When the stress of life gets overwhelming, I sometimes play a little mental game with myself.

If I were going to build Utopia, what would it look like?

First let me clarify:  The subject of Homelessness has been on my mind a lot lately.  Not the usual depiction of homelessness, that of people living on the streets, or in shelters.  Those are the ones easily counted, and those that immediately come to mind.  I am thinking about the Hidden Homeless: single adults and families that live in motels, in their cars, or couch surf with various friends and family while trying to sort out their lives.  This group consists of people that generally have a job, but through some misfortune ended up losing their house or apartment at a time when it was difficult to obtain another place quickly.  Due to their lower Middle Class income (Think a family of three or four making anywhere between $32,000 and $75,000 annually as a rough estimate), not only do they not qualify for any type of emergency aid, they often have very little of no savings to fall back on, as this group tends to live paycheck to paycheck, or alternately used up any savings they may have had on whatever misfortune caused them to lose their homes in the first place.

When creating my own little version of Utopia, I tend to start with this lower Middle Class group, also referred to as the Working Class.  This is the class of Blue Collar, and lower level white collar employees that we depend on to get those critical, front line jobs done, but overlook when it comes to thinking of someone who may need assistance down the line. Although this is mostly a self sufficient group, even they realize that they are not islands unto themselves, and everybody needs a little help sometimes, even if all they want is enough time and space to comfortably get back on their feet.  It is this lack of room to fix errors or make up for lost income that turns what should have only been a temporary setback into years of attempts to recover a family's life.

In my own little world, all people would be paid enough to keep pace with the cost of living.  There is no reason a working person should be priced out of having a decent place to live within reasonable distance from their job.  And, no, I don't consider having to live 60 miles away from your job in order to find decent, affordable housing in reasonably family friendly neighborhoods (an issue endemic to Los Angeles County) a reasonable distance.  Whatever money is saved by living far away from work is immediately lost in time (over an hour each way), transportation costs (gas and maintenance on the car, or obscenely expensive bus or train passes), and physical exhaustion from the commute.  I can't see where having employees worn out from from hours long commutes benefits any business.

Another option, since we are so fond of handing out tax breaks, is to offer tax breaks to property owners willing to embrace an income based rent structure.  Here's how it would work: A family finds, and applies for, an apartment. Once they pass the requisite background and reference checks (for those concerned about criminal behavior), they present the owner/landlord/property management firm with recent paystubs (or tax returns for the self employed), from which the receiving party determines what the family's rent should be based on their net income, ideally no more than 1/3 or 1/4 of the total family income.  The tax break would make up the difference.  This would ensure that no family was spending more than 60% of their total income on housing costs (which is where quite a few families are now), it would provide for constant residency, and very low turnover for apartment owners, as well as a stable and steady income (with residents needing to provide proof of income either annually, or whenever there is a significant shift in income, such as a job loss, or total family income moves to over six figures, at which point most can afford Fair Market Rent) for the owners, and the ability of residents to build community within their neighborhoods.  It is this sense of community that prevents neighborhoods from the downward slide that occurs when there are people constantly moving in and out, and neighbors no longer know each other.

The key to eliminating homelessness, in my world, anyway, would hinge upon employment for all who wanted to work, a wage that would allow for living at least adequately, help and services for those that needed them the most (not based on income, a method which leaves out that same working class), and a rent system that allows everyone to participate.  The subtext of all of these changes, is respect for the work and lives of the working class people that drive the economy.  They are people, not statistics, whose labor, and who are we kidding, money, contribute the most towards keeping the American way of life moving forward.  The lack of respect for this group, (which led to the subsequent financial squeeze on them that ended up contributing greatly to the Great Depression), is a sad reminder that were we not so busy thumbing our collective noses at those we consider socially beneath us, while groveling for crumbs from the tables of the upper classes, we might actually stand a chance of solving some of the more pressing social issues of our time.

I know my little world will likely never happen.  What I hope for is that sometime during my lifetime, our nation will come up with a more compassionate, humane way to help everyone who actually needs it.  We are one of the most advanced societies on Earth, but we cannot manage to think of a better response to a dramatic increase in homeless families than subtle victim-blaming followed by suggestions that if they really wanted to change they're circumstances, they would "work harder"?  We can manage to find money to support conflict in every corner of the Earth, but can never manage to come up with the money to solve internal issues (housing, education, infrastructure repair), that might actually restore America to it's place as a leader among nations. It can be done, but it would take a partnership of leaders and citizens with a will of iron to create and enforce a plan for solving our issues that would be structured enough to meet our goals, but flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances.  That is how problems get solved.

