Unprecedented Peril Meets The Ghetto

I have always known that U.S. society would meltdown because "the experiment," as it exists is, an unsustainable model. But imagining and experiencing an event are two entirely different things.

Crenshaw Blvd and The Rollin’ 60’s

Most of you reading this are warmly familiar with Robert Fulghum’s iconic book “All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” The title is taken from the first essay in the volume, in which Fulghum lists common lessons learned in American kindergarten classrooms (some anyway) and explains how the world would be improved if adults adhered to the same basic rules as children. Being one that speaks, reads and writes somewhat fluent German, I will gird my loins and refrain from mentioning the fact that most “Americans” have no idea as to the literal meaning of the term kindergarten. Nor will I muse about Kinderjungle.

Oops.

Like everything else in this inverted society, if one is a Black Person in the United States, we often exist in an alternate universe. Consequently, we have very unique and different experiences within that realm. The following explains how the world would be improved if The Ghetto was an experience for all.

All I Really I Need to Know I learned in the Ghetto (aka The Island)

These are the things I learned (in the Ghetto) by the time I was a 10 year-old:
1. Trust few people; respect and admire those that respect and admire you.
2. There is no such thing as “fair-play” in combat.
3. If you hit someone expect to get the living shit kicked out of you.
4. Empathy, though admirable, can be a liability.
5. Recognize that your singular purpose in this life is to leave it, and all that really matters is what good you do between your first breath and your last one.
6. Honor thy father, especially your Black Man father and consider yourself lucky to have one.
7. Don’t insult anyone’s mother.
8. Never, ever, allow anyone to intimidate you.
9. Keep a clean floor. Because no matter how clean your house is, if the floor is filthy so is the rest.
10. Understand that there is evil in the world, but always be kind to animals and children.
11. Listen and learn how to, for listening is vastly more important than Dick and Jane “Looking.” It is life’s singularly most important skill for one cannot speak without listening.
12. Always maintain situational awareness and keep your head on a turret (inside and out).
13. Lucky number 13, like the colonies, and the greatest lesson of all: everything ends as it began. Know that you never get away, you just get by and what goes around…comes around.

Ironically even though, in many, many ways, the United States is the worlds largest ghetto, it has failed to learn its own lessons.

Peril Here, Peril There: Peril! Peril!…Everywhere!

Kindergarten be damned. What I learned in the ghetto is far more significant. The only thing that supersedes that are the lessons learned from my father and my, absolutely stellar, teachers from kindergarten through college (with three exceptions). Pursuant to same, I would be intellectually in absentia if I were not reminded of that other trinity: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (aka “ghost”).

Heaven knows that 28 years after his transition from this Earth, my father remains a “ghost” in my life and I see him in everything I do. Just like the ghetto. Just like my teachers and professors; past and present.

I’m good and “spooked” now, as I sit by the door.

What many will fail to understand is that they are all, the triumvirate, one in the same. Given that reality, my tactical preference is to work from the outside and move N-wards. And so, we shall.

Peril Without

Though far be it from me to blow my horn, in what is known as “The Horn of Africa” the so-called United States Institute for Peace or USIP (if it were not so offensive it would qualify as a joke) warns that the region presents great peril to the “West.” The West is diplospeak for Europeans. White folks. You know, The Gardeners of The Garden whilst the remainder of the world is a jungle.

But aye matey, I be a proud jungle dweller as were me ancestors from which you emerged; I am both the alpha, and the omega.

Dominance in what is called The Horn of Africa (Alkebulan) has, heretofore, been dominated by “illegal aliens” that do not live there. A region that, were it to disappear for a week, would throw the world into chaos. It has not been treated well by The West.

It is also a region that has been a historical crossroad. Traders have travelled through the region from north to south and west to east for millennia, along with Empires that have ebbed and flowed. Islam and Christianity embedded themselves from the earliest days of each faith. The Nile River flows through to Egypt, existentially linking all continental countries. The eastern coast: the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean, are the origins of intercontinental trade.

