Sensible Bill Cosby

The African-American community, in my view, is loaded with exemplary individuals and natural leaders. I've been lucky enough to talk to Southern blacks in my life and honestly, I can't really put into words what I thought of those experiences. There was a sense of dignity even regal demeanor in their diction and understanding of life as they saw it.

Yet, all we see on the news it seems, are flamboyant and superficial figures who spew are more interested in furthering an agenda than offering a real helping hand to their community.

Bill Cosby is one of those successful individuals who is willing to offer an honest opinion of things. Of course, he's right. We make sure my daughter stays off the slang and keep on her proper course when it comes to speaking. How you speak determines a lot of what happens in your life. If you talk like you live in the gutter, then don't be surprised at the low quality job offers you get. Show like you care, and diction is a major example of this, and people will be respond in kind.

Same with writing. Lay off the lousy "text" spelling. You look like an idiot. When I read a bad text, it also lets me into how you may sound.

Bah.

Even the writings of historians like W.E.B. Dubois always impressed me. It was one of those "this guy gets it" type of thing.

Or Booker T. Washington who said in 1911,

"There is (a) class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. ... "

That goes for any culture slaves to a nationalist agenda - like here in Quebec. Without the perpetual fear of English and other grievances that must be kept alive, the Parti Quebecois would cease to exist. I see no difference with the "black power fist" as a metaphor to smashing and destroying and the under-sieged mentality of the 'Je me souviens' nationalist cult in the province. They "say" they're forward looking but they aren't. You can't be if you keep staring at the review mirror. Which, I guess, is why revisionism is so strong here. Always trying to find good in our bad past. Pretty soon Lionel-Groulx will have a Metro station named after him...wait a second. Never mind. Or a demagogue like Maurice Duplessis will get a street named after him. Damn. Never mind again.

All one has to do is read King, Dubois and Washington to see how far off the reservation people like Sharpton and even Obama are from these giants of African-American intellectualism and spirituality.

Obama could not muster the courage to stand above the Martin-Zimmerman case choosing instead to offer unwise words of projecting and fabricating a scenario of "if he had a son" and "that could have been me."

It was a profound disappointment for the leader of the free world to apt for this route. Instead of offering a voice of reason, he gave into his own private emotions and took a side - which is not hthe proper thing to do in my view as the President of an entire nation; of a people.

Anyway. Judge Joe Brown has a little thing he calls "Man up" or "protecting womanhood and promoting manhood."

A good reminder not just for African-Americans but all people of any race or creed.