after day. Many local print newspapers are dying. Many blame technology, but I think technology only facilitated their downfall. You see, newspapers were largley family businesses and locally centered, but the boys in banking and finance realized early on that their is money in newspapers and media in general for two reasons. They can bring in huge profits, and they realized that if they controlled the media, they could shape the financial perspective to their advantage thus making more profit. For a time, it was good. Profits soared due to advertising and subscriptions and their ability to shape the news was working.
In their attempt to shape the news, one critical thing happened. They forced a dumbing down of the conciousness of the public which allowed them to sell more papers. This slick, free market, sensationalism reporting surplanted good, honest journalism. After a while, no one really wanted to know what really happened, just give the 3 minute version, show a few video clips and call it a day. Rush Limbaugh calls it the “drive by” media, but it was his conservative buddys who owned a lot of the local media through FCC laws that turned the market into a “all you can grab” sale and greatly profitted from its existence. Of course, this left the black and brown communities high and dry because according to the GAO they weren’t even invited to the party.
No one cared about black and brown issues unless someone was getting shot, arrested or getting shot while they were getting arrested. This slick hyper-sensationalized news had us going. Some journalist crossed over. Many did not, but the management upstairs was determined to sell newspapers at any cost. Along came the internet. It was new, fast and free. Many papers tried to tie their subscriptions to the web in hopes of keeping the revenue flowing, but it didn’t work. Blogs sprang up, and anybody who thought they wanted to be a journalist could. The internet provide a way to bypass all of the control factors set in place by the media giants, even they had to bow down and get with the the internet craze.
Here is what has happened. The fast pace, free market strategy impaired critical thinking and the demand for the same from journalist. Things that should have been covered were ignored. Fact and a little things like the truth fell by the wayside. Now that we have marginalized the content into a slick, fast pace, up to the minute format, traditional means of media became obsolete. The internet was a much better resource for transmitting, facilitating, and aggregated this type of streamlined content.
What traditional media outlets were trying to do with a staff of hundreds could be done with one kid and a cell phone. It doesn’t take much to be a “journalist’ in this hour. All you need is a good wireless plan and you’re in. I use to podcast, but I really didn’t like how it went because it didn’t finish out like what I was used to. You see, I grew up listening to Tony Brown, Max Robinson, George Curry and now Roland Martin. I realized that as much as I like listen to Roland Martin. I am not Roland Martin. It took years of studying and refining the craft of journalism to get to where he is today; therefore, I will listen to these guys when I can and blog when I feel the urge and use twitter here and there. Listening to real journalist helps us reflect and encourages real thought and meaningful conversation and Socratic questioning as Dr. West puts it.
This is what the newspapers and good journalism was about. When they left their true mantra, they fell vicitim to a system that they did not fully understand. What I am trying to say is that the internet is not known natively for this type of journalism. Had they stayed true to their purpose, the internet could have facilitated a true evolution in journalism where we would have seen a marriage of the net to true journalism, but instead, it took them out. What’s the answer? A return to the true nature of journalism. It looks like that newspapers may have to go nonprofit for a season. Say it ain’t so, but it is what it is. Money has to stop being the driving force for everything in our society. The love of money is the root of all evil, not terrorism. My people are destroy for lack of knowledge because thou has rejected knowledge, I will reject thee- Hosea 4:6.
I chose to use scripture here to make a point. We have often heard the passage used in church to signfy the absence of knowledge. Knowledge being translated as perception, understanding or discernment, but this is referring to the rejection of knowledge. Having had it presented, but rejected out of one’s own volition. In this climate, now more than ever, we must chose to know. Chose to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and become discerners of truth by reason of use to know what is real.
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01.13.08
Posted in Personal Commentary at 3:31 pm by Travis
I don’t know if we normally have a theme during Black History Month, so I am presenting mine. Like Stevie said in “If Your Love Can Not Be Moved”, “You can’t form a line if you’re too scared to stand alone.”
I tend to see life’s events as technology. Since I spend so much time around software and upgrades, I get revelations on that level. I told a Bible study group one time that we often get caught up with new revelations to the point that we miss the depth of what was said, and it ends up being a spiritual fad. Every new revelation that comes out, we grab. We don’t fully understand or study it long enough to see if it is even compatible with what we really believe. After so much, you get bogged down with all this new stuff that nothing makes sense. In technology, we do this with our computers every new toolbar, free program, cleaner, widget that we see, we install, and it eventually slows our computer down or worse, crashes it. In this day, there is a new threat, malware. Software that invades our computer over port 80. This is the port that the internet travels to your computer because it has to be open, it becomes a major point of vulnerability.
The black community is also suffering from serious malware. In our attempt to integrate with main stream America, we have opened ourselves to the underlying and unseen malware of corporate greed, consumerism and narcissism. What makes malware so dangerous is its ability to re-write code within a system to allow it to continue operating freely. By changing the rules, it looks to the system as normal or right. This malware is identified by justifying violence and misogyny toward women in music and movies, calling each other out of our names in songs and calling it art, undermining the efforts of social justice, denying the pride of our heritage, disrespect of our communities, saggin, believing that intelligence is acting white and the list goes on. Once malware is present it tends to open the door for more and more serious violations, some that effect the source code which is at the heart of the system.
