What exactly IS an epidemic? We constantly hear this term when anything negative happens in the black community. Well according to dictionary dot com (not disease) it means extremely prevalent; widespread. The next definition is a rapid spread or increase in the occurrence of something.
Now I feel that the Derrion Albert death was totally ridiculous and callous occurrence. My problem is that these deaths which total 40, is far from an epidemic. Is it too many? Hell yes! But where were these CNN and other reporters or principals such as Steve Perry, who think they know all the answers or the rest who have so much to say all with little answers, back when there were 1 death, 2 deaths or 39 deaths?
We like to pick and choose what we label as out of control or epidemic. CNN has a story running right now on workplace violence which is overly represented by white society and they haven’t once called it an epidemic. They say that homicide is 42% of all workplace deaths and that isn’t an epidemic? Yet, somehow we are now having an epidemic after 40 deaths.
According to Harvard 45,000 people a year die because of lack of health care resulting in lack of medical attention. Isn’t that an epidemic that we should be focusing on and crying about? And we ALL want to sit and focus on 40 teens. This is why this country is going to hell in a hand basket, and not a very nice looking one either. We are way too focused on keeping inequality with phony outrage.
It goes all the way back to the per capita versus full numbers game. We like to focus ALL of our attention on things with small numbers that don’t affect us directly even though what DOES affect us with large numbers flies under the radar. Or we tend to look at the symptoms and never the root cause. Could we possibly be looking at the backlash from all the overwhelming poverty that black and other minority inner city children, adults and families have to deal with day in and day out?
We cry like the world is ending when the unemployment rate for the generic yet overwhelmingly white majority reaches 9%; yet could have cared less that the unemployment rate for blacks has been up over 10% for a very long time now. Maybe we should be concerned with ALL of our people. . . Oh! My bad! That would be socialism and thus bad. We all need to continue focusing on ourselves, even though it gets us nowhere.
OPEC is talking about dropping the dollar as the currency of their trade. And it makes me wonder if this whole concern with Chicago is just another distraction from the real issues. When the dollar is no longer the trade status of oil we are going to see a collapse of the dollar and then what? We know what happens when a country’s currency collapses. Just look at Zimbabwe and that out of control inflation. Thousands of dollars for a loaf of bread.
And according to The Independent, “Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in Euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in Euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.” Are we going to end up in yet another war? And all we can focus on is this phony so called epidemic of black gang violence which has resulted in a whopping 40 dead.
The Black Sentinel 