Does My Vote Really Matter?

For those who didn’t think their vote counted. Here’s a newsflash: it does. Every time, it does.  But for it to count, you gotta show up. 

The next time you’re tempted to stay home as yourself these questions………….

1. What might happen to my environment if I don't vote?

Answer: much, much more of this. Remember "Drill baby drill!"?

Meanwhile, out in the real world this is what is actually going on.

The 'Drill baby drill" crew swears up and down that drilling is now safer than ever, but that red river ain't looking like a particularly good example of safety in action. Unless water's supposed to be red?

2. What could happen to my (or my friends') Civil Rights if I don't vote?

Answer: an erosion of the comfortable, easy, diverse universe you've known your whole life.

It is not accidental that it took this nation until the late 19th century to begin to acknowledge the Civil Rights of some of its members. Neither is it a surprise that those rights have been challenged and undermined at every opportunity since.  That's kinda the way we do. Resistance to the principles and practice of equality remains a central theme of American social, political, and economic life.  

If people who are uncomfortable with growing diversity are going to vote, then those of us who embrace it must vote in larger numbers. That's the math.

3. What could happen to my healthcare if I don't vote?

Answer: the candidate you fail to vote against might wipe out any chance you have of owning some.

If you're really lucky, the eventual election winner might think health savings accounts (HSAs) make sense. But in a world where income barely meets current expenses HSAs are not going to help you much.  

Or, alternatively, the winning candidate might gut healthcare access entirely, as they seem intent on doing in Minnesota. Check out this list of procedures and care options that AREN'T covered. Numbers 1, 5 and 23 are especially interesting. But don't worry about them because there's no war on women.

As I written before, democracy is nothing without us in it. We may have forgotten recently that democracy won't continue without our express participation but I think we know different now. We have the proof that it will not. We gotta show up. Every time. 

We must get back in the game. And we must do so in numbers too large to ignore. 

Making a Way: Economics

Make a way out of no way

Over the next few years, we are going to have to do and be very different. The seasons have changed and we must make ready for winter.

I've seen one too many ridiculous memes about who and whose grandpappy made it through Jim Crow so we can too. While I understand the impetus to make such supposedly supportive utterances, I can't really say that they're helpful. I say if we want to be helpful to each other, we need to offer up some insights on what we might do to move ourselves forward economically, politically and socially.

If there is one thing that I am sure of, it is that the ingenuity and hard work that built the first Black Wall Street, can, and will, build us another if we make a concerted effort. This time around, with focus, effective use of social media and digital marketing tools, we can create and hopefully sustain an entire parallel universe.

1. Dreams matter

I've had various dreams over the last several years. One of those things involved abandoned houses in Detroit.  I recognize that my dream of rebuilding communities that have fallen on desperately hard times is a crazy one, especially since I'm neither a multi-millionaire nor am I especially handy with construction, but that doesn't make it any less of a great dream. I have visions of entirely self-sufficient communities, a central farm surrounded by homes, schools and every possible business needed by a community. Ain't nothing wrong with dreaming.

The next step after having the dream though, is taking action. What I probably should have done and I certainly encourage others to do, is find funding for your ideas and programs. There are grants. Go look. Network with non-profit professionals (if your dream is a non-profit) and find ways to make your dreams a reality. This isn't necessarily about becoming wealthy, although that would be lovely. It is about providing a needed service and making a way for yourself and those around you. 

Look into non-profits that received federal money to support entrepreneurs here. Start thinking about that thing that you think the world, your street or your community needs and begin the process of creating that. If a for profit enterprise is your thing, find incubator programs and reach out to the SBA and Score for support and guidance. 

I'm not for a minute saying, "Quit your day job!" but I am saying that we need to see what else we can do to build something with our sweat and ingenuity. 

2. Make a plan

I am under no illusions that this is going to be easy. Lord knows, 'easy' does not reside in our neighborhoods and even if it's just passing through, when it hears us coming, it runs like hell. We will have to work hard and fight tooth and nail for every inch of ground we can gain but how is that different from what obtains today?

