Posted on 05/30/2021 7:56:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
A century ago, my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was engulfed in a riot, also called a massacre, that left an entire swath of the city known as the “Black Wall Street” burned, its residents either killed or displaced.
One hundred years later, I want to look at our history and then forge ahead to our future. I believe that the future leads right to success. We’ve talked about the problem for a century now. I believe it’s time the soul of a nation is healed.
When people look at the past, we often do things out of tradition, like beautiful Memorial Day celebrations when we remember those who gave their lives in military service. We also do things out of history, recalling events both good and terrible, like that two-day rampage in our city. Sometimes we do things reflexively, reliving something that is long past but can also raise emotions of fresh umbrage at the injustice. It’s those negative reflexive feelings that point to an unhealthy soul.
We need to adopt a healthy perspective about life that will keep us from drifting on the waves of emotion. To be healthy in our souls, we need to think differently and react effectively.
Our souls are like a utility. They’re like electricity. You can’t see it, but the soul makes things happen. We act the way the soul has programmed us to act. Everything about your life—past, present, and future,—passes through your soul. It's because of a sick soul that many people are stuck. They have a heart, they have a passion, they have a love, and yet they are in trouble because their soul is in trouble.
When it comes to healing a nation’s soul, the only way forward is to heal a person. By healing an individual soul, one person at a time, we can be healed as a nation. To do this, we must go through a process of elimination.
First, we need to eliminate race from being our focus. When you focus on race, it keeps you out of the race. According to Martin Luther King Jr, and the Bible, humans are all one race, one blood, and made in the image of God. This is what I believe, too.
The second thing to eliminate is negative emotions that cause us to quit. Anyone who lives as a victim will never be a victor.
The most binding prohibitive of soul success is table-talk. Stoop talk. No matter what we learn in school, or how much we excel on the job and in our communities, we have invited in these silent authorizers of our emotions and behavior.
The kind of table talk I mean is that which is intended to make us feel inferior. It makes us believe there’s nothing superior about us. It’s, “Don’t act smart, boy.” With girls, it’s a double dose because of our gender. “Girl, don’t answer that. A man don’t want smart.” From this table-talk and stoop-talk, we make vows that become the silent engineers of our souls. They fuel our emotions and frame our thoughts.
I was raised in New Jersey in the 60s at the tail end of the Jim Crow era. We lived through riots and did a lot of stoop talk. My family, no matter what, couldn't keep a job and couldn't get along. We talked and talked but never had a rational argument of, “This is what we’re dealing with, and this is what we need to do.”
“The problem” that never got addressed, is that we were conditioned to fail. No matter how many billions of dollars were thrown at “the problem” in the last hundred years, we have still not dealt with a format of failure that has been programmed inside. And if you don't train the inside, the outside is going to fly.
We can do it. We can succeed. We can have “power to the people” if we know what power is. Success is not racist. Success has no favorites. Success is an equal opportunity rewarder or punisher.
To be successful as a nation, we need to regain our souls. To have a healthy soul as a nation, we need healthy souls as individuals. To be healthy as individuals, we need to stop being victims, eliminate negative emotions, and eliminate saying that things are the way they are only because of race.
After the way I grew up, I should not be a success today. But I am.
So this is my emphasis. You can take it or leave it. We need to turn the corner as a nation. We need to move into a future of success and prosperity for all our citizens. When we heal our souls, the nation’s soul can then be healed.
“eliminate race from being our focus”
Start with black lies matter thugs.
A lot of platitudes, no real solution.
WHY is ANYONE talking about this?
As if racial tensions aren’t high enough already!
I never even heard about this till now!
WHO (really) CARES about this? NOBODY (really).
It was a HUNDRED years ago.
I’m NOT reading up on this because in my 71 years I NEVER EVER heard of this before. It was a HUNDRED years ago, and it’s just ANOTHER “hands up, don’t shoot”, “Burn it down”, EXCUSE to steal big screen TVs.
Can we search for and exploit any more episodes of racial crap to keep the wounds open? Surely we can! Here’s one now!
We had a similar thing here in Cochise County, AZ one hundred years ago when the mining companies rounded up the dissident mine workers and shipped them by train to New Mexico.
I feel the same way with Watts, Rodney King, Busing riots in the south, the continuous inner city gang killings( black on black), Baltimore, Treyvon could have been my son,: the murderous rampage on police in Texas, The atrocious burning and killing fields of Minneapolis and the fools at Kenosha....among a few.
This writer is never apologizing, never going to kiss the feet of the mean side of “black culture,” and will deny CRT-critical race theory, 1619 project.
Maybe they’ll come for me. FBI stats suggest 13% of the population commit50% of the crimes.
Maybe it’s all LBJ’s fault keeping them on the plantation. Maybe blacks should police shier own?
But I’m not watching ROOTS and crying, bot listening to CNN’s Don Lemon and others calling me a racist.
F em all. I cared for all patients no matter color or identity, no matter sexual identity. No one will make me cry over sacred bleeding heard racism generally fomented by Marxists.
They want to offer and olive leaf, I’ll take it but in my 63 years on this planet I’ve seen over and over it is the “black culture” that plays knockout games, incredible crime, riots, drugs, lack of education,robberies, beating anyone that doesn’t look like then including the gang faction down the street and poor marriage relations( because welfare doesn’t help the father).
Not sorry for the rant. I am not living out my days kissing a$$ when maybe, MAYBE instead of throwing money and worthless programs with do-good social worker...maybe they need moral accountability and the strong arms of tough love.
Where are the strong GOOD black men and women that will stand up and police their own> They don’t want interference but demand money from the government( ie US), to fix or stay the same?
I don’t care about Tulsa.
Rant over
You can start by acknowledging the fact that the Tulsa riot was started by an armed black mob that fired the first shots.
Guess we could call this era The Robin J. DiAngelo era.
Some people like picking at scabs.
http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/riot/tulsatime.html
It seems to me that a series of incidents escalated into a small war that blacks lost.
Exactly right. As with much of what we’re taught about certain episodes in history, it’s a mishmash of fairy tales and outright lies. The Tulsa riots started with the arrest of a young black man for assaulting a white girl or woman. Rumors swept thru the local black community like wildfire and a small group of riled up black men marched to the jail. They were told why the young man was arrested, and they left. But emotions continued to run high in the black community, and soon an even larger group of armed black men gathered and marched four-abreast back to the jail. They were loaded for bear, and the shooting soon began.
Crap like this causes me to be reminded of the stern words my dear old dad used to recite to us kids: “Keep it up and I’ll give you something to cry about!”
The burning of Atlanta was 157 years ago and some folks still can’t get over that trivial incident.
Years later some of those who were supposedly killed in the riots were seen alive.
The black on white crime has already evened the death count between the races. Nobody mentions this.
Yep, and now they and their descendants are cashing in. What a scam.
I agree 100 percent.
When I see stuff about racism in America, a lot of the events and examples are from 50 years ago or more—such as this one, 100 years ago.
They were truly some horrible things going on during those times. Jim Crow laws and “standards” were certainly wrong—as were a lot of racially based regulations.
But, that is not the world we live in.
I cringed in the 80’s when I heard my 90 year old grandmother refer to them as “darkies.”
But that was 40 years ago.
I would like to believe that we’ve moved beyond that.
Whenever I read something like the stories about Tulsa, I do believe that we must sure that doesn’t happen ever again. And at the same time I ask if anyone can point to a place where that is happening now.
It isn’t happening now. That is what we need to keep reminding people. White on Black violence is an unusual thing these days. Collective white on black violence is even more rare.
Thanks to Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats, the Black community in general has been receiving reparations for now more than a half-century.
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