It's worth noting that in my little world, the government we elect, actually represents US.  Not the groups and individuals that financed their campaigns and may have a vested interest in Utopia (or any kind of balanced society) coming to pass. The cynic in me figures that this is the real reason things never change, and permanent solutions are never found.  The optimist in me wants to be proven wrong.

You never know...

It came in the middle of her answering the standard question, "So.  Anything interesting happen at school today?"

I rarely get to pick my daughter up from school, mostly because I work a full time, day shift job.  Mercifully, I work a 9/80 schedule, which means that although I still work 80 hours over the course of two weeks, it is compressed into 9 days, giving me one day off every other week.  My daughter loves my days off because they mean that not only does she get to sleep until 7:00 (a decided improvement over getting up at 5:30), I generally take her to school and pick her up, which gives us time to talk and spend a few minutes together at the beginning and end of her school day.  It's only a few minutes, but we try to make those few minutes count as much as possible.  Especially considering the conversation that followed.

"So, you remember XYZ?"  I rather vaguely remember the little girl, as the same rotating group of kids has basically been together since Kindergarten.

"Yeah, sorta. Why?"

A 10-year old version of OMG enters her voice: "Well XYZ had some shorts on today, and at some point she rolled them all they way up to HERE (using her hands to indicate where the upper thigh connects to the hipbone), and she was showing a little bit in the back!  She got sent to the office, but she hurried up and rolled them back down before she got there."  At the next stop light, I turned around and looked at my daughter.  "You have GOT to be kidding me?"  "Nope.  She hangs around with a group of girls that call themselves "The Strippers". (And yes, she did the Air Quotation Marks with her fingers!)  That is NOT cool."

The light changed, and we continued running a few errands but I was floored by her story.  Understand, I am not a person to get into slut-shaming, and I believe in a woman's right to make her own choices at all times, regarding everything from what she chooses to wear, to what career she decides to embark on.  Note I said, a WOMAN's choices.  These are 9 and 10 year old girls.  In Elementary school.  Identifying with strippers, the ultimate projection of oneself for the approval of the male gaze.  This is troubling in that, while we are trying to get children to begin to imagine themselves in business or science or medicine or technology by pointing out those that have succeeded in those fields as examples, there are still those out there that are so mesmerized by the false glamour and faux wealth presented to them by music, television and movies that more reasonable voices are being drowned out.  Worse than that, however, is the loss of innocence implied by these young girls knowledge of, and desire to emulate, such an adult concept.

We can all remember a time when we were not burdened with the trials of adult life; when our concerns were Barbies, Hot Wheels, Legos, playing hide and seek or riding bikes for hours on end.  And we can all tell you when that concern turned away from our childhood fascinations, and we started becoming more interested in the opposite sex as something more than one more person to play Tag with. I find it alarming that the innocence window is shrinking every year.  Why not allow kids to be kids for as long as possible?  I know that there are products to be sold, and money to be made from those that want their children to have the latest, and most fashionable clothing and gadgets, but 7 year olds in booty shoots, boots and cut off tops (worn to school by one of Ashley's classmates a few years ago) gives one pause.  Certain clothing, worn in certain combinations, are generally meant to have the effect of gaining favorable male attention.  Of course, the flip side of that is just trying to cool off, and being on the receiving end of unwanted, and often vulgar, male attention.  Being that I live in a fairly diverse, working class urban neighborhood, I am hard-pressed to speak to which of those two scenarios was at play here.

It has become very difficult to create safe spaces for children to have full childhoods.  Especially in inner-city neighborhoods, where the rush to assume adult identities and characteristics is exacerbated by a media obsessed with a certain image of inner-city inhabitants, popular culture that celebrates and markets pornography based images of women as ideal, and parents determined to give their kids everything they didn't have as children, even at the cost of a hurried leap into adolescence.  Or emulating adult entertainment professions that in reality they should know nothing about.

I was a kid once.  I gamed my mother a couple of times by wearing one thing out of the house, then changing once I got to school. I got caught, obviously, and subsequently was closely scrutinized by my mother everyday after that to make sure I didn't do it again.  I don't fault my mother for this, as I realize now that she understood that whatever you think of yourself, people are going to perceive you based on whatever they were taught about how people present themselves.  Meaning dressing scantily to attract male attention/approval might backfire if those same males were taught to perceive scantily dressed women, not as the sexually liberated women they see themselves as, but as the loose or amoral, according to whoever raised them.  I was also 16, and a junior in high school at the time. This is not a conversation anyone should be worrying about with elementary school aged children, girl or boy.

