Forgetting: The first symptom of defeat

It had been over several years since I started the case of discrimination against my corporate employer.  The fight started at the workplace and worked itself up to the EEOC, before making the final move to sue in court.  All of the administrative remedies have been exhausted, and my employer was determined to use every deflection tools necessary in order to strain me and my supporters of the will to fight.


Since the tools that Employers use (especially large employers) are not only varied, but are many and can be lethal,  I've made it my business to try and recognized the ones of stealth nature--hard to recognize.  Even with its stealth proportionality, and not easily recognizable, the large potential of devastating results are the same.  Of course many, just as I had, fail to discern the many and how these weapons are in infinite motion to destroy those who the enemy have deemed as being a threat to their order.  One could say that its a systematic fix.


As any one who has tried to fight a lengthy civil suit can acknowledge, the biggest enemy can be the time needed to litigate through the many processes that the judicial system has in place.  And it's no lie, 'time is money' and anything else of value.  If you can regulate your time properly, you can probably increase your chances for being able to not be dislodged by the symbolic corporate snipers that happen to be around every corner that they deem strategic.  Likewise, if you can't seem to get a grasp on the importance of time and how it is not only able to gain victory, but it can also be the most ardent enemy where time itself can literally destroy the senses of  one's being pertaining to his/her purpose in life or purpose in life situations.  Time can also become a culprit for you and/or others by helping them forget what you'll fighting for.

 Time can also be a culprit for you and/or others by helping them to forget what you'll fighting for.

While many black leaders got their winging from being in the forefront of the civil rights movement, or at least, being in close proximity to the real leaders of the movement, many have evolved, even today, to becoming only a shadow of the passionate and determined resolve to change the collective racial mind that had afflicted America for centuries.  Not the centuries became the enemy, history is preserved, but the time that people are born to the time they die is how they are measured in the relentless battle for righteous victory.


I often wondered how it is with political prisoners who are serving time and where the keys to freedom seem to have been thrown away.  One of the classics that comes to mind is the book Soul on Ice written by (Leroy) Eldridge Cleaver, a noted Black Panther, and a activist for human rights and justice for black people.  It was especially during the late 60s an 70s where the malaise effects from centuries of racism were being laid bare and thus, prime for activism.  Blacks were labeled as coming from one of two camps.  There were those who were prone to militaristic and provocative protest (mostly symbolically, not too many white people were killed during this period, but just the opposite, many black people were killed).  Then there was the non-violent movement where it appears the camp that most of the majority landed.  While hundreds of years had past since the first slave ship docked on the shores of native America, the taste, smell and unrighteousness of the results of these periods of human destruction never quite left.  People were ready to die for their rights.  Names like Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and then there were women like Professor Angela Davis all became synonymous with the militaristic part of black civil rights movement.  All had went to jail at one time or the other on charges that had or had not been related to their fighting for civil rights.  Cleaver's book of essays shows that his troubles were more than about being a member of the Black Panthers and being true believer in the civil rights struggles.  The man had hi issues.


Looking at a snapshot view of the journeys of the three mentioned earlier, Bobby Seale is best known for his co-founding of the Black Panthers for Self Defense with Huey Newton.  But was his involvement with the Chicago Eight that really sealed his iconic place in the civil rights movements being sentenced to four years in prion for allegedly inciting a riot during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  And then it was the New Haven Black Panther trials where his status as a militaristic freedom fighter was further sealed.  It was Huey Newton who appeared more destined for fatalism, actually being assassinated by fellow members of the cause that felt betrayed.  Yet his statement:  " All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire", arguably serves as a boilerplate to many Black Americans who have either lost or are still seeking their identity in a premature Post-Racial Society.


He was talking about the teachers and institutions that he felt failed in helping him to actualize his worth as a human.  Both Seale and Newton evolved, in a sense, to becoming American consumers and capitalists where both had their failings and failed out (last) over the supposedly content of a American movie about the Panthers and who should be producing it.  Oddly enough, it was a white man, Berton Schneider, the Movie Director, that probably help place a nail in their generation of partnership in provocative, militaristic rights stances, it was not Malcolm X theology.


It was Eldridge Cleaver that probably evolved into the quintessential purveyor of living an American distorted dream who eventually seemed to void the distractions made possible during the civil rights movement.  He will probably be remembered for his becoming a conservative republican versus his fiery past in the civil rights movement.  


In a nutshell, all three men, Bobby, Eldridge an Newton were victims of time.  Quite arguably the bad side of time is one's propensity to forget about the things that made them who they were and quite arguably, their God-given mission on earth.  Even today in a purported post-racial society, a young generation of blacks are hard pressed to remember any civil rights movement where people literally died for the opportunities they have today.  So time, a purveyor of forgetfulness, has a tendency to distract people from the purpose at hand.  Some are resilient and return to that purpose, others evolve into a lesser brand of resistance, and some, if not most, simply forget what the purpose really is and disappear in to the fabric of 'lost opportunities'.


The Reverend Jesse Jackson, civil rights activist and founder of the Rainbow Coalition in a recent article proclaim that it was time to return to the incomplete struggle.  The last sentence in his article eulogized the demise of a young black male at the hands of a white (or white Hispanic):  "We have to decide. Let us take a moment to grieve for Trayvon Martin, whose life was so brutally taken from him. Then let us move from moment to movement, and revive the struggle for a more perfect Union".


Jackson's yearning for the days of the civil right movement may be more symbolic than real.  It's problematic in that he wishing for a return but fails to recognize that the glory days of the civil rights movement is all but over.  Being that he's long discarded his undivided attention to the cause, it would be more than a miracle to see his second coming.  Once the enemy has steered you off course, things will never be the same, but, people do overcome.  This is a real case of a colossal missed opportunity.  Once the civil rights movement was prematurely steered from its course of complete victory, the tool of forgetfulness by the enemy was achieved.  Enticements don't necessarily have to me milk and honey, but it can be intimidation, lust, money and greed, status and position, etc.  Reverend Jackson probably can intimate the degree of his partaking at that table were (and is).  In the case of the civil rights movement, time has helped the enemy to employ tools of deception that may have doomed the actuality of one ever becoming fully black.

The court case that I am talking about surely has been a challenge.  Time has taken its toll.  If it was not for my faith and resolve, I guess I would have given up a long time ago. The support from others, family and friends that was a given in the past, are only their for normal and short-term uses. Leaders once devoted to helping to stamp out injustice have been replaced with their other urgent preferences (maybe being on the cover of Ebony) that the enemy have made them aware through the course of time--food, rent, mortgage, job loss, reputation, titles, etc.  Once God served as the pillar of strength and has now been replaced by the commercialization of the same faith and with a plethora of money making schemes.

But, I am determined to not let time conquer my opportunity to try to put thing right, to make it better for the next generation and on.  Once I look back as Lott' Wife did, it's all over.  One would argue that the election of a black president helps to mollify the pain of the past.  But it has not only mollified the pain, but it has helped to forget the past as we speedily drift in a post racial pot as opposed to  dealing with unresolved issues.