If I was a poor black kid...I would not know about subjunctive tenses...

A Forbe's columnist, Gene Marks, has many people talking about what it's like to be poor and black. He is neither, but that doesn't matter because when you have the secret for eradicating poverty, you can project whatever hypotheticals you would like...whether you use poor subjunctive tenses or not. If I were a middle class white man, like Gene Marks, these are more things I would assume of a poor black kid.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-i-was-a-poor-black-kid/

If I were a poor black kid and overcame the disproportionate odds of surviving to adulthood, the deteriorating school systems I attend wouldn't even become aware to me until traveling in the back seat of my parents vehicle as we passed nearby lovely nearby neighborhoods that our own barely lay outside of.  I'd be grateful to see the clean cut lawns, windows, and newly designed schools that made mine look slightly better than the half-way house a mile from my own. I would decry congresses' choice to cut taxes on education.  Not because I know my own would be shafted, but because who's going to clean the stained glass windows at Bexley highschool?  I'll never go there, but they're a beau to look at!  Everyone knows education reform is unnecessary because poor communities have the internet and Gene Marks; the bootstraps whereby we can pull ourselves up from instead of crying about poor education, crummy teachers, and the children stuck with them. I would lobby on Capitol Hill with a sign that reads "This poor black boy has bootstraps! No new taxes! Gingrich/Marks for Pres/VEEP!"

If I were a poor black kid, I would realize the welfare system is an umbrella for drug abusers and pushers just as my favorite conservatives retort. I would ask my mother, "Why do we need government subsistence when Gene Marks has shown us resources like Google, momma?" And she would say, "Well I'll be darn't! Jesus done come and sent us a real live angel child! God bless dat man, Mr. Marks!" And then we would share this mysterious google apparition with other poor black kids and eradicate poverty together!

If I was a poor black kid, I'd go to sleep every night dreaming that Sandra Bullock picks me up on the way to school and hones me into a superstar college athlete since I'm too dumb to soar academically by my own merits. I would pray everyday that a middle class white man would write an article about how much better he would be as a poor black kid than myself.  Maybe I would read it 20 years later and realize, "Oh! No wonder I'm such a failure...I didn't utilize google search engines!"  Wait, did I just assume the identity of a poor black boy and call myself a failure?  Must reboot.  Self deprecation will not be tolerated!

If I were a poor black boy, I would pick up my sisters at 10 years old from school to walk them to the library where we would wait for our mother to get off of work everyday. I would sit the three of us down to do our homework, read The Boxcar Children, and then play on the swings behind the library. If on three out of the five school days police officers came to accost us...I mean ask questions about what we were doing, I would know that they are our friends and would not confuse us with other children that sold drugs or threw rocks at the library windows the night before, shattering at least three of them. I would not mind that officers would glare at us in our neighborhood, because they are here to protect us. I would not question why libraries and recreation centers in the suburbs did not have as large a police presence as my community, because I know the primary reason is that the law wants to make sure poor black kids like me are really, really safe. For that reason I would never develop an internalized distrust in the presence of officers, as a poor black kid.

If I were a poor black kid, I would do the taxes for my mother instead of spending the night at my friends house playing video game consoles, and work on my portfolio on weekends instead of imitating the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers and climbing trees. As a poor black kid, working tirelessly from my disposition would be the only thing that matters in life and I would be born with the aptitude to suppress the wanton childish desires for endless mouthfuls of sugar, samurai violence, and elementary crushes.

Ah, good thing I'm a middle class white guy!

Man, I'm done with this

im not religious

and i do not support islam. nor do i support christianity. neither do i support bigotry and prejudice, the two principles that are behind the most recent decision by lowes and other corporations to remove their ads from the "all-american muslim" reality tv show. the threat of letting americans see positive depictions of muslims (outside of the radicals regularly seen on fox news) looms too large, it seems. while lowes did a great job eliminating muslims as their customer base, i think they will find that they have also eliminated a large segment of americans outraged by their spineless bending to a hate group and their bigoted agendas.

Cinco de Mayo, St. Patricks day, and the color of privilege..

Is every holiday an American holiday?

The man with the American flag hanging out of the truck (suspiciously in what seems to be a latino Socal neighborhood) was doing so during the 5th of May . A date Mexico overcame the forces of Napoleon over 100 years ago.

AZ is a hotbed of volatile racial subjects these days, so I'd rather focus less on the physical confrontation between the people involved and more on the verbal altercation. Particularly the "go back to Mexico" that was repeated over and over while dismissing that the minority is an American citizen. Which first, I deem racist and secondly, passively addresses the huge amount of privilege that the SB 1070 endorses. That because you are not white, you are not a "true" American or at least a suspect American. That illegal immigrants are a monolith. There is only one kind.

To look less racist, conservatives say that they don't mind immigrants being here, they just don't want them to be here illegally. But there are hardly inquiries into the immigration status of these individuals. No. It is "shoot first, ask later". It's because after everything is sugar coated and glossed over, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter if you were born here or not, it doesn't matter if they are here illegally or legally, it just matters that they're here and they want them to "go back".

On St. Patty's day, in the midst of the immigration debate, I don't see people parading around with American flags and telling Irish immigrants to go back to Ireland. I guess that's the luck of the Irish...

politicians are people too...honest

"i just donated 750 gifts to needy children, how many of you can say you did that?" declares Californian Representative Elton Gallegly to a crowd of people lobbying for job creation.

The audacity to make gaudy remarks as to how many gifts you can afford to donate is mind boggling. It is the equivalent of kindergarteners bickering over who gets the most number of rainbow stickers.

Share your narcissism with the rest of your ilk. You are speaking to people who are out of jobs, poor, and looking for hope. I can't imagine what would possess someone to scoff at those who they can afford to give more than.

How out of touch are politicians with everyday Americans?