The real meaning to life is a personal ONE; no one can tell you what that meaning will ever be.  They can only make suggestions.  But the real challenge is yours.  And it is your authority that will set you free.
 It was Frederick Douglass who was quoted as saying, “I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
Life carries us as far as one wants to GO but one must first Dream the possibilities, to not imagine life’s many possibilities is only to assume the worse.   

Everyone wants pie
 A necessary evil is it to care about, who’s on top.  Let’s not talk honesty, divine rights, the separation or the marriage.  Forget about humanity, terrorism, mistrust, faith, hope and the beliefs that their actions are right.  Skip the necessary fight, for the common good; the price of gasoline and sin.    Lost are the words on men with no ears and a body of wants, because everyone is looking for balance, everyone wants pie, and no one wants to admit it; but here we are, the good, the bad, the part-timers and the fooled all pretending to have it figured out – that’s what my grandfather took in and it made him smile, the foolish too blind to prepare for the road that is long.   

 

Singers sang about their dissatisfaction and poets got “naked” over their pains and the little pretties that threaten to steal our hearts along the way while a new generation emerged fill with love, peace and happiness amid the outbreaks of war adding weight to the adage a “king” would coin, “injustice anywhere, directly affects justices everywhere,” and time never stands still neither does rain clouds.   

 

The dream led by the church would be “spirited” to action and into a “movement” as civil rights become the top issue of the day for many extremists, nationalists and  moralists depending on the side of the fence or track you were on and a closed-eye would be the response and a bumpy ride towards ownership or the privilege would create a novel idea: friendship and forgiveness without post to the concerns of the hopeful while yet the rich gets richer and the poor sinks further, deeper into the inferno makes one want to cry, “we are but building blocks of our experiences and talents, touched by the passage of time and sand to remember.”    

 

The hope, that is the challenge is in the pain, as is the cure which no child, man, women, boy, or girl should ever shoulder alone or in silence denying the importance of cultivating cultural exchange we instead put up walls to safeguard our hidden dreams without the conscious light of reason that bridles progress allowing us to know the poor would leave if they could or die trying, which to me demonstrates the true nature of the gift  inevitably to be led by the example which is the testimony is a sign of intelligence, emotional and otherwise,  is satisfying.  

 

  Denmark Vesey’s conviction demands that I remember his position, Die like a man, and the human spirit’s need to rise-up is natural and necessary and even if they tied me up and stripped me down, they can never take away my DIGNITY.   Nor could I forget those nailed to the cross. 

 

Times are hard for those who remember and those who forget but the young will inevitably see as my dear friend Ms. Petra Novakova once told me, “Sometimes its black, sometimes its white, sometimes its red, but its always round and it’s always a ball,” to me that is simply poetic.

 

Copyright 2006.Fitzgerald Brown.nl

Should America, Honor the Spirit of the Black Men?  

 After a long fight, black activists in Charleston, South Carolina, succeeded in persuading the city to approve a monument honoring Denmark Vesey for planning a slave rebellion in 1822.  

In 1822, a black man by the name of Denmark Vesey was charged with planning to massacre the whites of the city of the Charleston, South Carolina.  However, the plot would be uncovered and Denmark Vesey would be executed, along with a large group of Black men, who refused to admit to the plot.   Then a new voice intruded from a more scholarly quarter–Michael Johnson, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. At a conference on Denmark Vesey in Charleston in March 2001, Johnson presented new evidence demonstrating that Vesey did not organize a rebellion of Charleston’s slaves back in 1822. Far from instigating a plot to kill white people, Vesey was more likely one of scores of black victims of a conspiracy engineered by the white power structure. Now a leading academic quarterly has devoted two issues to Johnson’s argument, and historians are asking a question that Charleston will have to answer: If there was no plan to revolt, is there anything left to honor with a monument?  

 

My answer is resounding yes!   To read the original article on Mr. Johnson’s argument – click on the link : http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020311/wiener

 

But as a small boy growing up in the city of Charleston, South Carolina often I had to wonder the sanity of the southern Black males that “stayed” in a city that was so marked by racism and hate.  When I was able to leave, I did.  At 18 years I joined the military for a better life, only to discover after 11 years of service and a veteran of foreign wars medal, that slavery’s legacy to Blacks and Whites the world over is a legacy of mistrust.
 

