This blog is designed to describe my conceptual, psychological and emotional stimulus for creating The Virtual Nation Of African America. It is an invitation, a challenge and possibly for some a crucible 
[crucible in the positive sense that a laboratory instrument used for heating to high intensity various chemical compounds for scientific purposes is a crucible] in that we will of necessity be forced to intensely scrutinize long held beliefs, assumptions, habits of thinking [or as fact would have it-not thinking really] and patterns of behavior we cherish-for no good reason really-in order for the purest possible intent of this idea to be realized.
The intent of this idea is to create a living, breathing artificial entity, in the very same way that corporations, LLCs, NGOs and patnerships become artificial entities, imbued with the power of a person, enlivened by the wills, minds and hearts of many actual persons. The Virtual Nation Of African America is Already that! It's first cell is already multiplying in the artificial womb of the completely artificial world we call the internet, cyberspace, the web, etc. Other cells have already received the delightful spark of it's life and are vibrating with anticipation of...more!
Because I am immersed completely in the idea, allow me please to describe the liberating psychology of it -the psychology of liberation for me-the first simple cell of the artificial entity to vibrate with the power of it [keeping in front of you the idea that freedom begins with and ends with the mind] and please forgive me for taking a long a circuit route to describe the recover of my sanity from dismay and depression. There is no other way to do it:
From my long life in America as a sixth or even seventh generation expatriate African, I experience every day of my life a feeling, a hunger, a vacuum void at the center of myself that begins with my very name. I have no name. This thing I wear, the thing I am forced to respond to as my legal name is a matter of constant but subtle embarrassment to me. The name is no more legal than any of the crimes committed centuries ago that are the cause of me wearing this thing. It's like walking around with a pink elephant on my head and calling it a hat. It forced me all these years to pretend I like wearing it even though I hate the color and when the people who put it there use it to turn my head about in response to them I am resentful about it but only for a split second because I have been socialized to hide that resentment most immediately for fear I will act it out on some poor, unsuspecting fool.
The fact is, I don't have a name. John Smith has a name only if he is of European descent. If he is of African Descent he doesn't have a name. He has a pink elephant masquerading as a name and he is the object of an affront so subtle, he actually can live a whole lifetime and not relate that feeling, that hunger, that vacuum void to the fact that he has no name. Having no name, he has no culture, having no culture he has no country, having no country he has no land, having no land he has nothing to leave his progeny and his emptiness is that of having no heritage of acceptable merit, only the vestiges of a terrible, terrible event, deep in his ancestral history that set the game, established the slanted rules and fitted him with the pink elephant, that dreary pink elephant that his mother and father wore, trying desperately to be proud of it while hiding their own rage about having no name.
[Could this be the same anomaly that forces my beautiful sleeping sisters to endure [too often with pride] the absurdity of attaching other women's hair, or worse fake hair to their wonderful bouquet fragrant African hair? The deeper absurdity of making their enemies rich while doing so?]
The saddest part of it all happened the day reason entered my mind. I can't even remember what sparked it. What prompted it to enter when it did. I had thought it [reason] was part of my original equipment, like my ears, my eyes, my feet. Until it entered and said "Why are you walking around with this pink elephant on your head?" I said "No! That's my hat!" Then I realized that it was-in fact-a pink elephant. But not only was I wearing a pink elephant, everybody, including my parents and generations of parents before all wore this thing and pretended they were wearing hats. Worse still, the same was true of everybody like me, of African Descent, living as African Americans.
The truth of the matter was, somebody had seriously, criminally messed with my psyche and that of everybody in my family tree, and that of everybody like me, in all directions, as far as I could see. We were all wearing pink elephants for hats. We were all suffering deep but oh so subtle psychosis because of it, manifesting as anger at each other, exaggerated or false senses of self, aberrations about food, religion, drugs, even our sexuality injured because we had false names and thus, false lives. Not only that, so deeply had they damaged our ancestors psyches they had made our ancestors first coerced, then willing conspirators in damaging their own children's psyches long before we could defend against it.
