Like most great street sayings, this one originated in the African American neighborhoods in the late seventies and early eighties, in conjunction with the crack epidemic that swept their demographic. Nothing will ruin a neighborhood, or an individual life, faster than a cheap, hard drug. And nobody uses these drugs more than the marginalized segments of society.
During the Occupy movement I gave the marginalized segments of society an out, but not the entitled class. There they were, in the tens of thousands, gathering on Wall Street and elsewhere demanding that we build a new economy. But were they really worthy of this ideal? If we had a window into their actions over the past two decades, would they come out smelling clean?
This is a question we must all ask ourselves, because we cannot create a better economy until we ferret out the human character flaws inherent in this one. Allow me to illustrate what I mean with a few examples.
We have allowed genocide to happen in our name, all over the world, and have done nothing to stop it. We were happy to go along with the game as long as we were getting a piece of the pie. Now that the pie is shrinking and we are no longer getting our share, we are turning against the global economic system that we have supported and benefited from, at the expense of others, for decades.
We have a covenant of respecting each other’s individual rights, and yet we financed that covenant by not respecting the rights of billions of people around the world. We can say we respect everyone else’s human rights, but if we are debasing their money and stealing their natural resources at ten cents on the dollar, we are not doing that.
We have gone along with the Beat Down, and now it’s our turn. The game that hit the African American neighborhoods in the seventies is now coming to a neighborhood near you. The middle class, who thought they could never get hit, are now watching the Beat Down spread to their demographic. Most of them could never have fathomed that this could happen, but those who have lived with this force intimately as marginalized members of society know that in a world based on predatory capitalism it can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
For more information on coming clean, click HERE.