I know I can't protect my daughter from everything.  That's impossible, and I can't even begin to try.  But I can make a small place for her to safely explore her world without having to learn to understand an adult world, and adult concepts before she is physically, mentally or emotionally ready.  It's a small thing, but the least I can do to make sure that she has a COMPLETE childhood before she is launched into the grown-up world.

We are almost 10 days into the Siege at Ferguson.  Not a military action, thousands of miles away, but an overzealous law enforcement response to protests waged in the wake of an unjustified police shooting in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. While watching the coverage, and reading many of the articles and blog posts that have been written in the wake of this latest tragedy, numerous people have mentioned the continued efforts to dehumanize the victim of the shooting, while demonizing the protesters.  The media tactic has been around as long as newspapers have been in print, if not longer, and all those who have called the news media out on this shameful habit were obviously correct in doing so.  They are missing one crucial fact, however.

In order to be dehumanized, we have to be seen as human.

Like so many things in America, the routine dehumanization of Blacks can be traced to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The entire southern economy was built on and depended on the free labor of those captured or sold into slavery in Africa , then transported to these shores for sale.  In order to justify the highly profitable, but morally reprehensible, practice of chattel slavery, as practiced in the U.S., the argument had to be made and emphasized that these were not people, but things.  No more than animals to be worked until they died, then you could either by more, or worse, breed them.  Even in the Census, slaves were only counted as 3/5 of a person.  That this point of view existed for at least 200 years prior to the end of slavery, is very telling about how attitudes towards all minorities, not just Blacks, developed over time as the nation grew.

After the slaves were freed, when most Blacks were just trying to live peacefully and support their families, the Ku Klux Klan formed.  Although, if you look carefully enough, their services weren't really needed.  After 200 years of being conditioned to believe that an entire race of people were all mostly lazy, ignorant, or animalistic, those in positions of power: the bankers, landowners and politicians, had no interest in creating a fair and just society were all men could propel themselves up the socioeconomic ladder by their own hard work.  There is no profit in that, for them anyway, so we have the invention of the system of sharecropping, a system meant to keep Blacks as close to a condition of slavery as possible, while also managing to sweep in the rural poor as well. It was during this era that we also saw the beginnings of the "Us vs Them" style of politics, which used the by now widely believed stereotypes of Blacks to scare poor Whites into believing that the Blacks were out to take away their livelihoods (rather than just trying to live independently), and/or commit some heinous crime against them.  American has always had a need for a "villain" (in order for someone to be declared a "hero"), and due to the fact that Blacks are highly visible, all that is needed to keep the population in fear of a certain group is to find someone who fits the definition of what they are afraid of, and parade that person out front, as often and as loudly as possible, drowning out the fact that the vast majority of the population is not only nothing like this person, but probably has more in common with the person being fed fear then they realize.  The purpose of the KKK was two-fold: to keep Blacks "in their place", which meant not doing well enough for themselves that they saw themselves as equal to the whites of the time (the phrase "Uppity Nigger" was coined during this time); and to control the remainder of the population through feeding into their fear of the "Other", thus allowing those in power to stay in power.

Just underneath the surface, although slavery ended 149 years ago, the lingering notion that Blacks (and other minorities) aren't really human, hangs heavy in the air over any media coverage of events surrounding largely minority communities.  Therein lies the rush to portray them in as negative a light as possible, especially when their death at the hands of an authority figure is in question.  Which leaves the parents, relatives and friends to tell the story of a complex life, rather than the caricature the law enforcement community needs you to believe in order to justify their actions.  They have to feed the fear.  Do not think there is not an economic component to this in these days, just as there was back then.  Now, those that benefit from media reinforced fear of the "Other", are not just the bankers, landowners and politicians (who sell fear as a means of staying in office), but the Military, Law Enforcement agencies (it is called the Prison Industrial Complex for a reason), home security companies and gun manufacturers all receive massive budgets, and huge profits, from selling seeming safety from the mysterious "Other".  The "Other" who in reality is more like them than they realize, if they would only see beyond what they are told to believe.

All races of people have people within that race that are criminals, fools and ne'er do wells.  The multi-award winning TV show Breaking Bad, and the much discussed show Sons of Anarchy, show that the drug trade and gang violence are not limited to urban minorities, concentrated in inner cities.  Rural America has it's fair share of issues, but those that live there are largely given the benefit of the doubt (or they used to be) in interaction with law enforcement and subsequent treatment by the media.  For Blacks and other minorities, the lowest common denominator is the default by which they are measured. Always. Minorities often have to go far above and beyond in order for the world to know that our loved ones and friends were not the "Thugs" (code word for all minorities) that they are being portrayed as.  The ultimate scenario of Guilty Until Proven Innocent, is what they have all come to expect.  Which, 149 years after the end of slavery, is a shame.