So what to do? Well, you can change your name. How do I do that? Well, you file a petition with the court for a legal name change. The judge will hold a hearing to determine if you will be 'allowed' to change it. Of course they'll check to make sure you haven't committed some crime but if not, pay a court fee, pay your attorney [approx. $500.00 if your not smart enough to do the filing yourself] and it's done. All right. Good plan!
Until reason set in. Maddening reason. Always right! Always-bearing-the-glaring-torch-of- truth reason cut like a razor through that solution:
Reason: "So what are you going to name yourself?"
Me:"How about Abu Mohammed"
Reason:"What does it mean?"
Me: "Hmmm! I don't know!"
Reason: "Are you Muslim?"
Me: "No. But I could be easily enough!"
Reason: "Africans with muslim names have them for the same reasons Africans with Christian names have them. They got them because some conqueror took their names and forced them to wear theirs.
Africans are muslims by conquest, not by heritage. Even the converted did so because they were conquered, first in body then in mind. Compelling reasons why war must be eliminated once and for all time from the human reality."
Me: Oh!
Reason: Besides. If the acts perpetrated on your ancestors were criminal and illegal, how can any court, [which enforces you having to wear the designated pink elephant at all times and will jail you if you try to legally use a different pink elephant to represent yourself meaning an illegal entity will decree that your legal right to alter your name is illegal], how can any illegal, criminal court system, imposed on people it had no right to systematically kidnap, enslave and rob of name, country and heritage give you legal sanction to change your name or even deny your right to do so without regard to what anybody thinks about it? Further, why would you pay somebody for the privilege, when even if you create a name out of your head, it can never replace what should have been your name, nor can it do for you what your real name would do, which is, identify you with your family, your clan, your nation, your culture and your heritage, the way the name....say-Windsor...almost automatically connects you with the British royal family? Not only does the name identify the person with that heritage, it identifies your inalienable right to property, money, status, purpose, trade association, protection, family and history whether the individual embraces these perqs or-as some do-reject them.
Me: Dag! [expletive sanitized]
The emptiness grows now. As I follow it, and the history of it in my life, I realize that I have been pissed for many, many years about this something that has happened to me. Something I can never, ever, ever make right. No matter what I ever do. My real name is lost forever. I cannot leave it to my children. I can not pull it out and shine it up. I don't know if it needed polish. I cannot read the great nor the notorious about it nor my ancestors-many of whom have graves deep beneath the Atlantic ocean. I can never pass on their knowledge, feel their spirits. There is no ancestral home for me where I have even a spiritual anchor. I can never say "This is where my ancestors even eight generations ago did diddly! And all this for no reason attributable to acts nor omissions on my part.
Idiots would claim that it doesn't matter. That you are what you make yourself and this is true. Still it rings hollow. It rings hollow for the same reason all apologetics for holocausts ring hollow and false to any group of people who bear that scar. I thoroughly understood this after spending literally days visiting and revisiting the Jewish Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach. I understood why it was necessary to formally address the horror of it, the damage it caused, the scars that remain with a memorial. I was transfixed by the images, the stories. I knew I had to see this, absorb it. All African Americans should see this memorial once.
Out of a long and torturous depression, a deep and terrifying journey into myself, where I fought with my grandfathers for allowing anybody to call their offspring illegitimate, bastards; for not having the courage to stand for the validity of their many wives/not wives and the rights of all their children to stand in the sunlight as the glorious creations of God they were, for their tacit and often explicit acceptance and collusion in the conspiracy to create near zombies of their progeny and for their idiotic [in my then rebellious opinion]
insistence on making their enemies rich and powerful at the expense of their own families; an encounter where I screamed at my grandmothers for breastfeeding babies who would grow up to sell, oppress and even kill their own sons, rape and demean their daughters, babies who should have perished with their parents in a blazing inferno, or choking on arsenic or hemlock; for trying to force their manners, their warped and hypocritical family values on African men and themselves; for passing right down to my mother and to my still scarred back the mean-spirited methods of torture parading as discipline and punishment they used...
