blacksnextdoor

This morning, I woke to a bird singing outside my window. The song was about love and rebirth. It had nothing to do with share prices or consumer spending. I was so relieved.

The bird’s subversive solo inspired me to eat breakfast under the veranda outside my kitchen. I ate a bowl of mangu topped with grilled onions and fresh lemon juice, cracking into a lemon seed as I chewed, welcoming the bitter taste in my mouth as it joined with the seductive sense of a Sunday on the cusp of Spring.

Unfortunately, my reverie was broken at the gym while on the treadmill soon after. Watching This Week With George Stephanpoulous on the monitor in front of me, instead of turning the damned thing off, I read the captions below George Will’s weasley face with a grimace.

Mr. Will mocking Obama’s ‘Stock Broker in Chief,’ routine last week when the President admittedly with some sheepishness recommended Americans start buying up stocks since there are some great deals out there if you have a long term perspective.

I’m really done with the tension between Barack and Wall Street. Done. Absolutely done, in fact with the tyranny of numbers over my day to day life.

This is the last great domain of racism. The Stock market as an echocardiogram of the American heart that does not respond to Obama, that is broken by ‘minorities who couldn’t afford to own homes but bought them anyway,’ that proves that blacks don’t stimulate intense economic desire, only paralyze it.

(Oh, such deep, deep despair I feel at the possibility that the worrisome market activity of Americans with black skin may not arouse the most rapturous investment outcomes. Sniff. Sniff).

Sarcasm aside, I didn’t feel Obama’s recent foray into being national financial advisor. If I want to get the latest casino gaming tips, there’s no shortage of it elsewhere.

What I appreciated most about our President’s rise onto the political stage was the humanity he brought to Washington. The Republicans would have us believe there is no VALUE to being alive that is not monetary.

Their ‘Patriotism is consumption,’ ‘greed is good,’ ‘nothing matters but the numbers’ message has brought the fear of a permanent winter where the sun doesn’t come out anymore, the warmth doesn’t return, flowers and fruit no longer blossom because they’re besides the point.

The point is the most narrow definition of profit.

So please, please, monsieur le President, don’t pander to these trading floor gangstas.

Your legacy will be defined by how well you’re able to execute the inspiring promise of your campaign which was never to be able to pick winning stocks for my portfolio but to inspire a dialogue between the races that is as enlightening as intimate and yes, inspire collaboration where before we had only bombs, improve human and ecological health care, motivate Americans young and old to be part of community projects that nurture our neighborhoods  and our urgent need to be more than spectators in sports stadiums.

Obama, perhaps not Elizabeth Alexander – but more poetry please – and support for the poetic, aesthetic, non-commoditized.

If fresh clay and paint, the sound of violins, flutes, and cellos would return to the hallways of our local schools, President Obama, an homage to you would resound more prodigiously than the most arrogant closing bell. Anyway…you get my drift…

In faith & solidarity

Jen Jefferson/Blacksnextdoor

I intended to write about something fun I did the other day, but I’m too flustered for that. I have to vent. From Suze Orman to George Will, TV pundits are attributing the current financial crisis to ’subprime’ borrowers. People with low credit scores who bought homes and other material comforts they couldn’t really afford but tried to own anyway. You know, minorities, the same fiscal scavengers who brought you welfare.

Well, as far as I’m concerned, all this bitchy finger pointing is more indicative of how America’s wound up in this situation than anything minority consumers have done.

We’ve all been offered financial products as addictive and harmful as illegal street drugs. Every night when I reach my front door and reach in the mailbox, they’re there. The faux checks made out to me, cardboard credit cards for which I’ve been pre-approved, offers to purchase all kinds of furniture and luxury goods for no money down etc.  A friend of mine is a single mom with two kids who ran up tons of debt in the last fifteen years trying to provide her kids with a couple of vacations, music lessons, a piano in the living room for the kid who was taking the music lessons. I can hear some crazy at a John McCain rally now, yelling, kill her!

I can also hear some smarmy suit at a round table coldly connecting the dots between her and our current economic demise and I can’t believe this is the society that we tout as the most humane in the world.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner and founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, while being interviewed at http://www.bigthink.com on his book, “Creating a World Without Poverty,” points out that our current free market system is lacking, incomplete. It’s created a one dimensional citizen insulated from the religious, emotional, and social whose value in this life is all numeric.

Which is why I hate being referred to as a ‘taxpayer.’ 

If the Democrats manage to seize the national stage from the Republicans in a few weeks — because for all their talk about God and patriotism, Republicans are a buckwild, self-serving bunch — or as my 80 year old aunt sadly observed about Sarah Palin the other day: She calls herself pro-life but she’s a hunter — what I’d like to see is the birth of a more ethical America, an America that is what the Somali blogger, Bashir Goth eloquently describes in a recent http://www.washingtonpost.com piece as economically ‘holistic.’

Americans who have less than others, black or otherwise, should not be regarded with such disdain at such a distance.

If it’s true that folks trying to improve their standard of living but who were ultimately unsuccessful at it can cause a financial virus like this to spread through global markets, the response should not be pathologizing them.  It should be making the acquisition of wealth more possible, less risky.

Ok, I’ve vented enough for now. What do you think?