When William Shakespeare gave that speech to Shylock during the court trial in The Merchant of Venice, he was making a comment about the view of Jews in Elizabethan society during the late 1500's.  What does it say about us as a technologically advanced, presumably First-World country when we still have to ask those same questions in 2014 in a mid-western suburb?  If all you know about an entire group of people is what you've been fed in the media, and maybe had one or two interactions with a few representatives, how much do you really know, especially if you are going to continue spreading the lies, fear and hate?

My son is 21.  He is already a veteran of being stopped for no other reason than "because", and was taught early on to be polite and respectful to law enforcement, no matter how they may be treating him.  He is funny and charming, but he can also be temperamental and easily upset if he feels that he is being treated unfairly.  He is by no means a perfect person, but neither is he some sort of always to be feared "Other", and like most parents of imperfect Black males, this is what I worry about most.  Having to defend my son should one day, propelled by fear, paranoia, and 350 years of being repeatedly told that my son is not a real person, some law enforcement officer will misread a harmless word or gesture, then completely overreact, thereby turning my son into another heartbreaking statistic.  Which they would then try to justify by bringing up the fact that he wasn't a great student, and whatever else they can think of, dig up or make up.  Which would leave those of us that loved him in the position of trying to remind the world that this wasn't some animal; this was a son, brother, nephew and friend, that was wonderfully human, flaws and all.

We all are.  Now if we could only realize that and treat each other accordingly.

Addendum on 12/1/14: I am re-posting this today, instead of another post I was writing, because this subject seems even more important today, in the wake of the Grand Jury verdict, than it did when I first posted it 3 1/2 months ago.  I truly believe that our historical inability to be perceived as human beings is slowly beginning to tear away at something deep in the fabric of American society, and if we don't stop this dehumanizing of the minority population, we are setting ourselves for a societal failure that we will not be able to handle or contain.

So my daughter and I went on a mission last weekend.

I was mailing some postcards for a geography project for a friend of mine, and decided that since I was mailing postcards representing different facets of the Southern California lifestyle, I would mail them from the cities on the postcards so that they would have a matching postmark.

I proceeded to unglue grumpy daughter from her phone, and pour her into the car with a mission: spot the blue U.S Postal Service boxes on the route, then get out and mail the post cards once I pulled to a stop.  She looked at the postcards and read out loud that we were headed for Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Hollywood.  She pointed out that she had never been to any of these places, although she had heard about them on tv.  This was true: like most Los Angeles natives, I tend to avoid going anywhere that involves a freeway unless I absolutely have to.  Because a trip to the Westside involved two of the most consistently congested freeways in Los Angeles (the 405 and the 10, respectively), and guaranteed horrific traffic once I arrived, this trip was not high on my to-do list for a holiday weekend.  But since I promised myself that I was going to do it, I looked at this as an opportunity to get my daughter out of our familiar neighborhood, and give her a chance to see some things she had only heard about.

Looking at the Santa Monica postcard, she noted the iconic Ferris wheel at Pacific Park, and asked if she would be able to see it from the car.  I assured her she would as I exited the freeway, aimed my car north to Wilshire Blvd., then west to the shore line.  The late afternoon sun, preparing to set behind the Pacific Ocean, formed a picture perfect backdrop framed by towering palm trees.  In moments like this, I know why I love living in Southern California.  It's a reminder that sometimes the fantasy really does match the reality, even if only for a moment.  After she mailed the postcard, I drove west, pointing out the Third Street Promenade, The Fairmont Miramar hotel, and all of the casual strollers out on this perfect afternoon.  When we finally turned south again, she immediately spotted the Ferris wheel, the roller coaster, and saw all of the people walking up and down the strip of park.  Her fascination was earnest, especially when she heard a comedian, surrounded by a large audience, regaling the crowd with his routine over a loud speaker.  She didn't realize people could do that, as that's just not something you see down in our neck of the South Bay.

