During these severe times of unrest and extreme darkness in our community, I’m left to ponder, “Where is our moral compass”? Where is the light? Who can intervene on the behalf of our community and lead us from astray and return us to consciousness and self-awareness? Who can teach us to be self-sufficient and independent? A prideful people with love in our heart instead of dislike, disdain and distrust for one another. Who can make the unfavorable favorable? There’s only one individual.
Doing these difficult times that we’re experiencing in our world today, with no apparent reprieve in sight, it bemuse me that nobody wants to publicly acknowledge and reference the only one who could save us. It’s so obvious that we need a divine intervention. We need something greater than ourselves to intercede on our behalf. We need God.
I believe in God. And my belief in God makes me fearless towards man. My belief also gives me a standard on how I should conduct myself as a man. It provides for me a sense of morality, a set of values and principles that I live my day to day life by. We’ve been given the example we need to pattern ourselves after for the betterment of us and our community, but unfortunately in present day, the message of who we are has been convoluted, improperly conveyed or just completely disregarded to the apparent detriment of ourselves. Especially our children.
There once was a time when God’s presence was acknowledged. We weren’t embarrassed nor afraid to pray to him in the presence of others or in the privacy of our own homes. We “thanked him” aloud. We swore by his name. We lived accordingly to his words. We admired his work. And he was worthy of our praise. I remember these tenets being embedded in me as a child. And I wasn’t raised in the church. As a matter of fact, I never went to church for service as a child. However, my praying grandmother thought it important enough for me to be taught that “there is a God” and to remind me that my blessings and protection is provided by him alone. I believed that then and even more now as an adult who’ve lived through trials and tribulations, blessings and altercations and has sustained and maintained through it all. I know it wasn’t by my own doing. Because if it was, by my own doing, I would’ve killed myself a long time ago.
Today, our children revere the “illuminati” more than they do their own creator. They attribute ones success to a secret organization whose hierarchy is supposedly comprised of monetarily affluent white men who’ve made sacrificial offerings to acquire power and influence. They credit the “illuminati” for life and death. They’ve either relinquished or refuted the belief of God and have replaced it with the belief in man. But they didn’t wholeheartedly make this decision on their own. Many of us, as adults, have helped them come to this conclusion by not reinforcing the truths of God that we know, which were taught to us by the elders in our families, our homes, our schools and in our communities. We’ve done a disservice to our children by not raising them in the same fashion that we were raised in ourselves.
Just Talked to Farrakhan is metaphorical and symbolic in its meaning. I haven’t had the wonderful opportunity of engaging the Minister, arguably the most fearless and powerful black man in this country, in a conversation. However, I was one of tens of thousands of individuals who watched his interview on the Breakfast Club with DJ Envy, Charlamagne and Angela Yee. And during the viewing and listening to the Minister speak, I was enlightened and once again reminded of the necessity and relevance of engaging and most importantly, listening to our elders share their knowledge and wisdom. Especially God fearing men whose life exhibits what it truly means to be aligned with the creator and demonstrating the example he set forth. That’s what I believe Kanye West meant when he referred to Minister Farrakhan as “sensei.” He was obviously acknowledging him as his teacher, master teacher. But he’s not just Kanye’s “sensei.” He’s our “sensei.” Just as other men from our community who truly exemplify what it means to be a real man, a God fearing man. But unfortunately what has happened in our community is a breakdown and disconnect from those who can lead us by example in the right direction and those of us who need to be led in that direction.
We need a divine intervention to save us.
However, for the sake of our children, I’m not speaking about a mythical or mystical divinity because these children of today will not be solely convinced by that suggestion alone. They need a real example set forth for them. So it’s our responsibility to introduce them to God by living like we know he exist, by recalling how we were once raised and how we once lived. Because frankly speaking, our children are merely an honest reflection of us now. We need to model better expectations for our children. And in all honesty, we can only properly model the right expectations if we’re paying attention to the right examples that’s being modeled for us. So before we become the elders that our youth stop talking and listening to, we need to become the conduits between today’s elders and our present day youth. And presently speaking, who better to start the introduction off with than the Minister Louis Farrakhan?
