POURING GASOLINE ON A RAGING FIRE

When I first came to this country from the Eastern Caribbean in1981, I resided in Concord, California; and my father, who was an Oakland police officer then, recommended to me and my brothers that we should read the newspaper editorials and watch the program Nightline to get knowledge about our newly adopted country. I cannot say how much my brothers adhered to dad’s edict-but I did. On one occasion, I was watching Ted Koppel’s Nightline when I realized what a fraud Jesse Jackson was…allowing race to take precedence over what is right. Our Civil Rights leader told, the host, Ted Koppel and a number of black foster care children, who were adopted by whites, that he would have preferred if they had remained in the foster care system, even though they were now living among loving parents. All Jesse cared about was that the foster parents were white--and not the fact that they were loving....Even as young boy, I knew something was seriously flawed with that kind of thinking; perhaps, this was because of my being from the Caribbean and that I was putting too much=2 0credence into the fact that Jesse was known as “reverend.” In the same vein, recently, five police officers were brutally murdered in Oakland, California, and our Civil Rights leaders (Jesse and Al) were conspicuously absent; yet, when the police shoot someone unjustly, they are out there--as they should--but no such discourse, healing or otherwise, and visibility in the case of the five murdered officers mentioned above. No one can or should take these so called Civil Rights leaders seriously because of their obvious bias and blatant racism. Take for instance, when Martin Luther King wife died, President Bush attended the funeral. You would have think that the funeral would have been void of politics, but you would have been wrong--instead, it was one the most despicable act of incivility I have ever witnessed. The hatred and vitriol that were directed at President Bush, while his wife sat with him, by these civil rights leaders and President Jimmy Carter, were unprecedented--I recommend you go to the internet to see it. Only Andrew Young had enough class to chastise these civil rights leaders and politicians for using Mrs. King Funeral to berate President Bush. Just imagined, if President Bush had not paid his respects and not attended Martin Luther King widow’s funeral….In the future, we will see these so called civil rights leaders--and to borrow and paraphrased lines from one of David Bowie’s song--putting out the racial fires with gasoline…or petrol.

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