Friday, February 16, 2024

Definition...

 

Revisiting the January 6 Insurrection - One Year Later, Sam Sanders, Jinae West, Anjuli Sastry Krbechek, Andrea Gutierrez, Liam McBain, Nathan Pugh, Jordana Hochman, January 7, 2022, NPR

© February 5, 2024, the Griot Poet

Insurrection (noun): an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. Merriam-Webster

 

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Article 14, Section 3.

Not a coup or a civil war.

It doesn’t have a time stamp that disqualifies you if your riot was “three hours or less.”

 

It’s simply for

“Revolting against civil authority or an established government.”

 

It sounds like blocking the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

It sounds a lot like trying to overturn a free and fair election that you LOST!

It sounds a lot like a Supreme Court trying to spitball The Constitution to allow a criminal with 91 federal counts against him to run for the office he figuratively shat on!

His followers had bowel movements in the Capitol.

 

I’m not a lawyer. I’m a scientist.

Except for a Certificate in Microelectronics and Photonics,

From Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey,

And a short course on semiconductor processing at the University of Florida,

 

All of my STEM education occurred at the same Black College,

Four students walked from and into the F.W. Woolworth counter on February 1, 1960, and ignited the Sit-In movement,

North Carolina A&T State University is the largest HBCU on the planet.

I met the first black astronaut from an HBCU, Dr. Ron McNair,

My grand teacher in Goju Ryu Karate,

I shook hands with his Frat brother, Jesse Jackson.

I heard Leontyne Price sing Opera and Desmond Tutu preach against Apartheid there.

My Physics Professor, Dr. Elvira Williams, was the fourth African American woman to receive her Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics in the nation and the first in North Carolina.

When I mentioned this to a manager at Motorola,

Who had the same Physics book in his work office as I did in my home office by Halladay and Resnick,

“Mr. Harvard” suddenly remembered a meeting he had to attend (that no calendar had scheduled).

 

So, I don’t compare us to your Ivy League institutions: You haven’t gotten where we are.

Harvard directly benefited from enslaved labor.

A&T and HBCUs were our reaction to it after emancipation!

Let freedom ring had to include education.

Which one of us is the better institution is purely academic.

Ivy League school graduates get the pedigree.

HBCU graduates get the PRIDE and extended family.

Unlike Bo Derek’s cornrows and Travis Kelce’s fade, you haven’t culturally appropriated that!

 

So, please let me disabuse your impression of esteemed, solemn, and wise Ivy League-educated Justices:

Defending a guy whose nickname in his birth state is “Dumbo Gambino” is stupid!

He didn’t win his Queen’s borough or home state in 2016 or 2020!

Your parents could have saved their money paying for people to take your SAT and LSAT tests for you!

Or, bribing the test proctor to pump up your scores!

 

Six of you spitballing the Constitution is the judicial equivalent of shooting yourselves in the foot!

Do you THINK that there will be three coequal branches of government: the Legislative (Article I), the Executive (Article II), and the Judiciary (Article III - you) if Dumbo Gambino and his hired thugs from the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 enact their fascist wet dreams?

 

You’re afraid of armed mobs NOW?

Homeboy will have Seal Team Six!

And he’s indicted with his frivolous “absolute immunity” lawsuit that he’s willing to use them!

 

See the second season of “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu,

A novel by the Canadian poet Margaret Atwood,

The crazed fascist lunatics called themselves “The Sons of Jacob.”

Stormed the U.S. Capitol and slaughtered the Senate, House of Representatives, the White House and the Supreme Court,

Closed all bank accounts owned by women,

Flushed bodily autonomy down the toilet,

To sanctify violent rape and prostitution,

Banned all books, censored the media and Internet,

Before they set up the Republic of Gilead,

Stop me if this sounds familiar!

“Will be wild” (aid and comfort?) probably preceded it.

 

“Fascism is mental pathology in politics.”

A gem from Dr. Bandy Lee,

One of the experts [who] warned us about the dangers of a psychopath running a political party.

 

Chief Justice Roberts,

Here’s your chance to impress me,

Since “stare decisis,” Latin for “precedent,”

Doesn’t mean shit to you or the five other Christ-o-fascist Mullahs,

 

Let an HBCU STEM graduate,

Give all of you a chance,

To take a test that I HOPE you can pass:

 

Insurrection (noun): an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. Merriam-Webster 

 

Who is that “civil authority or established government” that insurrectionists would revolt against?

Three guesses!

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Perspective...

 

Source - Science: evidence is intelligence, Facebook

January 28, 2024, the Griot Poet


This spell is a poetic composite of trolls online I have encountered and how I handled them.

