I’m always amazed during the Christmas holiday season when crime and thuggery capture the headlines. Last year the “hot thing” for the criminal element in society to do to celebrate Baby Jesus was to hunt down giant, inflatable, fabric Snowmen, Santa Clauses and Angels and slash them with knives to deflate their delight.
I answered the phone yesterday afternoon and heard the distraught voice of a friend of mine from Omaha. She kept repeating, over and over, as if her impromptu mantra would change history and peel back time: “This doesn’t happen here. This happens there. Where you are. Not here. Not here. Not here.”
It’s Thanksgiving and I spent the morning helping Janna get on a Continental Airlines flight from Newark, New Jersey to Council Bluffs, Iowa via Omaha, Nebraska, so she can bury her father.
Continue reading → The Continental Airlines Bereavement Fare Scam
Are blue eyes superior to brown? Have you ever experienced or witnessed an example of Black Rage? In 1970, author Toni Morrison took on both matters in her first book and subsequent ovaric masterpiece: The Bluest Eye.
One of my best friends and mentor was the late, great, Marshall Jamison and he, above anyone else, taught me many of my most important life lessons — the first of which was the definition of a “bastard.”
“Hand me that bowl of Nigger toes,” my grandfather shouted at me across a large oak table filled with family and holiday dressings for Thanksgiving dinner.
I must’ve been around eight-years-old at the time and before I could ask him — what bowl of who — his two daughters, one of them my mother, shouted back at him, “Dad! We don’t talk like that here!” He shrugged them off and pointed at me, “There, boy. By your hand. Shove over that bowl of Nigger toes!”
When I was growing up, children were expected to get good grades in school because it showed they had a love of learning and were dedicated to being a proper part of society; however, that didn’t mean some Lincoln, Nebraska children with smart parents were not paid $200 USD for an “A” grade, $175 for a “B” and so on along a sliding scale in 1980’s dollars.
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