2200 miles of Self Sustainability

Peace,


There are so many things I should be working on… This month’s issue of Useful Land isn’t ready yet and needs to go to the printer by Friday… Monday the latest. I need to finish some niggling projects at work. I need to finish at least 4 UFO’s in my sewing room; but I’m here blogging for y’all. I hope y’all appreciate what I go through to keep you interested! Teehee! All jokes aside… Sort of….

Self Sustainability is defined as the degree at which the system can sustain itself without external support. In everyday language it means not needing to rely on anybody or anything else outside your personal ciphers for anything. The colored man is doing all he can to obtain this. He moves to farms with animals, crops and guns so that when all hell breaks loose he can continue and defend his way of life. And on the surface, that “do for self” attitude has been advocated in the Original community but it has never really taken hold. I have my suspicions about why….

First of all, I advocate doing for self, but not in the sense of “It’s us 2 and we through.” I advocate it in the sense of we can get most of what we need within our own communities. It’s 2011, not 1945. More Original people are educated now than in previous generations. And the bar has been raised. Most of my parents friends had high school diplomas and that’s it. Yes my parents went to college, and my mother has multiple degrees, but they were the exception and not the rule. My grandmother was born in 1906. She had a 6th grade education. My grandfather, born 1900 had no education. He couldn't read or write but he could figure and managed to earn quite a bit of gold in his station in life. My grandmother's mother got a sincerely rudimentary education and her mother was born a slave. So the learning curve has improved greatly no matter what statistic the colored man throws out there. We are a race of educated individuals and we don’t have to (though many of us do) have to rely on the him/devil to help or allow us to live our lives.

Next, despite what you may have heard, Original people have their own financial institutions. Yeah, we do. Don’t believe me? Do the Knowledge. Yes, they can’t give you all the bells and whistles that the big boys can give, but they exist. Actually, they could offer more if we supported them. And I know Original people are leery of folks in our business (though we don’t seem to mind him/devil in our business… Somehow that seems like that’s the way it should be) but even if we put small amounts in our own banks it would go a long way to opening up resources for our own communities.

We also have the ‘know how’ to do anything, and provide any service for ourselves. We used to have to do these things for ourselves before segregation ended. We had our own schools, our own, stores, our own business, hospitals, etc. We still have have our own colleges... at least right now. Now a days all we really do for ourselves is hair salons, barbershops and funeral homes. And I have heard more frequently that we are starting to patronize the colored man’s funeral homes. Damn! Now a lot of that is our own fault. We are notorious for providing each other with sub par service. We act like just because we look like each other we can be cool/unprofessional with each other. And I know that’s a major turnoff to supporting our own.

I have Built on how it is a bold face lie that we have needs and reasons to leave our communities of goods and services. B.U.T….. The question begs to me… Why do we need to be self sustainable? It’s unnecessary.

I’m not saying that we don’t need to support our communities, but self sustainability as defined by colored people who advocate it, is not about supporting their own communities. It’s about going off the grid and not needing to get anything from people outside their families. That's how they think and reason. They would happily kill each other to save their own pale skins. That’s where I have issues with that philosophy. People come in communities. Everybody can’t and more importantly shouldn’t do everything for themselves. That is de-evolution at it’s finest. The logical next step in that equation is to become hunters and gatherers and/or live in caves because eventually what ever homestead you have will decay and if you are keeping everything in house then you will eventually run out of the raw materials. Also, if your keeping everything confined to a select number of people, what does that do to your eventual gene pool? That is not elevation and it definitely is not Building.

So, where as I will continue to monitor the self sustainable communities… always taking the best part… I don’t have plans to go off the grid.



Peace