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 keep finding emails from Jay Markoff asking me to ‘please call Roxanne Corson @ 619-644-1564 for information on photographic magnetic signs and more’.

Needless to say, I have no idea who Jay and Roxanne are, but with spyware as pervasive and supposedly sophisticated as it is, this message strikes me as exceptionally pathetic. 

Roxanne, Jay, very good. You made it past my spam filters, but like everyone else who has received this absurd SOS, I immediately sent it to the trash.

You would have had a higher probability of having this message read, if you had stuffed it in a bottle and thrown it in the sea.

If ever there was a time for business to stop being fake and keep it real, it’s now. That’s why Boeing’s laying off its people at its commercial airplane unit in Washington.

Boeing’s no longer an aircraft company. Take the billions of dollars they’re being paid to electronically seal off the border between the US and Mexico.  Even if that project’s floundering,  it’s more ominous sounding war and security services that are most lucrative for them now and ahead.

As for, Macy’s shutting down stores all over the country.  On one hand, you could say, that it’s a tragedy to see this great American store that sponsors this tradition of ours, the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan for as long as we can all remember – start to show signs of going under – but shopping at Macy’s is a disappointment. The clothing selection is oddly random and uninspiring. In fact, at a mall near me, you can wander seamlessly from Macy’s into Target then Sear’s without realizing it.

Maybe they should team up with Best Buy to market a surveillance system that makes black shoppers even more humiliated than they already are by having to show receipts when trying to exit.

The real tragedy isn’t the demise of these awful companies — because in almost every case, it’s good riddance to bad rubbish.

The tragedy is the way we Americans are connected to them.  Spending at extreme levels has become our patriotic duty to keep the whole economy afloat so at the same time we’re trying to save and not spend, we’re being made to feel guilty for not having enabled some Hollywood studio to reach its gross revenue record last weekend or being made to feel like a deadbeat for not having made Black Friday enough of a success.

I read an article the other day on the more humble approach recent college grads are being told to take to the job market.  Instead of asking potential employers what they can do for them, applicants are being reminded to make an extra effort to make themselves worthy of the companies they’re speaking to.

In my own personal life at least, I have no idea how my own company will fare in 2009. Even so, I will not as a result become so desperate to survive that I don’t create a dignified and nurturing future for myself.

Businesses need to understand that they can’t grow or expect to be around in the long term if they’re just pimping out but not nourishing the people they rely on to financially succeed.

Hey and don’t let all this nonsense scare you either.

Hold your head high.