Even though she wanted to see more, we needed to get moving to get to Beverly Hills, so after a few turns, I was back on Wilshire Blvd., heading east to show my daughter perhaps the most famous zip code, and one of the tonier shopping areas, in Los Angeles.  As we headed east, I marveled at how Wilshire Blvd works as a kind of a thread that ties together multiple diverse neighborhoods in Los Angeles.  The section we were on would give us a nice tour of the tony Westside of Los Angeles, winding it's way from the western terminus in artsy, laid back Santa Monica, to the staid upper middle class Brentwood, then on past the sprawling VA complex,  the cold austerity of the towering steel Federal Building and Veteran's cemetery into Westwood, the home of UCLA.  Once past UCLA, we climb through winding hills, passing between massive residential towers that I am positive have a pretty enviable view of both the placid ocean, and the gleaming towers of Downtown Los Angeles, giving the residents the feeling of being a participant in Tolkein's saga of the the Two Towers, only instead of Orthanc and Minas Morgul, they have a choice between the bustle of the financial district surrounding the U.S. Bank Tower, or the relaxed, gateway to the Westside feel of Westwood's Condo Canyon.

Just past the Los Angeles Country Club, we pass the Welcome to Beverly Hills sign.  A few blocks after we cross Santa Monica Blvd, we spot the familiar blue post office box, I pull over onto a side street, and my daughter happily jumps out to mail the next postcard.  My daughter rolls down both windows, and comments on the wide, clean streets and glitzy shop exteriors lining the street.  I ask her if she'd like to see all the fancy shops on Rodeo Drive.  She whines at first, asking what the big deal is.  I turn left onto Rodeo Drive, and her whining immediately turns to squeals of excitement, as she sees the names of designers she recognizes from television, magazines, and conversations with friends.  She is swearing that at some point, she is going to come back here with friends to see what the REAL THING looks like up close.  As much as I loved her enthusiasm, it was getting late, and we still had to make our way to Hollywood.

I turned east on to Santa Monica Blvd, and ended up giving my daughter a tour of West Hollywood.  Even I sometimes forget about this stretch of Los Angeles between Hollywood and the Westside.  We both ended up marveling at exactly how busy it was, with all of the people just walking around, into and out of stores, bars and restaurants.  My daughter also rather comically noted the number of men walking around with their shirts off.  It was a warm enough day to justify it, of course, but I wasn't quite ready to explain that among the large gay population in the area, this was just something they do.  Score one point for mental laziness.  While navigating monster traffic, I was unwilling to answer the onslaught of questions that I would have gotten more than anything else.

The sun had not quite set all the way when I finally turned north onto La Brea.  Driving toward Hollywood always gives a sense of excitement, as the farther North you drive, the more lights you see.  Even us crusty LA natives are dazzled by the bright lights that promise big thing to all those that come here with big dreams.  My daughter spotted the final post office box as we turned on to Hollywood Blvd., and I pulled over to let her deposit the last postcard.  She chattered, oohed and ahhed non-top as we inched our way slowly down one of the most storied streets in America.  She read as many of the names of the stars on the sidewalk as she could see in the dim light before she gave up, and made me promise to bring her back on day so she could walk around at look at everything at a slower pace.

And that seemed to be the theme of the day.  How often we don't venture outside of our own little comfort zone unless we have some pressing reason to do so.  Southern California is undeniably beautiful, but how many people never feel the warm breeze coming off of any beach, or see the bright gleaming shops, or dazzling lights right next door.  There is something to be said for being a tourist in your own state.  You never know what you might discover, and you still get the thrill of coming home after an adventure to view something you haven't seen before.

Driving south on La Brea, we drive through several neighborhoods, including one that locals call The Jungle, recently renamed by urban planners to the more friendly Baldwin Village, and after the winding drive through Baldwin Hills, we drive over a hill, called Overhill, BTW, and I glimpse perhaps my favorite view in Los Angeles: as you descend the hill southbound on La Brea, as soon as you come around the curve, you are greeted by the lights of the South Bay.  More than the tall shiny buildings of Downtown, more than the lights of Hollywood, or the beautiful blue of the Pacific Ocean, the sight of the South Bay speaks to me of home.  My home of the last ten years, that I love for the access it gives me to the glitz and promise of the Los Angeles dream factory, while still affording me the ability to go home and get away from it.    We make it home to the relative peace of the neighborhood we call home, with a promise to venture out for another look at what we know is there on another day.

Because it is so close, we know we will, too.

When I write the names of my children and myself, I write three different last names.

Maybe you've heard of me.

I am the never married, inner city single parent.  The image that is painted of me  by the world at large is one of wanton sexual promiscuity, complete irresponsibility and damaged children.  Statistically speaking, we live in an impoverished area, we live at or near the poverty level because I don't have enough of an education to have a job making much more than minimum wage, and since mine is the only income, it is woefully inadequate.  My children will suffer from not having both parents in the home, all the studies say, and I am to blame for it all.