Finally...I heard the gentle whispers, their calming voices cool and healing, like cooing to a screaming infant: "Please! Who could have done better given the same life? We knew the torture of the flesh, the mind, the heart and the soul. Throbbing, blazing, aching, shrieking in our bodies, breaking in our hearts, suffering in our psyches and raging in our dreams. None could know better than us. But we had to die to know the subtle torture that would pass unseen and un-noticed to our children. You...you have the luxury to even notice. You who can afford not to work from before dawn until deep in the night. You who can read and understand every single word, every concept, every nuance of what happened to us in the language denied to us by our culture shock... You for whom opportunities now exist that were inconceivable even to masters and their pawns. The real question is...
What will you do about it? What will you do? Given that every weapon you get will have already been replaced by them with better ones? Meaning-you will pay money for the excuse used to kill you and even then you will set those guns not on your real enemy nor their pawns but on your brothers and sisters, falsely believing you have done the job. Meaning that every armed revolution you create will destroy the very good it seeks and replace one bloody tyrant with one equal or worse...you!
What will you do? Given that the turf you fight for is not even your own to fight for, the land you buy with your money is stolen land, the courts you go to for justice will give you just that-JUST ICE! and even your woman must, by design, be the enforcer of your enslavement and hers because she wants, because she and your children have to have.
What will you do?
How will you remove the blindfold so she can really she how wrong it all is, so she can know that the reason she is angry with you is not because you have more than one woman, but because you lie and fear to own it and provide for it like a true man; because you play competition with sisters instead of cooperation among them; because you avoid responsibility for what happened to her and her sisters, because avoid responsibility for the children you create-emulating the very thing you hate in 'them'; because the cart is before the horse about even that as long as you have done nothing to address her raped body, her sullied honor, her devastated dignity, her lost heritage, her lost inheritance; is before the horse as long as you continue to do nothing about what happened to take her name away.
But most especially, what will you do to undo what makes your whole life a sham no matter what you accomplish because you...have lost...Your Name and no matter how much money you get or fame without your name you are a ghost. A spook. A cartoon! A caricature. And not until you do something about this ravaged collective psyche will you be a man in yours or anybody else's eyes.
I woke from my depression silenced! I woke from my depression with deep respect for my ancestors, a chastened understanding of my mother, forgiveness for my father, sweet love and compassion for my brothers and sisters and a new view of the history of African America. Suddenly, as the fog cleared from my eyes, I saw magic in the fact that so many sons and daughters of slaves had conquered the pink elephant by making the names they were left with immortal. Names like Frederick Douglas, Lerone Bennett Junior, Toni Morrison, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Betty Carter, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cornel West had been magically transformed. The power of the subtle affront of namelessness had been shattered, because these wonderful Africans and countless others had set blazing nuclear fire, forged in the very divinity of The Creator to these names. Lit them brighter than stars. Made them real names that identified unforgettable African people with matchless accomplishments.
The name Miles Davis could never belong to a European again. Ever. It would always burden the wearer of it with shoes within which he could shelter all his generations.
Reason, maddening reason had served me well over the course of my life. It had kept me reading. Always reading. Everything. Everybody. It had taught me how to steal education when I couldn't pay for it. It taught me how to value and use my invisibility. It taught me what happens to revolutions and revolutionaries, poisoned by their own self-importance. It taught me how to recognize pawns and kings. It taught me the motives of the faraway hidden queen, the real power behind her and what she hides behind her mask. It taught me about the eyes of predators, how they see their prey, how they smell it, about the odor of fear and its danger. It showed me the logic of every trap and I avoided most but stumbled lucky or protected like fools and babies through others. It delivered me to mentors like Samuel Clemens, Na'im Akbar, Alexander Dumas, Malcolm X, MLK, Rev. Leon Sullivan, Ernest Holmes, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Machiavelli, Carlos Castaneda, Frank Herbert,Toni Morrison, Ivan Van Sertima, Angela Davis, Nelson Mandela, Maynard Jackson, Huey Newton, Pearl Cleage, Vivian Jones, Newt Gingrich. Wildly diverse mentors. People I would never meet, many long dead but alive in their work. Reason taught me the power of the personal computer and schooled me for years in programs, processes, languages and the power of networks. Reason delivered me here sane with never a broken bone, through military service, through wars in spirit wars in the streets and cold, lonely vigils in places I had traveled with only my thumb for transportation. It delivered me to the place where galaxies are born and past all dogma, to the heart of love, truth, all knowing, all feeling. Then reason did it again.
