(Akiit.com) “Blame it on hip-hop” has become the common refrain of many older African Americans, especially those in the Civil Rights generation.

Apparently, hip-hop is singularly responsible for all that is wrong with the Black community. Misogyny just didn’t exist before hip-hop. Neither did materialism. All fathers took care of their children before hip-hop. All mothers were great mothers before hip-hop.

If it’s wrong, the hip-hop generation is responsible for it. Does hip-hop, the music and its supporters, have problems? You betcha. Is it solely responsible for all that ails the Black community? No.

Earlier this year, I attended the Trumpet Awards, which is generally an inspiring and uplifting event. Two of the honorees, one a successful businessman who rose from poverty to become a multi-millionaire and the other, a successful surgeon who has a passion for jazz, accepted their awards noting that young people need not look to just athletes and rappers as beacons of success.

I’m all for expanding the realm of possibilities to our youth but, often times, when we mention athletes and rappers, the underlying implication is somehow successful athletes and rappers got lucky. That’s the tone that both honorees projected to thunderous applause from the many older attendees in the audience. It’s problematic because we miss the real key ingredient to success, which is hard work. No amount of God-given talent is solely responsible for anyone’s success. Luck does play a role but hard work is what ensures longevity.

Hip-hop and its celebration of bling are also blamed for the rampant materialism in our community. Speaking on a local panel a few years back, I noted that DeKalb County in the Atlanta metro area was the second richest Black county in the United States but it had a fifty percent high school drop-out rate. To me, if you are driving a Benz or Beamer instead of a Camry, Taurus or Civic at the expense of spending time with your children, then Jay-Z and Diddy aren’t teaching your children materialism, you are. We’re not looking at those things, though. It’s much easier to blame it on hip-hop.

In a heated discussion a couple of weeks ago, a gentleman in his fifties noted that it’s a problem when mothers and daughters are dressing alike and you can’t tell them apart. He blamed this on hip-hop and the style it promoted. The real culprit, however, is we live in an age where getting older is a crime. There was a time when a person in their 20s didn’t reel at being addressed as ma’am or sir by a teenager so hip-hop is not the culprit. Our undying need to stay forever young is.
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(Akiit.com) The human body consists of nearly 70% water; brain tissue is said to consist of about 85 per cent water. This is why drinking 6–8 glasses of water a day helps our body function efficiently. It is estimated that if we lost just one-tenth of the water within our body, we would not be able to stand, let alone walk.

The body loses fluids in a variety of ways:

when urinating;
when you vomit or have diarrhea;
when sweating; and
from the lungs when you breathe.

Normally, the body cools itself by sweating. If temperatures and humidity are extremely high, however, sweating is not effective in maintaining the body’s normal temperature. When this happens, blood chemistry can change and internal organs–including the brain and kidneys–can be damaged.

The circulation in your body helps to dissipate heat, but when the air temperature is higher than 90°F, cooling by sweat is the only way to prevent the body from overheating. Cooling through evaporation, or sweating, is only possible when your body has been provided with enough fluids. Failing to properly hydrate can result in dizziness, fainting, digestive problems and even death.

Dehydration can quickly lead to fatal collapse of the circulatory system because the heart and temperature control systems cannot dissipate the core heat of your body. Your body is a little furnace- pumping blood, breathing and digestive activities all generate heat deep in the core of your body. If you are working in the heat, the activity of the muscles generates even more energy. If you haven’t consumed enough fluids to sweat and cool itself, your body core temperature will rise and begin to destroy tissues and organs. Collapse can come on quickly, although the body gives fair warning of the problem, many people fail to react to the warning signs.

As your temperature starts to rise, your hot blood burns your muscles and your muscles hurt and burn. If you continue to exert yourself, your circulation is compromised when you become extremely short of breath and no matter how hard you breathe, you can’t catch your breath. If you ignore this sign, your temperature rises above 106 and your brain is damaged, you get a headache, see spots in front of your eyes, hear ringing in your ears, feel dizzy and pass out.

Lack of fluids set you up for heat stroke, so you need to drink fluids all the time when you are in extremely hot weather. You cannot depend on thirst to tell you when you are dehydrated because you won’t feel thirsty until you have lost between two and four pounds of fluid and by then, it is too late to catch up on your fluid deficit.

We all hear the phrase, “You should drink plenty of fluids in hot weather. “Plenty of fluids” means at least 1-1/2 to 2 quarts of fluids daily. This can be water, fruit juice, or fruit-flavored or carbonated drinks. Since aging can cause a decreased thirst sensation, elderly persons should drink water, fruit juices or other fruit drinks at regular intervals during the day, even if they do not feel thirsty. Avoid alcoholic beverages and those containing caffeine. Salt tablets are not substitutes for fluids.
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(Akiit.com) Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich backpedaled from his reverse racist slur of Supreme Court designate Sonia Sotomayor as a racist. A defiant Rush Limbaugh didn’t. There’s a reason. For more than four decades the reverse racist tag has been the most potent weapon in the arsenal of ultra-conservatives and closet bigots to torpedo affirmative action, cower elected officials and judicial appointees into silence or tepid support of civil rights and poverty related issues and court decisions, and deflect attention from the continued political and economic dominance of well-to-do white males. Obama’s election did not change the racial power dynamic in America.

