this is… The Neighborhood
the Story within the Story
SING! even when no one is listening
To improve is to change;
to be perfect is to change often.
– Winston Churchill
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from Boston
Steis feat. Termanology & Erin Daneele
with Who Would I Be
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Republished for a new, yet frustrated Author (big smile)
SING! even when no one is listening
by Kendall F. Person
A funny thing happened yesterday….
In the scores of individual and collaborative work I have written and published, never before had silence prevailed as loudly as it did with the series finale of The Exorcist. No comments toward the story in any forum, by anyone. No voices from personal friends or relatives, nor long term fans or staunch supporters – in neither praise nor condemnation, just a silence, that only I could hear. No arrows to my pride, nor sense of despair (I like to think) for my mother often told us “Not everyone is going to like everything you do“. So instead of fretting, I used the silence as a teachable moment, for myself. 
I reached out to readers – something I have never done – with the specific purpose of discovering how The Exorcist’s ending was interpreted. My thoughts were two-fold: either I delivered a finale that had crashed and burned, making a mess of a promising beginning OR with the assistance of a brilliant assembly of artists, produced the perfect short story, that fooled them all.
Each character, firmly established; plot line of the 3-part drama, remained on course throughout. But short stories can be more difficult than long form or novels, since the exact same elements must exist without cheating the audience.
I sing because The Exorcist may have reached perfection in the short story genre. The small, but nonetheless informative study revealed, that while the excitement and adrenaline rush of a thriller/horror were felt, and the overall premise of good versus evil was understood; the intricate dynamics, along with an abbreviated use of words, combined to overwhelm, and the bombshell moment, flew overhead, even though every single clue was there.
We long to be recognized on a grander scale, but be that as it may, it is vital that we sing even if no one is listening, and that we offer praise to ourselves. Not with a sense of bravado or self-importance, but sing if for no other reason, than we were gifted with a voice.
STEREOTYPING OR JOKING? OR BOTH?
You really can’t stereotype people
or put them in boxes, it’s unfair.
– Kesha
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from Miami
Childs with Are Yall Kidding Me
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“It’s not a stereotype if its’s always true.”
– Daniel Tosh
STEREOTYPING OR JOKING? BOTH
written & edited by Kendall F. Person
The above quote by comedian Daniel Tosh It’s not a stereotype if it’s always true, is jarring upon the first read, if viewed through restrained goggles of defensiveness or political correctness. If read when we are in our comfort zones and have a willingness to poke fun at ourselves, than we understand the joke. But it also offers an extraordinary insight, into what turns everyday or historical truth, into one of the most explosive words in the American vocabulary.
Ponder if you will for a moment of the stereotypes you find hurtful: as a woman or a young Black man or a member of the LGBTQ community or a Muslim American or a Trump fan. Take off the armor of indignation. Dive passed the expressed bias or actual discrimination and divide the truths from former truths and myths. Then take your lists of truths and conduct your own research. Talk to your elders and scholars about why a particular group of people, most of whom have never met, share the same basic taste on food or are of the same religious denomination or political party. The discovery will not be just another fact of information, but it becomes empowering, while lowering the blood pressure during a hostile exchange.
I wish I had an exact number, but I am not sure it would matter, nor change the way I internally view the attitudes or opinions of the general population of the United States. I believe that most of us are not racist or mean or have ill intentions (although greed is another issue). Many biases are not based on what we know to be true from our own life experiences, but through information acquired via our immediate surroundings or passed down from family relations or from a medium or leader we trust; and it is their intent – not necessarily their truth – that we must comprehend, for their belies the cycle of stereotyping. 
So why should we question the people we believe or create doubt in our own minds, when we are just fine?
Even though we are eternal students in the game of life, at some point we also become teachers with a responsibility to challenge and discover, not simply accept information, that shapes our views and defines our attitudes toward other demographics. Passing down truths to the next generation, chips away at our nation’s archaic mistrusts and perhaps one day, all stereotypes will be a joke.
Tell us about Your Neighborhood.
- click image to learn more about the Sentinelese
CLASS and RACE
“You cannot further the brotherhood
of man by inciting class hatred.”
– William J.H. Boetcker
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from 1988,
Tracy Chapman
with Fast Cars
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“In West Virginia, the most vulnerable
people we have are people who get up
every morning and go to work.”