Reason: Do you want to kill that feeling...that emptiness...that vacuum void?
Me: What are you talking about?
Reason: What you were going to do about having no name.
Me: You mean what I'm going to do about the fact that I have nothing to leave my children, my grand and great-grandchildren except things derived from corruption, avarice, rapine and the blood of billions of people for thousands of years, with even that slipping into economic chaos?
Reason: Yea that!
Me: o.k. spill it!
Reason: Freedom is in the mind! It begins there...it ends there. If you want to do something about recovering your name, which is to recover your dignity, your worth in the eyes of your woman, your eminence in the eyes of your sons and daughters, create virtually what is impossible to create elsewhere.
Create a virtual nation for and with people like you. People with no name. People who realize this emptiness. This loss. People who are pissed off about it. People who know they've done nothing about it. People who know they really have nothing they can leave their kids and grandkids that truly belongs to them. People who know doing this will psychologically heal and set their minds free of slavery because they did something meaningful about it.
Create a desktop accessible Virtual Nation for African America, where children...generations from now will have all the history, all the successes, all the mistakes, all the protagonists, antagonists, the lessons, and the solutions created by African Americans to recover, not the names they lost...these can never be recovered, but the sense, the certain knowledge, accessible with all their senses, that they came together and created a practical, evolving and responsive universal continuum, in a pure place truly their own. A monument to the trail of bones across the Atlantic, a monument to the rivers of blood poured out. An icon on school children's desktops and laptops that speaks: This Is What We Did About It!
Last night, I showed the first skeletal 'draft' of it to a young medical student friend of mine. Her response "WOW" let me know Reason was absolutely right! I showed the same 'draft' to a wise Ethiopian mother of two boys. Her excitement-again-proved Reason right! In that moment, I felt, in the aura of those beautiful African daughters their vindication. My psychological liberation was born in their excitement. The vacuum void at the pit of my soul diminished ever so much. We have the answers. The technology is here. We use it for porn, for fantasy, for things that will never serve us. For things that only rob us. There is nothing we can't easily do with it. Let's Do This! This is worthwhile!
[crucible in the positive sense that a laboratory instrument used for heating to high intensity various chemical compounds for scientific purposes is a crucible] in that we will of necessity be forced to intensely scrutinize long held beliefs, assumptions, habits of thinking [or as fact would have it-not thinking really] and patterns of behavior we cherish-for no good reason really-in order for the purest possible intent of this idea to be realized.
The intent of this idea is to create a living, breathing artificial entity, in the very same way that corporations, LLCs, NGOs and patnerships become artificial entities, imbued with the power of a person, enlivened by the wills, minds and hearts of many actual persons. The Virtual Nation Of African America is Already that! It's first cell is already multiplying in the artificial womb of the completely artificial world we call the internet, cyberspace, the web, etc. Other cells have already received the delightful spark of it's life and are vibrating with anticipation of...more!
Because I am immersed completely in the idea, allow me please to describe the liberating psychology of it -the psychology of liberation for me-the first simple cell of the artificial entity to vibrate with the power of it [keeping in front of you the idea that freedom begins with and ends with the mind] and please forgive me for taking a long a circuit route to describe the recover of my sanity from dismay and depression. There is no other way to do it:
From my long life in America as a sixth or even seventh generation expatriate African, I experience every day of my life a feeling, a hunger, a vacuum void at the center of myself that begins with my very name. I have no name. This thing I wear, the thing I am forced to respond to as my legal name is a matter of constant but subtle embarrassment to me. The name is no more legal than any of the crimes committed centuries ago that are the cause of me wearing this thing. It's like walking around with a pink elephant on my head and calling it a hat. It forced me all these years to pretend I like wearing it even though I hate the color and when the people who put it there use it to turn my head about in response to them I am resentful about it but only for a split second because I have been socialized to hide that resentment most immediately for fear I will act it out on some poor, unsuspecting fool.
