Impromtu Manifesto
Ten Things People Fail to Understand:
#10: Teachers in lower income school systems are expected to be not only teachers, but nursemaids, counselors, social workers, referees, interventionists and much more (all on the salary of a teacher). In fact, they are so consumed with solving so many of the children's other problems, thanks to the devastating and perpetual failure of parents and communities, that there's hardly any time left to actually teach them anything.
#9: Politicians, by the nature of the work they do, are not activists, nor are they truth speakers. It doesn't matter what they promise before they're elected, they don't give a fuck about equality, justice, your misery or world peace. On the contrary, they all have two goals and two goals only: to get elected and to get re-elected. If those aren't their goals, if they attempt anything beyond those two things, then they aren't successful politicians.
#8: It doesn't matter what your Jehovah, Allah, Yahweh, Zeus, YHWH, Jah, Osiris, Buddha, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Magic Sky Friend, G-d or other deity says: Bigotry is a moral, spiritual and intellectual failing of the highest order. If your god and/or your religion sanctions or encourages the oppression of others, then your god and/or religion is evil and must be destroyed.
#7: Attempt to justify or deny it in any manner you choose, but the Tea Party is simply a better-organized, better-funded, better-promoted, craftier Ku Klux Klan. Given their supposed platform, the fact that they didn't exist when Bush was in office, but suddenly found their commonality when Obama took the seat, tells me everything I need to know about them. That and their proto-racist, misspelled protest signs.
#6: In its never-ending quest to be more like the Rockefellers, Al Capone, John Gotti, Donald Trump and other do-anything-for-money figures, hip-hop music--like Wall Street and government--reveals, for a contemporary audience, the frightening pathology behind the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy--namely: an inability to resolve any conflict without the use of brutality and a profound fear and hatred of femininity.
#5: Jay-Z is full of shit. He's dealing, superbly, in false dichotomies when he claims that he only had a choice between starvation and drug dealing and therefore chose the latter to survive. His choices were actually between not being able to "floss" and dealing drugs so that he could. Thus, he helped poison his own community so that he'd have the benefit of the rest of us marveling at his sheepskin coat and shell-top Adidas.
#4: The true definition of traditional marriage is an arrangement where: fathers choose their children's spouses based on material benefit, not romance; men are permitted to have as many wives as they desire; old men may marry girls as young as eight years old; and husbands are permitted to kill their wives without penalty because wives are nothing more than a piece of furniture. Anything outside of this definition is not a traditional marital arrangement.
#3: With all this "land of the free and home of the brave" propaganda, you would think that the U.S. was built through fairy magic and pixie dust rather than the genocide of Native Americans and the forced and wicked enslavement of Africans. And you would think that the U.S., unlike "the savages," was actually civilized and not currently engaged in the systematic obliteration of human lives all over the world. You would think.
#2: Egos are a powerful thing. It's what makes white people think they're better than black people, black people think they're better than gay people, gay people think they're better than Mexicans, Mexicans think they're better than Muslims, and the Muslims think they're better than everyone--all of which is just a sly distraction from the fact that, compared to the vast splendor of the universe, we're all EQUALLY insignificant.
#1: Hypocrites always want to play innocent, which is why Eddie Long can get up in church and tell his parishioners to hate homosexuality while simultaneously giving blow jobs to their sons. It's also how Newt Gingrich can commit adultery and get divorced, but tattoo "the sanctity of marriage" on his forehead. Religion and politics have been, are now and forever will be self-serving tools of hypocrisy.