The unvarnished truth is that the Horn of Africa (Alkebulan) straddles a geographical space of such strategic importance that those who treat it with indifference will come to rue their human disregard, greed and global apathy. I am cynical enough to not dismiss the potentiality that worldwide conflict and millions of deaths is a thing that some seek. You’ll pardon my brutality here, but it has happened before.

At least twice.

Same actors.

Same origins.

Without Alkebulan the West is still living in the caves of Europe and wearing animal skins. The United States would have nothing, absolutely nothing, without the Alkebulanian. This region, The Horn, comprising the countries of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia with Kenya and Uganda very closely associated is, indeed, the center of the “Western” universe. And therein, hereien and within lies the peril ahead. I’ve never liked Westerns, I much prefer gangster movies but, perhaps, that is a distinction sans a difference.

Bounded by Suez and the Strait of Hormuz, The Horn of Africa, and waters surrounding the Arabian Peninsula, in the region of the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea through the Arabian Sea to the Gulf of Oman and Iran, connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. The Strait of Hormuz is the world's most important oil chokepoint. Choke-point. Be ye not strangled.

Ask a Black Man in the United States about a “chokehold” and you can start with Jordan Neely. Eric Garner gave him his orientation into heaven (aka rigor mortis). See, we understand “choke” like you don’t. But, verily, you shall. Choking Eric and Choking Jordan. Does one not choke to death when lynched?

That same geographic area is home to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Yemen's strategic location along essential maritime routes and its position next to important U.S. allies has caused the West to deploy a bumbling foreign policy that has destabilized both the country and the region. A policy that uses Saudi Arabia as a proxy and a very stupid move from an international relations standpoint. U.S. complicity in the Yemen war is partly one of miscalculation, in that Washington initially overestimated its ability to shape coalition conduct and underestimated the devastation of the conflict it was helping enable. Can you say Iraq?

Or as my uncle Earl would say “now you done shit and stepped in it.”

Yesterday, Israel launched an attack inside the sovereign nation of Iran. Iran is an oil rich nation that has been under brutal Western sanctions for the past 40 years. The Iranian people have suffered tremendously, yet Iran remains not only defiant, but also strong. Yesterday’s attack by Israel killed Hamas’ top political leader subsequent to his attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president in the capital city of Tehran. Ismail Haniyeh was the point-man in negotiations for a cease fire in the Palestinian genocide being conducted by Israel.

By the assassination, Israel has made it clear that it not only enjoys its murderous rampage, it intends to escalate it. The same nation that howls about a holocaust is, indeed, perpetuating one. Ultimately, an already complicit United States will be drawn into a regional, if not worldwide, conflict. Israel is a “reckless driver” and the United States does not have sense enough to get out of the car.

The People’s Republic of China is waging a diplomatic and economic offensive against the West and Beijing has been quite successful in doing so. Take the Pacific Island nations, for example. The Peoples Republic of China has scored a number of strategic coups recently including a security agreement with the Solomon Islands that dramatically expands its standing and military access there.

Additionally, China has formed the international security and defense Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as the geopolitical bloc known as BRICS. The West kills children, women, men, dogs and cats across the globe calling it diplomacy. China is building hospitals, schools, roads and, most importantly, bridges calling it diplomacy. It does not require a mental giant to figure out which is which. Then there is Taiwan.

The West has, essentially, surrounded China with military bases in what can only be likened to a noose. However, lynching China is going to prove a lot more consequential than the European mob hanging one of my Alkebulanian brothers and sisters from a magnolia tree. China will not acquiesce to being Strange Fruit anymore than Iran, North Korea or Russia will and they are all militarily aligned with Uber potent navies. Any conflict with China will start on the water. The Chinese have made it clear that Taiwan is part of China. Kind of their version of the Monroe Doctrine.