The fact is, I don't have a name. John Smith has a name only if he is of European descent. If he is of African Descent he doesn't have a name. He has a pink elephant masquerading as a name and he is the object of an affront so subtle, he actually can live a whole lifetime and not relate that feeling, that hunger, that vacuum void to the fact that he has no name. Having no name, he has no culture, having no culture he has no country, having no country he has no land, having no land he has nothing to leave his progeny and his emptiness is that of having no heritage of acceptable merit, only the vestiges of a terrible, terrible event, deep in his ancestral history that set the game, established the slanted rules and fitted him with the pink elephant, that dreary pink elephant that his mother and father wore, trying desperately to be proud of it while hiding their own rage about having no name.
[Could this be the same anomaly that forces my beautiful sleeping sisters to endure [too often with pride] the absurdity of attaching other women's hair, or worse fake hair to their wonderful bouquet fragrant African hair? The deeper absurdity of making their enemies rich while doing so?] The saddest part of it all happened the day reason entered my mind. I can't even remember what sparked it. What prompted it to enter when it did. I had thought it [reason] was part of my original equipment, like my ears, my eyes, my feet. Until it entered and said "Why are you walking around with this pink elephant on your head?" I said "No! That's my hat!" Then I realized that it was-in fact-a pink elephant. But not only was I wearing a pink elephant, everybody, including my parents and generations of parents before all wore this thing and pretended they were wearing hats. Worse still, the same was true of everybody like me, of African Descent, living as African Americans.
The truth of the matter was, somebody had seriously, criminally messed with my psyche and that of everybody in my family tree, and that of everybody like me, in all directions, as far as I could see. We were all wearing pink elephants for hats. We were all suffering deep but oh so subtle psychosis because of it, manifesting as anger at each other, exaggerated or false senses of self, aberrations about food, religion, drugs, even our sexuality injured because we had false names and thus, false lives. Not only that, so deeply had they damaged our ancestors psyches they had made our ancestors first coerced, then willing conspirators in damaging their own children's psyches long before we could defend against it.
So what to do? Well, you can change your name. How do I do that? Well, you file a petition with the court for a legal name change. The judge will hold a hearing to determine if you will be 'allowed' to change it. Of course they'll check to make sure you haven't committed some crime but if not, pay a court fee, pay your attorney [approx. $500.00 if your not smart enough to do the filing yourself] and it's done. All right. Good plan!
Until reason set in. Maddening reason. Always right! Always-bearing-the-glaring-torch-of- truth reason cut like a razor through that solution:
Reason: "So what are you going to name yourself?"
Me:"How about Abu Mohammed"
Reason:"What does it mean?"
Me: "Hmmm! I don't know!"
Reason: "Are you Muslim?"
Me: "No. But I could be easily enough!"
Reason: "Africans with muslim names have them for the same reasons Africans with Christian names have them. They got them because some conqueror took their names and forced them to wear theirs.
Africans are muslims by conquest, not by heritage. Even the converted did so because they were conquered, first in body then in mind. Compelling reasons why war must be eliminated once and for all time from the human reality." Me: Oh!
Reason: Besides. If the acts perpetrated on your ancestors were criminal and illegal, how can any court, [which enforces you having to wear the designated pink elephant at all times and will jail you if you try to legally use a different pink elephant to represent yourself meaning an illegal entity will decree that your legal right to alter your name is illegal], how can any illegal, criminal court system, imposed on people it had no right to systematically kidnap, enslave and rob of name, country and heritage give you legal sanction to change your name or even deny your right to do so without regard to what anybody thinks about it? Further, why would you pay somebody for the privilege, when even if you create a name out of your head, it can never replace what should have been your name, nor can it do for you what your real name would do, which is, identify you with your family, your clan, your nation, your culture and your heritage, the way the name....say-Windsor...almost automatically connects you with the British royal family? Not only does the name identify the person with that heritage, it identifies your inalienable right to property, money, status, purpose, trade association, protection, family and history whether the individual embraces these perqs or-as some do-reject them.