Herein lies the problem. The source code of the black community has changed. Decades of malware that has perpetrated itself on the system as normal has undermined the fundamental structure and now 40 is the new 30, and 20 is the new 10. So much of what we have embraced is so not us. What’s worse, is that those who actually know the way the program is supposed to be, are being deleted off the scene. Here is what I propose. Its time to re-install the operating system of the black community. There is no quick fix. We must start over by re-defining blackness. We need to go beyond slavery and go all the way back to Africa because we have been trying to celebrate who “are”, but not fully understanding who we “were” before coming to this continent. We have to fully define our existence pre-slavery to understand what changed as a result of slavery. We keep acting like we didn’t exist in any reasonable intelligence pre-slavery. The black church as been very guilty of allowing this malware to flourish. Maybe we should tone down on the hoses and dogs on PBS because this is deep as many of us go toward understand black history, outside of going shopping on our “day off” for Dr. King’s birthday.
Let’s restore Black Heritage. Re-install and put up a new firewall. We know what the problems are and where they are coming from.
“When I became a man I put away my childish things.”
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09.04.07
Posted in Personal Commentary at 9:28 pm by Travis
First, let me apologize for weighing in so late on the Jena 6, so let me share my thoughts. I am sure that there are people asking how could this happen in 2007 after Martin Luther King and successes of the civil rights movement? Oprah, Michael Jordan, Will Smith, Tiger Woods are all examples of black success and equality, right, but is it really? I found it significant that the item that started all of this is the greatest metaphor of the whole situation of the issues of race in America. The tree, a symbol of life in the bible. “And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bring forth fruit in his season.” This same image has had a sordid past in the south because of the artificial fruit that it once bore. Strange fruit as Billie Holiday once sang.
To cut down the tree and leave its roots intact, is indicative of the American political and social system. The cutting down of the tree is to be seen by many as remedy, hoping that those offended would see this gesture as one of honesty and sincerity. How long are we going to subscribe to this type of programming? We go on everyday striving to get our piece of the pie as if the pie was an end unto itself. Never questioning who baked the pie, what ingredients were used or if there hand were clean, and therein lies the problem. Do we really know if the hands of those who are preparing the proverbial pie are really clean. I say not. What we fail to understand in this country are the constructs of race and class on which this country was founded. These constructs have been in place from the beginning and have been the guiding principals of this country ever since. Every law that has been passed has yet come under the subjection of these construct. Constructs that propose that blacks, especially black men, position on the map of human geography is that of the least. The founding principals of this country have always stayed true to these constructs. Constructs so highly worshiped the Christian Church co-opted its promulgation.
The Word of God always brings revelation. You do not have to been scholar or prophet to receive a revelation. The truth is simple. During the inculturation process of bringing salvation to the slaves, a revelation came. All men are equal. How can this be? A choice had to be made. Do we follow on in truth or not? The Church chose the latter. Rather than walk in revelation, they settled for a form of Godliness denying the power thereof and has limped along in history every since. These constructs say that we don’t matter, we don’t count, our live are worthless compared to theirs because what they fear is our equality. Your place is at bottom, the back of the bus, special ed, cell block 10, 20 to life, death row or we just shoot you with multiple gunshots from a service revolver.
W.E.B Dubois co-wrote “The Negro In The South” along with Booker T. Washington which was published in 1907 . In the chapter entitled, “Religion In The South” he states,
” If my own city of Atlanta had offered it to-day the choice between 500 Negro college graduates–forceful, busy, ambitious men of property and self-respect, and 500 black cringing vagrants and criminals, the popular vote in favor of the criminals would be simply overwhelming. Why? because they want Negro crime? No, not that they fear Negro crime less, but that they fear Negro ambition and success more. They can deal with crime by chain-gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can, but the South can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man.”
The spirit of white supremacy is not messed up at all about crime. Although our news services are very good and highlighting crime and emphasizing its brutality, our society has a remedy for the criminal element. Here Dubois outlines the chain-gang and lynch law, but our modern day criminal justice system is not too far removed from this sentiment. As soon as we assert ourselves or we show promise, they find a way to “criminalize” our behavior to bring us under subjection of the ever present construct of race.
We cut down trees of racism with laws, but the root, which is the construct itself remains intact like the tree in Jena, Louisiana. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is passed as a remedy to Jim Crow which was an offspring of the construct, meant to subvert the right to vote. The Congress before the November 06 election tried to subvert the law once again by its attempt of non-renewal. We finally saw the resignation of a stagnant Attorney General due to a scandal surrounding fired U.S. Attorneys who refused to prosecute voter fraud in minority voting districts. Once again the construct seeks to make its presence known.
As we begin our descent on Jena, Louisiana in a couple of week, let’s remember what the condition of the tree really means. It may be cut down, but roots are still there.
FREE THE JENA 6!!!!
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