Many in the urban centers, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, live in food deserts. Can you deliver healthful food in your neighborhood? Can you make 'real food' available? Can you and a few friends make something like this happen? Then do. There are communities aplenty in need of this kind of support. Do the research. Go to the neighborhood library. Get the help you need and try your hand.

Don't have money start a food desert supply service? Then what about creating an urban garden? Check out the guerilla gardener! Allow yourself to dream and be inspired to imagine some new thing that only you can do.

3. Use social media

Look, I'm no expert on social media. If I were, I might writing fake shite and laughing all the way to the bank. That's not me, that's not how I want to roll. Still, there are those of you who have your finger on the pulse of social media. Use it. You know how to drive traffic? Drive it in the general direction of up and coming Black and POC businesses, especially your own!

These are going to be trying times. Have you seen who's being tapped for Cabinet posts? Good Lordt! We better get our shite together! Use your vast social networks to create and sustain interest in your business and those of your friends.

4. Get the help you need
There are people out there who can help you. Everybody's got a computer in their pocket. Use it! Spend less time matching three cropsies or whatever and more time building yourself up for the days ahead. Trump and Bannon  are gonna be running the store for a minute. We'd better make sure we are ready for what that is likely to mean.

5. Support each other
We will need to rely on each other and we will need to support each other. One of the great things about the original Black Wall Street was that there were so many complementary businesses there, that a dollar circulated between 36 and 100 times before it left the community. Where do we do anything even close to that today? *Hint: nowhere

Do you have a friend who's a painter? Hire her/him to paint your house. Have a friend who's a caterer? Hire him/her to cater some part of your next shindig. Have a friend who's a writer (psst! lol)? Share their work. We are really going to have to do a new thing in this Brave New Trumpet World. Let me remind you that during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, thousands and thousands of Black men, women and children walked for months (13 to be exact, 381 days) to make themselves heard on the issue of desegregation. We need to 'make a point' (and to both ourselves and the majority) about self-determination. 

6. Network
Networking is critical to success in this society, it's also a significant part of why people of color do not thrive in the professional world the way others do. We don't create networks and we don't do the glad-handing and socializing that's required to maintain them. I understand it completely. So much of our lives in the professional world requires performance of Black acceptability that it gets wearying. We just want to go home and switch it off. I hear you. I feel you and I tell you "Not today". Stay plugged in and turned on. We can rest later; maybe four years out when Elizabeth Warren or Tulsi Gabbard is president-elect.  

There are Black Entrepreneurs Meetups and networking events. There are also Hispanic entrepreneurs meetups. Find a group that meets your needs or interest. Can't find one? Start one. Find a mentor. Become one. Join something that will uplift and encourage you. Get help and support. Ask questions. Be vulnerable. Be brave but don't immediately give up your day job!

I dream of the day when super wealthy POC's foundations create opportunities for fledgling micro-enterprises, but that may not soon come to pass. In the interim, we have to find other ways. Hopefully, one or two of the six ideas above will give us places to start. 

Ultimately, we must have faith....in ourselves and our circles and our circle's circles. We are going to have to have each others' backs. We are going to have to support each others' endeavors and network like our very lives depend on it because they just might. Prayer is good and all, but Jesus ain't buying your services, the people in your neighborhood are. So talk to Jesus, but talk to Jesús next door too.

We are going to have to imagine and work our way to independence. Whether we have a burning desire to be 'job creators' or we simply want to offer a good or service as a side hustle, we're going to have to hustle. A lot.

Whether ours is a brilliant massive idea or a simple small one, whatever our gift(s) are, use it (them). Seek out the help needed to make something out of nothing, a way out of no way, a bridge out of thin air. We don't have much choice.

When candidate Trump asked what we have to lose by voting for him, we had an inkling of what might be at stake. As time passes and his Cabinet starts to take shape though, the 'what' we might lose looks to be every damb thing. 

Trying times are ahead, be the change. 

And while we're out there doing our thing, join the Injustice Boycott because social justice activism and political action are just as critical as economic independence.  

The Bending Arc of History

It is said that the arc of history, though long, bends surely towards justice. (Theodore Parker)

This line is often attributed to MLK Jr. but it was Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist born in 1810, who used the above phrase in an 1853 collection of “Ten Sermons of Religion”. The third sermon titled “Of Justice and the Conscience” included figurative language about the arc of the moral universe: 1

In the sermon he says, 

"Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right [thing]*. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble." **

* Parker used the word ‘right’ to denote the right thing not the right wing, just to be clear. 