Me: Dag! [expletive sanitized]
The emptiness grows now. As I follow it, and the history of it in my life, I realize that I have been pissed for many, many years about this something that has happened to me. Something I can never, ever, ever make right. No matter what I ever do. My real name is lost forever. I cannot leave it to my children. I can not pull it out and shine it up. I don't know if it needed polish. I cannot read the great nor the notorious about it nor my ancestors-many of whom have graves deep beneath the Atlantic ocean. I can never pass on their knowledge, feel their spirits. There is no ancestral home for me where I have even a spiritual anchor. I can never say "This is where my ancestors even eight generations ago did diddly! And all this for no reason attributable to acts nor omissions on my part.
Idiots would claim that it doesn't matter. That you are what you make yourself and this is true. Still it rings hollow. It rings hollow for the same reason all apologetics for holocausts ring hollow and false to any group of people who bear that scar. I thoroughly understood this after spending literally days visiting and revisiting the Jewish Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach. I understood why it was necessary to formally address the horror of it, the damage it caused, the scars that remain with a memorial. I was transfixed by the images, the stories. I knew I had to see this, absorb it. All African Americans should see this memorial once.
Out of a long and torturous depression, a deep and terrifying journey into myself, where I fought with my grandfathers for allowing anybody to call their offspring illegitimate, bastards; for not having the courage to stand for the validity of their many wives/not wives and the rights of all their children to stand in the sunlight as the glorious creations of God they were, for their tacit and often explicit acceptance and collusion in the conspiracy to create near zombies of their progeny and for their idiotic [in my then rebellious opinion]
insistence on making their enemies rich and powerful at the expense of their own families; an encounter where I screamed at my grandmothers for breastfeeding babies who would grow up to sell, oppress and even kill their own sons, rape and demean their daughters, babies who should have perished with their parents in a blazing inferno, or choking on arsenic or hemlock; for trying to force their manners, their warped and hypocritical family values on African men and themselves; for passing right down to my mother and to my still scarred back the mean-spirited methods of torture parading as discipline and punishment they used...Finally...I heard the gentle whispers, their calming voices cool and healing, like cooing to a screaming infant: "Please! Who could have done better given the same life? We knew the torture of the flesh, the mind, the heart and the soul. Throbbing, blazing, aching, shrieking in our bodies, breaking in our hearts, suffering in our psyches and raging in our dreams. None could know better than us. But we had to die to know the subtle torture that would pass unseen and un-noticed to our children. You...you have the luxury to even notice. You who can afford not to work from before dawn until deep in the night. You who can read and understand every single word, every concept, every nuance of what happened to us in the language denied to us by our culture shock... You for whom opportunities now exist that were inconceivable even to masters and their pawns. The real question is...
What will you do about it? What will you do? Given that every weapon you get will have already been replaced by them with better ones? Meaning-you will pay money for the excuse used to kill you and even then you will set those guns not on your real enemy nor their pawns but on your brothers and sisters, falsely believing you have done the job. Meaning that every armed revolution you create will destroy the very good it seeks and replace one bloody tyrant with one equal or worse...you!What will you do? Given that the turf you fight for is not even your own to fight for, the land you buy with your money is stolen land, the courts you go to for justice will give you just that-JUST ICE! and even your woman must, by design, be the enforcer of your enslavement and hers because she wants, because she and your children have to have.
What will you do?
How will you remove the blindfold so she can really she how wrong it all is, so she can know that the reason she is angry with you is not because you have more than one woman, but because you lie and fear to own it and provide for it like a true man; because you play competition with sisters instead of cooperation among them; because you avoid responsibility for what happened to her and her sisters, because avoid responsibility for the children you create-emulating the very thing you hate in 'them'; because the cart is before the horse about even that as long as you have done nothing to address her raped body, her sullied honor, her devastated dignity, her lost heritage, her lost inheritance; is before the horse as long as you continue to do nothing about what happened to take her name away.But most especially, what will you do to undo what makes your whole life a sham no matter what you accomplish because you...have lost...Your Name and no matter how much money you get or fame without your name you are a ghost. A spook. A cartoon! A caricature. And not until you do something about this ravaged collective psyche will you be a man in yours or anybody else's eyes.
