Sunday, December 31, 2017

Kwanzaa Day 6: Be Reminded to Be Creative About the Protection of Us...


Kuumba (koo-OOM-bah) 
Creativity

"To do always as much as we can in the way that we can in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than when we inherited it."


Principle 6 of the celebration of Kwanzaa has a lot to do with our being creative in how we respect and protect our environments, our communities, our homes, our neighborhoods, our legacy...

As so many of us are at risk of being displaced from the place we call home due to the hostile take over of our communities by those vested in the very mean spirited sport of gentry-fication. Kuumba, the 6th Principle of Kwanzaa, is all the more relevant.

Our neglect of our environment, sometimes beyond our control, other times purposeful and carelessness on our part, makes us very vulnerable to being displaced from that which is familiar to us. We look up and before we know it, we don't recognize our own neighborhoods, that in which we have invested ourselves, our time, our energy, our creativity, raised our Families, fell in love, went to school, buried our ancestors, etc., etc...

Our Chocolate Cities are Chocolate no longer... Even where we were homeowners, our relevance and welcoming has been reduced to that of a tenant, a mere borrower of someone else's land or property and our presence is no longer wanted or welcome in these places we used to call home...

We must fight to preserve and protect our communities long before the greed and insensitivity of gentry-fication invades us. It's an old trick. Nothing new in this play book of "grab the land by any means necessary". Still, we fall victim to the game time and time again...

To protect our communities, we must be engaged in our communities, We must attend city council, school board and homeowner association meetings. We must MAKE elected officials work FOR us, make the cops servicing our communities engage our community, demand that merchants in our community respect and employ us; if not, boycott their stores... We must VOTE!, VOTE!, VOTE! & where possible RUN! RUN! RUN! for elected office, volunteer for board or commission seats, housing associations, involved ourselves in the courts, social service and other government agencies that wreak havoc on our lives and the like.

Hold members of our village who live amongst us accountable for violations of our peace and serenity in any kind of way; defacing our property, littering our streets. Snitching? Eliminate the concept... No such thing!!! Get back to truly being a village where certain behaviors are not tolerated and we are our children's, our Brothers' and our Sisters' keepers. Be bothered even when it, the problem, does not directly involve or affect us. Don't wait for the problem to knock on our door before we give a damn... Deal with the matter BECAUSE it is in the village, BECAUSE it is OUR village...

I know, this sounds like some Utopia like dream but is that not how all realities begin? Where necessary, we must be willing to take over or take back, our own neighborhoods before others do and we can no longer afford to call them home. WE can take leadership in making our communities better places to live and beneficial to us. Standing around scratching our heads after the fact does not serve us well as we get duped once again by the same ole' trick...

In 2018, let's get creative, purposeful, focused and damn busy about the business of protecting our legacy by becoming vested in the continuity of that which we have created in the communities in which we live and have come to call home...



Happy Kwanzaa & Happy New Year Folks!

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