That's what conservative media sells their constituency, anyway.  For some people that's very true.  For SOME people.  For most of the rest of us, the truth is far more complicated and nuanced.  If you are willing to listen, there is a story there, just not the one you think it is.

Mine is a story of an insecure girl who sought to soothe her insecurity in the worst possible way, relationships with men thought to be the objects of other women's attentions.  If you were to ask me what I was thinking, I would probably tell you that I thought that I could be the one to make the relationships "work" where other women had failed previously.  The fact that I believed this not once, but twice, tells you that I was either a hopeless romantic, an incurable optimist, incredibly foolish or a rotating combination of all three.  All I can say is that between romance novels and romantic comedies, there was a long stretch in my life where I had particularly unrealistic notions about relationships, and people's willingness and ability to "change" given the right circumstances.  Mercifully, I figured it out at the two child mark, but some women take far longer, and unfortunately, are the ones who turn bitter after the reality that you can't change people sets in.

But as much as I admit to making two extremely poor choices (based on looks alone) in relationships, eleven years apart, I do not regret having my children.  That's not to say that this has been an easy road.  I realized on the day of my son's birth that the majority of the responsibility for child raising was going to be on me, and I made a promise to God and myself that I was going to step up to the best of my ability.  I was one month shy of my 21st birthday with only a high school education, but I had a pleasant enough personality, a good professional demeanor, gave great "phone", and had a history of front of house type jobs (Which I didn't realize at the time meant I had kind of a pretty face. I've always thought I was funny looking.   Live and learn.), which I was able to translate into a series of receptionist jobs.  I say series because initially the only work I could get was through temp agencies, which was far from steady work (I can't begin to tell you the number of times we were evicted because I was out of work just long enough to get behind in the rent.), but it kept us afloat for 10 years.  During that time I worked my way up from Receptionist to Executive Secretary by learning on the job any skill I didn't already have.  The upshot to that, however, was that my son had a lot of issues both at school, and with his daycare, and when you are a contract employee, if you don't go to work, you don't get paid.  Which is why I missed my son's learning disabilities by so far a margin that by the time anyone was halfway willing to do anything about it, he had already given up on school.

By the time my daughter came along, I was in both a better, and a worse, spot.  I had completed trade school to learn how to repair computers, thereby turning a longtime hobby into a profession.  But my relationship with her father was already mostly over, and by the time she was six months old, we were living on my sister's living room floor.  It was a long slow crawl to the lower middle class for us.  The first step was an entry level civil service job for me at the ripe old age of 32.  The next step was a small 2 bedroom apartment in a working class suburb of the South Bay.  What was supposed to happen was for us to build from there.  But...

Our little family fits the description while blowing it out of the water.  Yes, we live paycheck to paycheck.  I wanted to live in a safe-ish neighborhood, especially because of my son, and I wanted to be somewhere I could let my daughter play outside, without fear or worry.  Mercifully, where I live is about average for the region, price-wise.  I drive an eight year old used car, but there is still a car note, and insurance.  I tried mightily to live without a car on several occasions, and so long as I had no life outside work or church, living without a car was doable.  The minute I wanted to do anything at night, or in any of the outlying suburbs at odd hours, there was an issue. My son did drop out of high school, and is struggling because of it, but so are many other young men and women with untreated ADHD and other learning disabilities.  The ADHD, by the way, is hereditary.  I have it, as does my daughter.  If you can tell from the title of this blog, there are three people in this house that have fairly serious social, emotional, concentration and organization issues.

Nobody knows how or why, but somehow, we make it work.  Despite what you may have heard about young Black males without a high school education, my son has not only NOT become a criminal, he has never been in any major trouble.  My daughter is an academic superstar, with the social behaviors exhibited by natural introverts, preferring to be alone with electronics or with a good book as often as with other people.  Whatever they end up believing later on in life, I gave them a Christian foundation so that they would both have some spiritual grounding, as well as an extended church family.  I have always encouraged communication between the fathers and the children.  Note:  I said between the FATHERS and the CHILDREN.  I have also made it very clear that the state of these relationships are the responsibility of the father, as I would neither force these relationships, nor discourage them.  I would only intervene if there were absolutely no other way to resolve an issue.  My son has chosen to have limited contact with his father; my daughter's relationship with her father is, much like the Facebook status,  "complicated" (see earlier statement about only intervening if I had to).