I woke from my depression silenced! I woke from my depression with deep respect for my ancestors, a chastened understanding of my mother, forgiveness for my father, sweet love and compassion for my brothers and sisters and a new view of the history of African America. Suddenly, as the fog cleared from my eyes, I saw magic in the fact that so many sons and daughters of slaves had conquered the pink elephant by making the names they were left with immortal. Names like Frederick Douglas, Lerone Bennett Junior, Toni Morrison, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Betty Carter, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cornel West had been magically transformed. The power of the subtle affront of namelessness had been shattered, because these wonderful Africans and countless others had set blazing nuclear fire, forged in the very divinity of The Creator to these names. Lit them brighter than stars. Made them real names that identified unforgettable African people with matchless accomplishments.
The name Miles Davis could never belong to a European again. Ever. It would always burden the wearer of it with shoes within which he could shelter all his generations.Reason, maddening reason had served me well over the course of my life. It had kept me reading. Always reading. Everything. Everybody. It had taught me how to steal education when I couldn't pay for it. It taught me how to value and use my invisibility. It taught me what happens to revolutions and revolutionaries, poisoned by their own self-importance. It taught me how to recognize pawns and kings. It taught me the motives of the faraway hidden queen, the real power behind her and what she hides behind her mask. It taught me about the eyes of predators, how they see their prey, how they smell it, about the odor of fear and its danger. It showed me the logic of every trap and I avoided most but stumbled lucky or protected like fools and babies through others. It delivered me to mentors like Samuel Clemens, Na'im Akbar, Alexander Dumas, Malcolm X, MLK, Rev. Leon Sullivan, Ernest Holmes, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Machiavelli, Carlos Castaneda, Frank Herbert,Toni Morrison, Ivan Van Sertima, Angela Davis, Nelson Mandela, Maynard Jackson, Huey Newton, Pearl Cleage, Vivian Jones, Newt Gingrich. Wildly diverse mentors. People I would never meet, many long dead but alive in their work. Reason taught me the power of the personal computer and schooled me for years in programs, processes, languages and the power of networks. Reason delivered me here sane with never a broken bone, through military service, through wars in spirit wars in the streets and cold, lonely vigils in places I had traveled with only my thumb for transportation. It delivered me to the place where galaxies are born and past all dogma, to the heart of love, truth, all knowing, all feeling. Then reason did it again.
Reason: Do you want to kill that feeling...that emptiness...that vacuum void?
Me: What are you talking about?
Reason: What you were going to do about having no name.
Me: You mean what I'm going to do about the fact that I have nothing to leave my children, my grand and great-grandchildren except things derived from corruption, avarice, rapine and the blood of billions of people for thousands of years, with even that slipping into economic chaos?
Reason: Yea that!
Me: o.k. spill it!
Reason: Freedom is in the mind! It begins there...it ends there. If you want to do something about recovering your name, which is to recover your dignity, your worth in the eyes of your woman, your eminence in the eyes of your sons and daughters, create virtually what is impossible to create elsewhere.
Create a virtual nation for and with people like you. People with no name. People who realize this emptiness. This loss. People who are pissed off about it. People who know they've done nothing about it. People who know they really have nothing they can leave their kids and grandkids that truly belongs to them. People who know doing this will psychologically heal and set their minds free of slavery because they did something meaningful about it.
Create a desktop accessible Virtual Nation for African America, where children...generations from now will have all the history, all the successes, all the mistakes, all the protagonists, antagonists, the lessons, and the solutions created by African Americans to recover, not the names they lost...these can never be recovered, but the sense, the certain knowledge, accessible with all their senses, that they came together and created a practical, evolving and responsive universal continuum, in a pure place truly their own. A monument to the trail of bones across the Atlantic, a monument to the rivers of blood poured out. An icon on school children's desktops and laptops that speaks: This Is What We Did About It!
Last night, I showed the first skeletal 'draft' of it to a young medical student friend of mine. Her response "WOW" let me know Reason was absolutely right! I showed the same 'draft' to a wise Ethiopian mother of two boys. Her excitement-again-proved Reason right! In that moment, I felt, in the aura of those beautiful African daughters their vindication. My psychological liberation was born in their excitement. The vacuum void at the pit of my soul diminished ever so much. We have the answers. The technology is here. We use it for porn, for fantasy, for things that will never serve us. For things that only rob us. There is nothing we can't easily do with it. Let's Do This! This is worthwhile!