All over Alkebulan, in Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Niger, Mali and Guinea a growing number of Alkebulanian nations are pushing the U.S. and France out of the continent while welcoming China and Russia. The use of coercion and military power that characterizes Western imperialist doctrine is being replaced by a new model of cooperation that seeks mutual benefit rather than the hegemony of one party. The struggle of Alkebulanian people across the continent, particularly in the Sahel, is not an isolated event.

All over the continent the people are rising. The whole continent is burning right now. Recent military coups are part of the first phases of an “African revolution” against Western neocolonialism. This wave of military interventions is a reaction to the West’s ongoing plunder of the continent’s natural resources. Have you ever heard of the “British Crown Jewels?” Ask yourself, if you don’t already know, where they came from.

Finally, in terms of peril from without, there is Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is now two and a half years old. Months before the conflict, I wrote a column entitled Mr. Stein's Lesson. In the article, I mentioned the events that have now occurred and those still yet to come and am hardly surprised at the conflict itself. Mr. Stein's Lesson

The projected "World War III," beginning in Ukraine is less than a days drive from Poland; virtually the same distance away as the geographic distance between World War I and World War II. Both wars were auspiciously to "fight fascism" which is the same rubbish propagandized today. There has never been a Black fascist nor oligarch. More "innocent" black and brown people, that have zero interest in Ukraine, are dying than there have been "brave" Ukrainians dying. The world sees this.

The Peril Within

It would be easy for me to state that Donald “Agent Orange” Trump is an existential threat. But, as I have said before, it is not that elementary. Donald Trump is not a person, he is a thing. And even if the personage that is he is defeated, the thing that he represents will not be so easily vanquished. Donald Trump has exhumed and reanimated the corpse that is the essence of the United States: racism and violence and the two are closely intertwined.

In my piece, written a year ago, entitled Tears for Fears: The Morning After The Night Before Eleven, Six 2024, I articulate the ensuing civil chaos the United States faces the day after the November 5, 2024 general election. There is absolutely no way out of this. No matter who wins or loses there will be a civil meltdown. It is being telegraphed by Trump, the SCOTUS and, yes, the Democrats as well. Voter rolls being purged. Intimidation at the polls is a certainty. The SCOTUS is licking their chops and there has, apparently, already been one assassination attempt and the bullets haven’t stopped flying. https://rohnkenyatta.substack.com/p/tears-for-fears-the-morning-after

At some point in the near future Former President Donald Trump will speak with the FBI for what the bureau describes as a "standard victim interview" to discuss the attempted assassination against him at his Pennsylvania rally a few weeks ago. Trump has already set the table attacking the FBI subsequent to the Mar-a-Lago document seizure and, resultantly, intimated that Joe Biden tried to have him assassinated. In conjunction, he is also inferring that the Secret Service (S.S.) intentionally allowed the shooter to manifest himself as part of the “weaponization of law enforcement” narrative he has so stealthily and cleverly weaved over a good period of time

He continually chants with regard to his political opponent (apparently Kamala Harris) “we can’t let that happen, or your not going to have a country” to a bunch of inbred, redneck, uneducated hicks. He has successfully ensconced himself as a martyr and made it quite clear to his followers that if he does not win the election it will be a result of electoral fraud and theft. And they believe it; whether they should or not.

There has never, to my knowledge, been a female politician assassinated in the United States and, whether one wishes to face it or not, Donald Trump has put Ms. Harris in mortal danger with his irresponsible rhetoric. I would hate to be on her BCT (Body Coverage Team) because they have their hands full. Can you dare imagine what such an event would do to an already collapsing society?

The only hope for The West, the United States in particular, is to learn from the global ghetto that it has created. Those that view my thoughts from afar have cast(e) me as pessimistic. Not so, for I am quite the optimist. My optimism has mandated cynicism. Therefore, I am optimistically cynical.

The creator of the ghetto must be mindful that it is also an inhabitant of same.