WEB POSTED 02-13-2001

WANTED--ONE TRUE IDENTITY

Sometimes it can be quite annoying to encounter someone with an overly-inflated ego. However, I find it much more dismal to encounter a whole category of folks who seem to have no sense of personal worth whatsoever! I am particularly fed up with those of our people who constantly bemoan our economic shortcomings, yet avoid any and all moves which will concretely lessen them.

We have been over here, not by choice, for some 500+ years. During that time, we have watched, and participated in, the transformation of this land from a piece of property owned and controlled by the Red Indian, to the bastion of White Supremacy on the Planet Earth. Part of our history consists of blood we shed and lives we sacrificed to wrest control of this continent from the hands of the Red Indians. We never, however, marshalled our troops to free ourselves from the chains of slavery to our white masters. Instead, we constantly cry and complain about the jobs that white people are not providing for us. An oft-repeated admonition from The Honorable Elijah Muhammad was, "Study the Successful man!"

As this is being written, businesses are closing, companies are merging, and in every case, the number of existing jobs is being reduced. Most of our readers have only heard of the "Great Depression", and fail to see the similarity between the state of the present economy and that of the economy immediately preceding that era. As the American economy goes, there is a well-worn observation that, economically, when the white community gets the sniffles, that means the black community has pneumonia. Another manner of stating it is that when the unemployment dog barks at white folks, he bites a plug out of Black folks. We have added the word "recession" to our vocabulary, without realizing that whenever white folks suffer a recession, we are in a depression!

Again, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad began warning us 71 years ago that we absolutely must "DO FOR SELF!" This principle has been stated again and again over the years. I can remember Black singers, especially Billie Holiday, singing in mournful tones, "Mama may have, Papa may have, but God Bless the child that�s got his own." The old folks, a generation or two before ours, expressed it thusly: "Root, little pig, or die poor!"

Today, the population of the United States is rapidly increasing, while the news media daily count the elimination of more and more means of sustenance. As I have warned before, in a "DO-IT-YOURSELF" age, pity the poor fools who get caught waiting for somebody else to do it for them.