You won't hear about my little family on the news of course.  We are the OK square pegs that simply do not fit in the dysfunctional round holes that society would have you believe we should be in.  We are far from perfect, obviously.  I get frustrated with all the new parenting methods and I yell.  My restless, impatient son is drifting between goals, and trying to figure out what to do with himself.  My daughter is in the throws of an ADHD enhanced pre-teen life, and it's attached emotionalism.  Quite normal, actually.

No one is suffering from a lack of anything.  Sometimes we run out of things, or have to wait until payday.  We are three people getting through life, day by day.  Nothing remarkable or extraordinary.  Which doesn't sell newspapers or political agendas.

Which is why you've never heard of me.  Or any of the rest of us.  And you never will.

This being the final week of Black History Month, I couldn't let the entire month go by without a Black History post.

I remember Black History Month growing up in the inner city schools I attended.  While there was a great deal of attention paid to the same three to five figures most influential in Black History (Tubman, Parks, King, et al.), we were also encouraged to look up other African Americans and report on them.  The thinking back then, especially as we entered middle and high school, was that if we could find a role model in the field that we eventually wanted to work in, we might be more encouraged to stick with it.  Then, as now, most of the popular media attention was focused on African Americans in sports and entertainment, but we were told to dig deeper.  We were told to look into Politics, Science, Medicine, Education, Literature, literally almost anything but sports and entertainment.  Self images were being formed, and every adult knew it.  If we were going to pick role models outside of our parents (which happens as we try to build our separate identities), then our parents wanted to make sure that we were focused on the qualities that would eventually shape us into the type of productive, progressive human beings they knew we were capable of being rather than the shallow caricatures the media often portrayed us as.

In 1983, new wave group Oingo Boingo posed the question "Who Do You Want To Be Today?", then proceeded to ask if we wanted to be just like someone on tv.  For African American youth and young adults, this was a loaded question.  If television defined and reinforced our roles, then we were expected to aspire to little more than the thin visions of ourselves that were permitted to be shown in popular media.  Until Bill Cosby brought the vision of a successful, intact, middle class family headed by a physician and an attorney to American prime time in the mid-80's, we were often shown as broken families, loud clowns, or stoic sidekicks, with very few exceptions. This was at the dawn of the music video area, and the beginning of the definition of our lives and roles by the portrayals of Black men and women, and their relationships in these musical shorts.  During this time, we were also introduced to the excesses of the hip-hop genre, and although not all of the artists preached materialism as pseudo religion, those were the artists that came to dominate the airwaves.  We were assailed at all times by the tales of the extraordinary feats, and failures, of superstar athletes.

So who did we want to be?  For 28 days each year we were asked to expand our definitions of who we could be, by turning our focus away from the media driven definition of what success should look like for us, and based on our own research, begin to craft what we wanted our futures to look like.  There were, and there always will be, those who aspire to sports and entertainment.  For quite a few of our young men, and some young women, sports were just the ticket needed to pay for their college educations.  Educations that produced doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants and entrepreneurs.  Educations that were not wasted, because due to a partnership between home and the classroom, youth were given something to strive towards by first being made to look back.  Somewhere, in our shared history, was someone that we could relate to, whose career, or life, was something we would want to emulate.

For me, Black History Month has always amounted to finding the answers to three questions: Where have we been?  Where are we now?  Where are we want to go?  These questions were the basis of our study of Black History many years ago, and sadly are being overlooked today in our hurry for the next headline, the next hero, and sadly for African Americans, the next heartbreak or humiliation.  But if we continue to tell the old stories to the next generation, not just the safe, familiar narratives, but those diverse voices that tell every side of the African American story, maybe they will get something new out the stories.  We never know who we are inspiring when we inform our youth that there is more to our history than the snippet that is shown to them in the media.  Because if we don't give them the full picture of the possibilities available to them, how are we going to expect them to decide, with any real clarity, who they want to be?

I will always remember my seventh birthday, because that's when my parents took my older sister and I to see The Wiz.

If I have an absurd love of musicals, it probably started with the modernized, urbanized tale of of a young woman named Dorothy, and her adventure as she struggled to find the true meaning of home.  As young girls, we were meant to empathize with the journey of Dorothy, as she tried to make it home, and helped others find what they already had (the Scarecrow had always been intelligent, the Tin Man indeed had feelings, and the Lion's courage surfaced when it needed to), even if they didn't realize it.  We understood Dorothy (even if she was a kindergarten teacher instead of a teenager, a concession made due to the casting of then 33-year old Diana Ross in the lead role) and certainly empathized with her quest, although we would not have to deal with career trajectory issues for another dozen years or so.  When I started watching the movie again with my own children some years ago, I began to notice themes, bits of dialogue and song lyrics I hadn't noticed before.

