Mother's Day Reminds Us To Listen To Our Mother's

Today is more than Mother's Day, it is a day of fellowship.

Weekends often bring along the call of fellowship; a command that is a tricky thing because it assumes interaction with others despite our lack of control in such matters. Since life seems to determine for us who we interact with each day, I believe every human interaction is potentially a God ordained fellowship.  In other words,waiting to fellowship on weekends minimizes its value. In fact, some of my greatest days of church have been just me, alone with the Spirit.

Last Sunday was one of those memorable services in which I found myself considering the power of my isolated fellowship, much like what I imagine when I think of some of history's great leaders, who often found themselves locked up without their consent.  Ghandi, MLK, Jesus Christ.  Each endured isolated moments in which they were forced to fellowship with the spirit when opposing forces attempted to separate them from the ability to fellowship in the flesh. Some consider the greatest impact of their ministries to be the parts which occurred during imprisonment. Sometimes, isolated moments of fellowship bring about deep great thoughts that connect you to the same spirit that inspired the worlds great deep thinkers....


.....and sometimes the spirit ministers through off-beat 1980's music.

Do we still have paperboys?

Born in 1969, I grew up in love with the video age because it was so new and exciting and enticing to my curious pre-teen mind.  Little did I realize that it would lead me to hate the sight of newspapers- the source of my first love in life, writing.  I almost lost my mind when some convincing salesperson recently talked my wife into receiving orange bags on the porch each morning once again, as if there is something other than advertisements that I hadn't already read before the paperboy finishes his route each day. These days, those bagged papers are nothing but a sign that a family is out of town, so I will be cancelling the delivery before the Spring/Summer travel season arrives.

The point of all of this is the  extremely powerful prophecy that bounced inside my head in the form of "Video Killed The Radio Star" by the Buggles.  No, I did not remember this 80's music groups name without the help of Google, nor did I know that their somewhat famous song actually was released in 1979 when I was 10 years old and my family had finally gotten cable television and MTV. I also did not realize that some new aged group called the Penatonix did a remake of the song until my kids started to sing along when I thought I was educating them about 80's music. My wife is the same age as I am, so I instantly assumed that she would remember the song and forget the artist just as I had, but she didn't remember the group at all. When I pulled it up on YouTube, it came to me that Will-I-Am and Nicki Minaj had also borrowed the intro as the same intro to their smash hit, "Check It Out".  Computers and cable TV certainly have globalized televised media, but video was destined to slowly destroy our willingness to listen and hear, spelling the doom of radio and those orange bagged things I keep stepping on in my yard.

For some people, upside your head momma is the answer
and not just a symptom of the same fear that other blacks have.

Prior to televised video imaging, families had to read to understand the world or listen to a radio broadcast, taking time to hear sound and listen for meaning.  Video killed the radio star when it ruined our desire and capacity to hear and actually listen.  With video, we often add catchy music, but there is no duty to even turn up or include the original sound.  When it's time to understand what's happening, we often allow commentators and narrators to fill in the blanks or paraphrase the purpose and intent, even if they don't have a clue what they are saying.

Such is the case with 'upside your head' momma in Baltimore.  This frightened mother inadvertently elevated herself into a deeper meaning- maybe even a solution of sorts- so her name isn't as significant as her deed.  What she appeared to do on video was to stop her misbehaving son from being a part of the problem in Baltimore.  Violence is not an answer to problems, although her violent reaction to her son's stupidity seemed to create a viral video reaction that most news stations found a way to applaud.

What the news, or very few of us have done, is listened to the mother and her son instead of assuming we recognize the story that the video keeps telling us.  What looks like a mom trying to keep her son from being a problem child is actually a desperately afraid mother who said she did not want her son to be the next Freddie Gray.

SHE DID NOT WANT HER SON TO DIE NEEDLESSLY LIKE SO MANY OTHERS HAVE.

Baltimore police have already admitted to arresting Gray falsely just because they felt a sense of suspicion when he decided to run away upon making EYE contact with police.  Upside your head momma had a son deliberately throwing rocks at police.  In her mind, why would her son receive anything less than what run away Freddie Gray endured? The eyes are the windows into each of our souls, and through them isn't just a view of who we truly are, but an access point for who we shall become.  The eyes pre-programmed the souls of these Baltimore police officers who pursued Freddie Gray and denied him medical attention because they had seen run away black criminals in Baltimore before, and they proceeded to the ultimate conclusion that this fleeing black man was worthy of losing man's most sacred right, freedom and ultimately life.

