Cliff Kelly: We’re going to take another caller. “Yaphet,†you are on the Talk of Chicago.
Yaphet: Minister, I am trying my best to go on this crusade to save the young people who are out there doing the gang violence and the killing. I’m talking to some of the youngsters in my neighborhood [in] the South Shore area, trying to [say to them] “You young people are our future! We’re not going to have a future if you keep knocking each other out with this silly gang violence!â€
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan: Thank you, brother. Our children are victims of a terrible conspiracy. In the Bible, when Pharaoh saw the multiplication of the numbers of the Children of Israel, he said, “Come. Let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply and join on to an enemy of ours, and come against us.†So, the conspiracy was to kill all the male children, and spare the females.
Right now, if you look at the Black community, there are Black men dying in unprecedented numbers. When you look at the college campuses of America, you find Black women predominant, and Black men less. Black men are filling the prison. Black men are sick with AIDS, and Black women are the No. 1 carrier of the AIDS virus, according to what they say. There is a conspiracy to destroy us as a people. When we see a people being marginalized, the next stage of that marginalization is their extinction. What better way to do it than to bring guns into our community? Drugs into our community? And AIDS into our community?
What you tell the young people is true, but we have to go deeper. We not only have to teach our young people, but we have to give them a sense of their greatness. They are the greatest generation that we have ever produced. They are fearless. They are born warriors. They are not like their parents, or grandparents. They are very, very different. And the enemy knows this, so he calculates separating the youth from the wisdom of age and experience.
I wish that my Black brothers and sisters would help Brother Farrakhan to get out of prison. I am not in a prison of “steel bars†– I am in a prison of public opinion manipulated by the media and their hatred of the truth that is in my mouth that would set our people free. Help me to get out of prison. Stop looking at the Nation of Islam as though we are some enemy to Black people. Open the door to the schools, and let us go in and teach! We don’t have to teach religion. Just teach truth, and these young people will rise up! They will be disciplined. They will see their future, and then the condition in our community will change.
About 3 or 4 weeks ago I began facing new (and revisited) challenges which I would have to face and overcome one way or another. I mentioned one of my personal challenges in my last blog post. One of my nephews had become so unruly at home that his Mother could no longer deal with him and was crying out for help. I visited them and talked to him extensively at the time trying to impress on him the importance of him doing the right thing because he was helping to place his very life in danger. He listened but I don’t think I was getting through to him. He knew that I would be gone after a couple of hours and that he would be right back with his peers doing the same thing that was getting him into all of this trouble both at home and at school. I told him at the time that I didn’t think he could finish the school year especially if he continued to engage in the activities and behavior he had committed himself to. Well, here we are 3 weeks later and he finally managed to get expelled for the rest of the school year. I’ve been messing with him a little bit asking him if he knew how I predicted this eventual outcome. I told him we’ve been witnessing cases just like his for the last 20 or 30 years. It’s not surprising at all and very easy to predict.
Another challenge that has arrived at my door is the fact that my daughter has recently turned 16 and she can’t seem to get boys off of her mind. She goes to an all girls school but every second her friends and her have they are trying to interact with boys in some form or fashion. Today with modern means of communication it is increasingly more difficult to police these activities unless you are totally committed to limiting all lines of access. Between social sites on the internet (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.), cell phones and any social event they can convince you to allow them to attend it is a real trial to limit their access to other peers who probably suffer from a lack of guidance. My daughter is intent on forcing boys into my life.
About 2 weeks ago she asked me if she could go to the Prom of one of these young men. Without hesitation my answer was, “no.†Little did I know that this seemingly casual exchange would spark a battle which I mistakenly assumed that I had a little more time before dealing with the explosive subject matter of boys. Well, my daughter stomped off. She was upset by the decision. Cool. She has to learn how deal with disappointment in life, right?
These two situations combined have served as a catalyst of sorts to awaken me out of my personal hibernation. Like the Honorable Louis Farrakhan stated above these young men are warriors. They are fearless. And it made me realize that I have a tremendous responsibility to introduce them to their own greatness. Allah has blessed me to grow in wisdom and if we are to move forward as a people we have to share our wisdom and experience with these young warriors so that they can fight the next phase of the struggle for our complete liberation as a people.