After posting several pictures of my hero, Dr. Ronald E.McNair, and others for February,

I received this short missive from someone in their mommy’s basement:

 

“Since we have Black History Month, why don’t we have White History Month? Why do we have Women’s History Month, LGBT History Month, Asian-Pacific Islander History Month, and Hispanic Heritage Month? Isn’t that reverse racism? Isn't that heterosexual discrimination? Don’t ‘all lives matter?’”

 

I often encounter trolls who think that they are being clever in posting things like this,

Their mentality involves “narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and sadism.”

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-online-secrets/201409/internet-trolls-are-narcissists-psychopaths-and-sadists

 

My wife always asks, “Why do you BOTHER answering them?”

My answer is always the same: “Because they asked!”

 

“We already have one,” I started my preamble.

February 1 to February 28,

February 29 on leap year occasions,

 

I start my retort,

Like a lawyer in court,

With “what if” scenario questions:

 

What if Thomas Jefferson,

Who wrote the poetic “All men are created equal.”

Wasn’t also pedophile-raping a fourteen-year-old baby named Sally Hemming?

Whose mother was also the product of rape by Martha Jefferson’s father?

George Washington had dentures made out of the teeth of enslaved servants.

DL Hugely pointed out on Instagram that humans are complex,

You can “write dope shit” and still be a psychopath.

 

What if the freed, formerly enslaved Africans were immediately paid reparations?

What if they got government subsidies for real estate and property expansion, just like the government did white western settlers?

What if they were taught a quality education for participation in the body politic?

What if Black Wall Street In Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood in Florida hadn’t been razed out of existence?

What if the fusion government in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 had been allowed to exist?

What if the Ku Klux Klan hadn’t killed or thrown out the elected officials, razed the black newspaper, and threatened its editor with lynching?

What if Central Park was still the black township of Seneca Village?

 

Would there have been an Emmett Till?

Would there have been a need for a Montgomery Bus Boycott?

Would there have been the need to “Sit In” at the F.W. Woolworth counter?

Would there have been a March on Washington on the same date that Emmitt was lynched?

Would Trayvon Benjamin Martin have become his modern equivalent?

Or Jordan Davis, Reneisha McBride, Sandra Bland, Breona Taylor, Michael Brown, or too many, I'm too exhausted to name?

Dr. King wouldn’t have left Dexter Avenue Baptist Church’s pulpit,

And might have lived to a ripe old age without much incident.

 

What if the descendants of the white men who lynched Emmett Till, a child, stopped taking potshots at his grave marker?

What if the practice of Black History Month is corporate whitewashing of what Dr. Carter G. Woodson originally intended?

Dr. Woodson gave oppressed people the tools to fight against gaslighting.

Just like they jumped on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bandwagon after lynching George Floyd on livestream.

 

What if Malcolm Little’s dad hadn’t been lynched?

What if his mom hadn’t been committed to an insane asylum?

What if he and his siblings hadn’t been split up in foster care?

You wouldn’t have created a Malcolm X.

 

What if, indeed?

Because if all these hypotheticals had happened,

We wouldn’t be having this conversation!

 

You’re so vexed about not having a month specifically named for your culture,

You missed the point that our hidden history is a reliving of shared trauma.

Just like Asian-Pacific Islanders Month has to discuss the Chinese Exclusion Act, the fact that the U.S. interred George Takei and his family (Mr. Sulu of Star Trek), and the U.S. TOOK the Kingdom of Hawaii as a naval coaling station!

Just like Women’s History Month is about struggles with patriarchy.

Just like LGBT History Month must discuss the assassination of Harvey Milk, the murder of Matthew Wayne Shepard, and the police attack on Stonewall.

Just like Hispanic Heritage Month has to discuss Cesar Chavez, the plight of Hispanic agricultural workers, and the fact that “remember the Alamo” is superfluous,

Since you conveniently forget that the whole conflict was that Mexico wouldn’t extradite escaped Africans back to the United States!

 

Cubans who escaped Castro were allowed to touch Florida’s shores,

Haitians, whose ancestors repelled French colonialists, are turned back with a shoulder shrug.

 

As a matter of fact,

HAITI had to pay FRANCE for 122 years: reparations.

20 to 30 billion in today's dollars.

The cost of colonizers losing free enslaved labor,

Started in 1825 directly to the Gauls, having the gall to ask for it,

Transferred in 1922 to the National City Bank of New York, now Citibank.

This HEIST is the cause of Haiti’s poverty, NOT indigenous religious practices!

 

So my perspective,

To your objections,

Is like Jack Nicholson said in “A Few Good Men,”

“You can’t handle the truth,” or this smoke!

 

Interestingly,

My online troll choked,

And I did not read a single word of rebuttal from them going forward.