**All emphases mine.

As insightful as the arc of history metaphor is, there are some ideas in there that are open to misinterpretation.

First, Parker's language suggests that history's arc bends naturally. The phrasing seems to center the bending of the arc away from human actors. The sentence gives the – dangerously erroneous - impression that the arc bends, not that we who wish to see it bent, must act to make that happen. That's really misleading. Passivity bends nothing. Staying away from the polls wins no elections. Apathy achieves nothing. Disengagement wins no war.

The bending of history's arc does not occur without significant effort. We ought to know this by now. Shoulders - many, many, many of them - must be applied to the work, and there must be blood, sweat and tears shed along the way. The bending of history necessarily involves both victories and defeats, and at times it may even feel like more of the latter than the former. Yet overall, the arc may indeed bend, but only if we have the will and do the work to bend it. For history bends toward justice only if we fight tooth and nail against the will of those who would have it not bend at all.  And then when there are victories, we must fight harder still to hold the newly gained territory, because change is a threat to those comforted by the status quo, and they will fight with everything they have in them to reassert what they believe to be the natural order.

Parker also offers the idea that "[things] refuse to be mismanaged long". This idea has very little bearing on the truth. Perhaps where he stood in history this was the case, but it ain't the case today. I could write you a list, as long as my arm, of things that have happily been mismanaged for quite long, but I'll offer just one: racial justice in America. We've mismanaged that to hell and back. We still don't have it managed, and if the election campaign of 2016 is anything to go by, we probably shouldn't hold our breath that it's going to be managed any better, any time soon.

Not least of all, I must disagree vehemently with Parker's suggestion that "all America did tremble." When did this happen?  Parker, speaking in 1853, suggests that America had some collective epiphany that clearly has not occurred.  It had not occurred when Parker spoke, just two years after Chief Justice Taney asserted that "the Negro has no rights which the White man is bound to honor" with respect to the Dred Scott legal matter. It certainly had not occurred when the Confederate States seceded to preserve African enslavement and defended that course of action with a Civil War.  Surely it had not occurred when in the wake of Reconstruction White supremacists implemented Jim Crow laws and rained Domestic Terror (lynching) on African people.  It was evident that it had not occurred when millions of Americans expressed their hatred of the slogan and the notion that Black Lives Matter.  And it most certainly has not occurred, as evidenced by this year's awful incidents around the election.

So on this election day + a few, while the arc of history may seem (to liberals and progressives) to have returned to its original place, and while we seem to be careening back to an earlier, uglier time for people like me, I am working to remain optimistic about the overall direction of history's arc. I am choosing (or trying to) to believe that we can bend history. At the same time, I am also staying coldly realistic about what that bending will take. I accept that sometimes, even as the arc is bending, it will bend through dark and dangerous places and times (such as these may now be) and we won't all come through to the other side. MLK Jr, himself said as much and was then killed for his efforts to bend the arc. 

This last point is critical: we will not all see justice. Not every family survived the Trail of Tears; not everyone survived the Middle Passage; not every unarmed man, woman or child survives their supposedly  uncomplicated encounter with the police. We do not all come out the other side of these horrors, which is why these "My grandpappy survived Jim Crow, I can survive Trump" memes are ridiculous as hell. Your grandpappy survived so that you wouldn't have to! But let me not go down that rabbit hole. Some of us won't make it out of these next four years. Some with chronic or life-threatening conditions will lose their health care and it will shorten their life spans. Some will be diagnosed and unable to get care. Some will be harassed or brutalized by an increasingly out of control police force and there will be no justice. Some will lose homes, jobs, everything and will succumb to grief and despair, and give up. 

Whether the election of Donald J. Trump is whitelash or not I'm not sure, but here's the truth: the arc of history will bend if we set to bending. There will be setbacks and there will be victories but we must never stop applying the pressure that is required to bend history's steely arc. Right about now though, I'm taking a little break. I'll get right back to doing my part just as soon as I get up off the floor cuz this election done laid me flat.