There is still only a handful of African-American, Latino or Asian CEOs who run Fortune 500 companies or who sit on their Boards of Directors. The overwhelming majority of top, middle and lower corporate managers are white males. There is only one African-American in the Senate. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund notes that the increase in the number of minorities on the federal bench has been frozen during the Bush years. Minorities still make up a small percentage of state and federal judges. The first Latina on the High Court won’t change that. Laws and public policy are still made, shaped, and enforced by white males.

Sotomayor and any minority perceived to be a threat to corporate and political white male dominance will be branded a reverse racist. This is not new.

The bogus term cropped up in the early 1960s during the first surge of black militancy. A CBS special on the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, Mike Wallace, was labeled “the hate that hate produced.” The special played hard on the theme that the Black Muslims with their white man is a devil rhetoric and messianic religious flavored black separatism were the incarnate of racial bigotry. In the next few years, the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Chicano activists, and other militant groups were routinely reviled as reverse Klan, Nazis, and racist nightriders.
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(Akiit.com) Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan.”

That quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is as relevant today as it ever was.

Our children are dying in the streets and in many ways, they are being blamed for their own deaths. They are being hated for the conditions they are born into.

When we talk of violence in the Black community, many people want to blame that violence on the young Black men and women who are victims of it.

People want to blame the youth for the guns and crack that are killing them.

Automatic weapons did not just walk into our neighborhood in the arms of Tyrone the drug dealer.

It is deceptive to espouse that Black men are somehow responsible for systematic racism and classism, but making such statements is easier than taking action, or facing one’s own responsibility.

More than half a million Americans are victimized in handgun crimes each year, and our community is the hardest hit:

3,792 children and adolescents under age 20 died in 1998 due to gun violence.

While 85% of all gun deaths of people under age twenty are males, the rate for Black males is 2.4 times higher than Hispanics and 15.3 times higher than for whites.

For black males, aged 15 to 19, firearm homicides increased 158 percent during the last decade of the old century, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports.

In the last decade, Black males, ages 15 to 24 accounted for nearly 60 percent of the victims of homicides involving firearms.

The total number of teen deaths due to gun violence has dropped, but, really not by much. By 2002, the above number from 1998 dropped to 3,012. That is still 3,012 too many.

We hear the term “Black on Black Violence,” and we assume that African Americans are in the streets hunting each other down. Many of us fail to realize that typically violent crimes happen close to home, which means that we tend to harm the ones closest to us. In other words, none of us are out looking to increase our own death rate.

There are myriad reasons why young Black males are being subject to gun violence and the fingers don’t all point to the young men themselves.

Society itself is to blame for conditions that facilitate crime and violence, yet, even many African Americans are quick to blame each other.

For everything.

In America, Blacks are often blamed for everything, from the high crime rate to the unemployment rate of poor whites.

Today, many African Americans are blaming poor African Americans.

Talk to the average educated African American and he or she is likely to tell you that Black men are going to prison at higher rates than whites because they are simply committing more crimes.
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(Akiit.com) Last week during a long-awaited speech in Egypt televised to most of the Arab world, President Obama called for “a new beginning” in the relationship between the United States and Muslims. He declared that the “cycle of distrust and discord must end.”

The president’s speech sounded good. It was sorely needed after eight years of hostility from the Bush administration. And, indeed, it was politely received by most Islamic leaders including the heads of radical organizations such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

However, everything the president said will be for naught and the situation in the Middle East will get even worse if the Obama administration does not get tough with Israel and stop the Jewish state from continuingly doing the very things which for years have made peace in the region impossible.

There is a pro-Israel bias in most of the major American media. As a result, most Americans have been led to believe that the core problems in the Middle East are the Arab refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist and terrorist acts by Palestinians who hate Israelis for reasons the media never bothers to explain.

The picture painted by most U.S. news organizations is simply false.

The core problems preventing peace in the Middle East are threefold:

1) The state of Israel was created in 1948 on land which the Palestinians feel was taken from them and for which they have never received just compensation;
2) In wars which have followed the creation of Israel, especially the 1967 war, Israel has seized additional Arabs lands and refuses to relinquish them; and
3) Israel oppresses the Palestinian people and continues to insult them by establishing even more Jewish settlements on lands which it knows belongs to the Palestinians.

During the recent U.S. meeting with newly elected, hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama and Vice President Biden made it clear that the building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands had to stop and that there had to be a so-called “two-state solution” in which the Arabs would recognize Israel’s right to exist and the Palestinians would be allowed to come out from under Israeli oppression and build a nation of their own.
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