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Flippant Remarks about “Success”

Buy this DVD at Amazon.com! There is so much lack of success in the so-called “Black community” that we sometimes forget what success is… Since the rise of gangsta rap (the Indo-European missionary zeal of materialistic fascism set to a beat that just happens to be misogynistic), the young people have been offered almost one definition of success: success simply means that you have so much white-man-money, you can afford to pay the bills of incompetent friends, the mentally unhealthy descendants of slaves (and slave masters), for years. And this is why a round-the-way brother’s success with, say, information technology means nothing until the brother is so “rich” he can pay the way for others—grown-ass others… What this view toward success does is take accomplishment away from the individual and forces it over into the whack-ass lives of others. “You are not successful until you can make my life easier—and, by the way, I am doing nothing to improve my life—apart from waiting on you and other bad-magic tricks…”

So the ranting in the previous paragraph says that success for me is personal first—and then shareable with others later. I think that it’s backward to share it first and I think it’s very sad to never be able to share it. So this implies that there must be a careful balance of the personal and the communal—and I hear too often the premature declaration of “community”—because inside the word “community” is the word “commune.” How can children of fake-hippie-bullshit, plastic-empty-suburbia, divorce and single-motherhood know a damn thang about a commune?

When our view of success becomes simple and personal (instead of elaborate and social), success simply means that you say what you intend to do and you do it. Every great dream needs to be broken down into a series of real, mundane tasks in order for it to come true. This is one reason why nature walking can be so sacred: we might learn to feel satisfaction and fulfillment with every step instead of wishing for the so-called “destination”—it is error to assume that the concept of “destiny” (and the “wish”) is a universal concept. Watch carefully how ancient African ideas can be mistranslated into English—by modern Africans let alone Europeans.

Knowing what to do from moment to moment is a powerful skill. I look forward to improving on this every day…

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