RULE #1: NEVER Blame The Person. ALWAYS Blame Society As A Whole...
"Yesterday, some 200 people took to Times Square at the behest of the Rev. Al, joining thousands across the country who braved heat and hair-killing humidity to protest three ugly little words.
Namely: "Nigga." "Bitch." And "Ho."
A good start.
But the target of this protest, I'm sorry to say, was not the rappers who throw out those words - and more - like candy corn on Halloween, numbing the public to smut and violence.
Nor was it the young men and even some women who, every day, can be heard loudly coarsening ordinary discourse to the point where I can barely walk the streets or ride the subways without fighting the urge to plug my 8-year-old daughter's ears.
No. Sharpton & Co. have found a way to blame white folks.
"Rappers say they're being pressured by the record companies" to use offensive language, said Jill Flowers of Brooklyn, who established the Web site abolishthenword.com.
The target of her protest is not Snoop - or Scoop or Poop - but Sumner Redstone of Viacom.
"What we want to do is ask Mr. Redstone why he allows negative views of our women," said Flowers.
"We support our artists," said minister Kevin Muhammad, who wants to "deal a death blow to the [record companies'] chairmen."
The crowd called for governments to pull pension funds from record companies who don't comply with banning words starting with "N," "B" and "H."
"Black and brown women are being denigrated, while other races are being subjected to a higher standard," declared Tamika Mallory of the Rev. Al's decency initiative.
She must have missed the shop right next door to the Virgin Megastore, where the protest was held. Outside this random shop, I spied a T-shirt. It screamed, "Do I look like a f---ing people person?" Cute.
Then there are smart kids like Gary Lucero, 16, who doesn't think the answer is the wholesale banning of individual words.
"Hip-hop artists are telling their story, like blues artists told theirs," he said. "I don't find it offensive."
The Rev. Al does have a point. We're all becoming victims of falling standards, crude language and sick, public jokes.
He's just got the wrong villain."
Bullswaddle. And spoken like a truly sheltered one. Way back when, there'd be occasions when I was visiting a friend and would chase an errant fly ball onto the wrong side of the street. Hey, good balls didn't grow on trees. Step half an inch into black turf and spend the rest of the week asking friends to translate the names you were called...after you ran for your life...and the only difference between then and now is that in order to make the home boys feel wanted society allowed for a certain enclave of bad taste to develop out in the open air as opposed to the back alleys where it had not only lived but flourished.
All under the guise of tolerance. Acceptance of another culture. But guess what? Even the loons finally came to the conclusion that fertilizing one weed meant others, MANY, MANY others, and what once was a bestowing of bad graces to a few, just to be politically correct, into a torrent that was suddenly permissible to see the light of day. But it never happened overnight. It was always there. And the nanosecond after decent people stopped complaining about it, it took over.
The Reverend Al blames it on the record companies. I wonder how much they'll slip him under the table to go bother someone else. It has nothing to do with decorum, and everything to do with blackmail and big bucks.
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