"Africa Unite, 'cause we're moving right out of Babylon..."

"Africa Unite, 'cause we're moving right out of Babylon..."
- Bob Marley

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(email...)

Hey,

This is the picture of the starving Sudanese girl I was talking about. It's extremely disturbing and sad.

v

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(response...)

vygmalion...

this is very sad, and is the type of thing that both motivates and disturbs me, as i wonder: who's letting this happen and why (and how dangerous and dispassionate are they?; what God would allow this to happen (and where is He or She?);and how can we make sense of it (and how bad is it that we can?)

i think we can "Make the revolution a blast!" (BK Song: Tupac Resurrected), and gain positive energy from doing something about this - like your adopted indian foster-child costing you a shiny-nickel-a-day and giving you at least a shiny-nickel's worth of happiness, as opposed to shutting it out as most want to do...

... and thus, making things infinitely worse.

of course i know that ignorance is bliss (and i really believe it), and the core logic really makes sense - the mainstream info we get is so spotty and malnourishing that it sets of crazy alarms without giving us closure: they scare us into silence by yelling "fire!" and then not telling us much else...

but, we have to play through the pain and figure out the truth, because unfortunately, we can't escape it anyway.

we can't possibly stay completely ignorant when inundated with media everywhere we go... little bits of freaky-stuff will hit us and mess us up... we'll start discrediting honest people just because we've trained our brains to defensively do so, discouraging others from speaking truth to power... and frankly, we are all feeling worse - just think back a few years, and see that history will not look kindly upon today...

(...)

if you wonder how it all works, here's one tiny but significant angle:

- the U.S. is the world leader (whether we like it or not)

- the U.S. govt is the worst in history right now when it comes to caring about this stuff when it's most needed and capable

(you can see for yourself if you've seen what i've seen - no more "their side/our side" artificial equivocation bullshit. if you "look" at it - and i mean really "look" as opposed to simply assuming both sides are equally morally compelling, you would see that the side not hell-bent on destroying the world makes a hell of a lot more sense - trust me...)

- the U.S. govt needs to lead the world in the fight to save Africa from disaster

- BUT, if they treat African Americans so poorly...

(in Texas "there was a 360% increase in the number of African Americans sent to jail for drug offenses, while there was a 9% decrease in the number of whites sent to jail for drug offenses" - Jason Ziedenberg, Executive Director, Justice Policy Institute; referenced in BK Blog: T.R.U.E. - B.L.O.G.)

- then how can they possibly care about Africans?

(...)

since current solutions aren't working, we have to frame everything differently, accomodating from our narcissistic selves-outward to fix it, and avoiding the mainstream default argument i've been telling you was objectively completely wrong for a while: leave everyone alone because "That's the way It is, He is, She is, I am." (BK Blog: T.R.U.E. - B.L.O.G.)

the only way to give people enough pride to believe they can change the world, is to give them that pride in incremental steps: changing their "own" world first (their sphere of influence) for the better, and then using those changes as a stable jump-off for bigger challenges...

in fact, i've been saying this for over a year now...

"(Tupac) was talking to his people, and advocating change and success in the ghetto, often a lost land in American culture discussed in terms of perpetual karma: ghettos are bad places with bad people, that's just the way it is." (BK: original Tupacumentary article, re: T.H.U.G. - L.I.F.E.)

and so, m'lady...

if you're happily sunning yourself by the pool in the greek islands, and you see a 3-yr old kid drowning in the pool beside you, just scoop him up and plop him down safely, and let's hope the rest of the world does the same for Africa...

peace,
BK

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Kevin Carter captured this striking image of a starving Sudanese girl who collapsed on her way to a feeding centre while a vulture waited nearby. It's not known what happend to the girl after the picture was taken. The photograph became an icon for mass starvation in Africa. The war in Sudan was between an Arab Muslim-dominated government in the north, and black Christian insurgents from the south.

In the 1990s, the cold war gave way to dozens of ethnic, religious, and sectional conflicts. Millions of people were tortured, starved, and slaughtered. Many were innocent children. This photo of a vulture standing near a starving Sudanese child won Kevin Carter the 1994 Pultzer Prize for photography. A few months after receiving this award, Carter, who was only thirty-three years old, committed suicide.

Photographer: Kevin Carter (1961-1994)

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Epilogue:

I got,
No stress,
When I test,
The blessed,
Getting stuff off my chest,
Allows me to rest,

I'll take care of the rest,
Whenever I confess,
Win over the stressed,
'Til they see,
We're all blessed...