At this point in these proceedings, angry Baltimore blacks have seen too many replays of Freddie Gray- or Eric Garner who was killed while selling cigarette singles on the streets of New York during a recession- or Michael Brown Jr. who was shot dead and left for hours in the street from misbehaving during a police shake down. Occasionally, we  all are susceptible to mistaken images and tainted perceptions, like the one that happened recently when a fleeing suspect in Baltimore dropped a gun that went off. No one was hurt or shot, but angry citizens started to film and confront the situation under the assumption that another Freddie Gray had just begun- even to the extent of getting squarely in the face of law officers they believed to have shot the suspect.

 In Ferguson, officer Darren Wilson was not charged for killing Michael Brown Jr. because he functioned within the manner in which his training allowed.  What he never gave us was a real explanation for the shake down of two black boys that he didn't suspect of any particular crime.  Why did he stop them in the first place, and why so aggressively if not to make them sit like criminals while he checked for warrants?  This shake down practice is an illegal but common behavior among Ferguson cops; a practice that the DOJ report says was allowed and encouraged by superiors in the Ferguson PD.  For the DOJ to hold Wilson responsible for a Ferguson shake down would have required ignoring that police forces are doing similar revenue generating bigotry all across America, not just in Missouri.

Full Ferguson Report .pdf link.

(excerpt from page 20 of Ferguson report)

Many of the unlawful stops we found appear to have been driven, in part, by an officer’s desire to check whether the subject had a municipal arrest warrant pending. Several incidents suggest that officers are more concerned with issuing citations and generating charges than with addressing community needs. In October 2012, police officers pulled over an African-American man who had lived in Ferguson for 16 years, claiming that his passenger-side brake light was broken. The driver happened to have replaced the light recently and knew it to be functioning properly. Nonetheless, according to the man’s written complaint, one officer stated, “let’s see how many tickets you’re going to get,” while a second officer tapped his Electronic Control Weapon (“ECW”) on the roof of the man’s car. The officers wrote the man a citation for “tail light/reflector/license plate light out.” They refused to let the man show them that his car’s equipment was in order, warning him, “don’t you get out of that car until you get to your house.” The man, who believed he had been racially profiled, was so upset that he went to the police station that night to show a sergeant that his brakes and license plate light worked. 

 For those who've allowed their eyes to blind their souls into defending bad cops instead of rooting them out, the Ferguson report is both damning and justifying at the same time.  The very normal practice of police shake down has been squarely documented against the Ferguson PD, yet the lack of prosecution for Darren Wilson has become a battle cry for those who often say,

"Read The Report" as if the part that kept officer Wilson out of prison is the only important section of the entire document.

They clearly must be saying, read the parts of the report that reveal the difficulty with prosecuting people who serve and protect.  Policing demands advocates that won't allow the institution to be colored by its bad apples, although good cops have never run from the call of duty or embraced the negative image created by their ill-behaved brethren. Cop hatred is not new and neither is the associative guilt or lack thereof from good cops who simply have never allowed cop hatred to keep them from the call of policing. The captured video of Freddie Gray's last moments of freedom and life told enough of a story to charge 6 Baltimore cops with a crime; something difficult to achieve, just not as hard as a conviction.

The Message Behind The Video

Thanks to a nosy television camera, upside your head momma is the new poster child for the calibrating of black youth because she appears to be doing what not enough other blacks are doing, since so many young black people take to the streets with rocks  to help a peaceful protest evolve into an angry riot at these moments.  Television flaunts the kid and his mom as the survivor and his savior instead of hearing that she was afraid of him being another victim of one of those trigger happy, ill-behaved police brethren that exist in police forces across the land.  In other words, video intended to expose and reveal the degenerates uncovered this mother's only son of 6 kids.  His face was covered for discretion sake, but a momma knows her baby and gets frozen with fear when his life is in danger.  Her violent reaction of anger was simply a mother's plea of love that, fortunately, the son recognized for exactly what it was, while the world let the head smacking video and a self serving media narrate it for them.