The many references to our urban reality, although handled with humor, pointed to the very real situations we faced on a daily basis.  The munchkins turned into permanent graffiti for painting on the walls of a park, showed children paying the ultimate price for what came to be called tagging, although back in the late 70's, they really were trying to make art, not just marking gang territory.  The Tin Man who hid his feelings behind jokes could be any of us who hide our true feelings in order to survive in our day to day lives.  Feelings are thought to be your enemy, and a sign of weakness, so we stifle them by whatever means necessary, in his case with humor, but occasionally with food, alcohol or worse.  The Lion's loud display of bravado, to cover up the fact that he felt he had no courage, was easily echoed in the legions of young men and women who resorted to violence and crime, based on a false, but popular, vision of what they thought courage looked like.

One of my favorite set pieces, and one of the funniest, was the Scarecrow and the Crows.  Here we have a young crow whose job is to scare the birds of prey away from the crops and seedlings.  When not doing this, which is most of the time as he is rather harmless looking, he entertains and educates himself by reading the bits of paper used to provide his stuffing.  He also yearns for a chance to come down from his perch and take a walk in his garden.  The crows like him where he is, of course, helpless and unable to stop them from stealing food from the garden.  To this end, not only do they refuse to help him off the pole, they unintentionally conspire to keep him from learning anything that would help the Scarecrow to help himself.  The Crows figure that by having The Scarecrow repeat their defeatist, cynical mantra (set to a good, dance-able beat, and sung well by a young Michael Jackson), they might maintain control over both him and their advantageous situation.  This was not new.

As far back as the 1950's, a crab barrel mentality, in which crabs try to keep each other from climbing out of the barrel by pulling them back in, has existed in the darker corners of urban centers.  Ostracism awaited anyone who dared display that they were academically talented, and/or wanted to rise above their circumstances.  Especially in lower socio-economic areas, reading was considered uppity, and the reader was thought to be either trying to be better than everyone else, or wasting their time, since they were unlikely to get a much better job than menial work, based on where their current place in life was. There was, some people believed, no escape from the life your parents led, so why even try?  The message of the Crows, then, was this:  Since the Game of Life is rigged to favor those that were already going to win, don't bother playing.  You will lose anyway, and feel worse for having tried.

What was true in the late 1970s is still true today.  Rampant anti-intellectualism (say that five times fast!) permeates urban culture.  Anyone that strays away from the accepted messages of hedonism (the search for pleasure above all things) and conspicuous consumption (you are what you buy) is regarded with a great deal suspicion and heaping doses of scorn.  Popular media feeds us a steady diet of images and music that tell us that we should aspire to look successful on the outside, never mind any education, as we are not expected to accomplish much else.  The messages are all wrapped up in pretty packaging as well.  Hmm.  Hedonism, materialism and negativity all set to a nice beat, with glamorous images.  Sound familiar?

Of course the movie goes on to a happy resolution, everyone finds what they are looking for, and Dorothy finds out the true meaning of home before being transported back to her New York City neighborhood.  But I've always found it interesting the things you realize when you first start hearing the words to the music you loved as a child, as an adult.  I never noticed that the lyrics to the song "Greased Lightning", from one of my other favorite musicals, Grease, were so dirty until I watched the original version of the movie sometime in my early 30's, after only watching the edited version on broadcast television for many years.  But aside from that, I am glad that the ultimate message of the crows, that of giving up in the face of obstacles, was defeated by the Scarecrow himself, with the aid of Dorothy and her dog in the movie.  He proved that no one has to let the  negativity that surrounds them on a daily basis define them, or decide their path.  He sang it actually.  To a nice, dance-able beat.

I still enjoy this movie.  Granted, I now understand both the lyrics and the underlying messages, a perspective that being 35 years removed from the first time I saw it as a child has provided.  The positive themes of family and self-determination presented in the film (Dorothy was afraid to make any real decisions, or leave the comfort zone of her aunt's home, until she was thrust into Oz), are what I believe the filmmakers really wanted the viewing audience to focus on.  Yes, the other, more negative connotations are there, and while it is good to be aware of them (mindless viewing of ANYTHING is always a bad idea), I believe that the larger point is that we determine our own fate, either by our actions, or lack thereof.  Sometimes despite where we started.

And like all journeys, it's always better when we make the trip with friends.  And music.