However before I was able to put all this together, all I had was my grandfather’s smile, which I later, would come to realize was a symbolic gesture of a man convinced of his belief in the creator and good.  

I think a monument to remember the spirit of the Black men killed in America from slavery to present day would be a start in honoring the triumph of the human spirit to rise up.  
 In 2004 I wrote a poem titled, “Why the Old Man Smiles,” which is the bases for this reply and the book, “The Gospel Truth: Notes of An African American on the Run.” 
  

 

 

 Why the old Man Smile

 

  As a young black boy growing up in South Carolina, I couldn’t help but feel out of place.
Life in the South was much different some 30 years ago.
It was as if no one else was paying attention to life, except for the old people.
The young were moving too fast I couldn’t keep up, and I was only seven.
 I see an old man, a handsome, sturdy man, who stands 6feet tall.
His gray hair gently caresses his strong Afro features.
His eyes twinkles a strange shade of blue.
He stands for hours, staring past the sunflowers he planted.
Over the train tracks he helped to lay some 60 years ago.
A single chain-linked fence separated us from the fruits of his youthful labor under the blazing hot southern sun.
 When asked, what it was he was doing? He would only smile then look up over the fence, beyond the newly built expressway, towards the heavens.
His smiles (that smile) would mystify me and I would wonder why, was he so content? Was it Joy? What was he thinking? I was too young to see. My grandfather was over 70 years old.  Hear him tell it, his life was pretty rough.
Said, when he was born, in 1901, times were pretty tough.   There were no schools for boys like him; boys, born poor and black in the backwaters of the south.
Told me, all of what he knew about reading and writing he learned from Grandma.  She had a 10th grade education. 
 He told me of how when he had no work, how he and his friends would jump cargo trains looking for work or more tracks to lay.  He told me about his friends, who lost their lives while building that old bridge, The Cooper River, when all they had for safety, was ropes.  He told me about how he had to fight off those “dirty” whites that didn’t want to see him vote.  How, he fought for his life, and nearly meeting his doom, went on to place his vote.   He told me about being the first Negro to work for the South Carolina Electric & Gas Company and about the mean but fair old man he worked for.
 He told me about how; he and his three friends felt they had to form their own Church during those tense times in the south.  He even told me, what being a senior member of the Masonic Order meant.  He told me about his responsibilities, to the widows and the weak; his commitment to God, and family all twenty-one of them.  He told me everything, except why he smiled. He only said, with all life’s many struggles and hardship, the secret was to be found in the breeze.
  (Extract from the book, The Gospel Truth, Notes of an African American on the Run© 2004.)   If you would like to read more about my book visit his webpage at www.fitzgeraldbrown.nl

I am an african american male and a blogger, I got into the idea of blogging after writing and publishing my first book, The Gospel Truth: Notes of An African American on the Run, which was published in 2004.

Now since writing my book, I have come to understand that the reasons Blacks are underrepresented by mainstream media is the same as the reason Blacks are underrepresentated in the workplace, at colleges, and etc., I attribute this to results of slavery legacy. A legacy of misrepresentation leading to mistrust and a lack of faith and misopportunities - however, I do believe we must continue the fight of the faithful and remain hopeful.

If you want to hear more from a black voice visit my page at www.fitzgeraldbrown.nl or www.blackangelfish.

Black Angelfish: Where is the love?

Drugs and Sex is not going to go away

Only you can liberate you.  Life is about the choice you make.  We can talk about what “we” should do until we are blue in the faces, but as I said in my first book, The Gospel Truth: Notes of an African American on the Run, people will do what “they” do based on their understanding. 

What I want everyone to understand is whether “we” admit it or not, drugs are never going away, just like promiscuity is not going to go away.  We all will have to make a  choice.

I say, “ Hail to the creator; life is here to stay.”  Life will take care of itself even after you are gone.  Sleep on that, chew on it but, be with thought; and let thought become your guide.  Realize your existence, whether you consciously or unconsciously chose, is limited which only amplifies the need for action. 

Action that considers the following:  Not all action is good and not every desire is a good one to have.  But everyone desires a place in the sun, and many will be denied. This is the world we live in.

 

 If you want to hear more of my thoughts on life and the situation we face, visit my webpage:  www.fitzgeraldbrown.nl