Even as this mom and son worked the television circuit from the sheer popularity of it all, no one seemed to hear say that she was just as fearful of the police as her son was in response to this moment.  Without his mask, her son became a black life that matters. When he talked, it was obvious that he was a really good kid. Few seem to hear that this really good kid was doing what a lot of really good and scared kids do when they don't know how to deal with anger. According to his own mom, this kid didn't have confrontations with police (probably because of a watchful mother), but friends of his who didn't deserve aggressive policing havd. A few didn't live to talk about it.  When you are bred in a culture that witnesses the negative impact of police profiling, your eyes become the windows to your soul and color your perspective accordingly.

Before the mass video era, we didn't have the ability to fully kill the message before it got delivered.  We might not have totally agreed with what we were hearing, but we listened.  Like a seed, any unfamiliar thought can be planted inside of an open or objective mind. Political polarization isn't new, though it has grown with the growth of 20 second video attacks that program our presumptive minds to believe unfair assumptions instead dismantling half truths with the scrutiny of skepticism.  Skepticism might be rampant, but hearing and listening instead of falling for video illusions is not- thus we often find ourselves watering the seeds of our own illusions.


Fellowship Means Hearing, Listening and Sharing

Within the process of fellowship, the seeds of change get watered through the act of hearing and listening. Thoughts often get planted inside each of us from things we read and hear, however, the ones that grow to eventually change us demand water. Fellowship waters our seeds and allows people to water one another. Absent water, we all dry up and die- which is why God sent his only begotten son to dwell within his people as a new church of sorts- a fellowship of two with direct access to the water of life.

No person was made to only receive water and never share it with others, even if the freshest taste seems to come from quiet places and isolated fellowships.  Eventually, God gives more water than you can keep to yourself anyway.  Like the water from the words of 'upside your head' momma.  She is the hero who seems to have shown us all the answer, but was only blessed to see her son on TV while cursed to have to figure out what she thinks a wayward boy needs- a curse that many single mothers endure when THE father is not around to do it.

I say THE father, with capital letters, because lots of us grew up with step dads and still found ourselves ripping and running the streets.  Both my real father and my step father have passed away, but I only have interactive memories of my step dad, and none of them involved popping me upside my head for the kind of stuff that deserved a good pop, including occasional rock throwing.  My mom, however, fought tooth and nail, including an occasional smack on the head,  to keep her son's away from death by cop or otherwise. Her hit lost its sting long before my teenage years, but my brothers and I didn't have the heart to tell her.  Nonetheless, we are alive today thanks to her willingness to try whatever she thought would work.

Momma's Hand?....where is Daddy?

 Momma's love certainly has a way of influencing your actions even when momma's hand loses its sting. With all of the love and respect due to momma, only a kids real father ever gets to comfortably spank them, and these days, that too has become highly unfavorable.  If this video included anything other than a woman's hand, the criticism against the actions might be more pronounced.  Absent a deep anthropological analysis, I will venture to say that most kids who are raised by their own father don't find themselves in the street during riots, or confused about respecting police (another blog for another day). Momma's hand certainly has a role in rearing healthy young black men, but its probably not upside his hard head. That is always a move a last resort and desperation.

If the answer to teen rioting in Baltimore is actually a timely parental butt kicking (which can work in the short term), then what would the narrative sound like if this same mother hadn't been watching television and she didn't make it before something awful happened to her really good, but misbehaving child?  How would we view the exact same mother if the challenge of single parenthood didn't give time for her intervention, and something happened with her son? What if this momma didn't snatch off that mask and humanize her only son for the world to see differently, would we hear his voice?  Would he still be one of those thug kids or did her smack magically cure someone who, moments before, deserved no empathy or sympathy since he was just another thug?  Would anybody hear the voice of this mother if her son ended up dead from his aggression towards cops? She came to the rescue of  her son, yet no one is listening to why. Does it really take embarrassment and shame from mom for us to recognize the humanity of this child?
What about the kids whose momma didn't come for them?

This mother hen was protecting her son from the cops, not for the cops, while her son was simply hoping his rocks would speak louder than the silent voices of other young black youths like him, no longer alive to speak for themselves.

The video delivers a message, but it doesn't tell the story. Today is more than Mother's Day, it is a day of fellowship.

So who's listening?