– Joe Manchin
Laura Mine – Redstar West Virginia
CLASS and RACE
remixed by Kendall F. Person
originally published as
Fear & Loathing in Detroit West Virginia
The Coal Miners of West Virginia
The first explosion was in 1886, 131 years ago. Thirty-nine people were killed in Newburg, and year after year, the coal mines of West Virginia never stopped erupting, and the body count continued rising. In 1907, a calamity of explosions rocked Appalachia, in what must have appeared as mockery, as each successive event – nearly unbroken – claimed more lives than the one before, including a December finale: the Monongah explosion blew 361 West Virginians sky high. But coal was a necessity around the nation; a hazardous occupation, but a “good job” and an honest, yet cruel living.
The Great Migration
“Hypocrisy is the mother of all evil and
racial prejudice is still her favorite child.”
– Don King
The Great Migration
The American Civil War remains unparalleled, the magnitude in lost lives, takes a moment to sink in. 620,000 Americans, inclusive of 40,ooo former slaves, died in the battle to hold this great union together, and at long last end the hypocrisy in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Article I. All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.
The deep South was humiliated by the loss and had convinced themselves, that owning slaves was their right. So they held onto their ideology for dear life, weaving a bitter hatred in the fabric of the land, and pushing it down through generations. The Yankees may have defeated them, but Confederacy lives in the soul. The former African slaves would become the niggers of Jim Crow: a segregationist rule of law, so ruthless and degrading, and applied with such intensity, I imagine the only difference, was the weight of chains.
In 1924, the passing of the Immigration Act limited the number of immigrants, coming into the nation, cutting off the flow of Eurpoean workers, just as America thought they needed them most. Led by Ford Motor Company, the mid-sized city of Detroit Michigan was transformed into a booming automobile industrial mecca with nearly 90,000 jobs created in Dearborn alone. And finally, Black Americans were allowed access to the idea of the American dream. An entirely new workforce was created, by people who were already there. By the millions, during The Great Migration, the Negroes would leave the dirty south behind and headed north, in hot pursuit of the the good life, or at least a fair and equal one.
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Advanced Black Lung Cases Surge in Appalachia
courtesy of National Public Radio
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The theory that all White Republicans and even those that voted for and support President Trump are racist is a myth, born of a bygone era, that should have been buried when Robert E. Lee surrendered. West Virginia, for street cred if needed, was so adamantly against slavery, that when Virginia joined the Confederacy, West Virginia would break ranks and remain with the Union Army, becoming the only state to secede another state during the civil war.
And the belief that the root cause of the challenges faced by inner cities are the result of lazy and violent Black Americans is equally untrue, because they too died in the civil war, and survived the Middle Passage – in which millions of African people did not. From the south to all points north, east and west in pursuit of happiness; to own a home and raise a family and enjoy the fruits of their labor called the good life.
Distortions of truth survive, when it is in the best interest of the ruling class. Also known as the Boogeyman Theory and – on a more personal level – the blame game – Divide and Rule is a governing technique, that keeps the masses suspicious of one another, allowing the ruling class to hold onto power unchallenged, right in the middle of the world’s greatest democracy. And because of our own personal unwillingness to listen to the other side of the story, for fear of learning something that forces us to analyze our politics, our religion and even family bonds, and sometimes, it is way too much work. So we remain in our make believe bubble, pretending to follow God’s song, hoping to hear something – anything – in the news, that justifies the us against them mentality. We exhale, then quietly drift right or left, but further away from a united nation.
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2012
In West Virginia, Wall Street moved in, and the West Virginia leaders were seduced by power or greed or reluctance, but no matter the poison, it is a distinction without a difference, because they have never had the best interest of the people at heart, no matter how many times they say it. West Virginia is not just one of the poorest states in the Union, but rank at the bottom in higher education and number one in drug-induced deaths. So instead of building a diverse economy, the mines became generational. And all the while the explosions continued their near annual rampage. After so many years of working underground, black lung cases surged in the Appalachian Mountains. But with a straight face and right to this very day, the civic leaders tell their population to get ready to go back underground — even though it is literally killing them, right before our eyes.
When the Worker’s Unions brandished true power, and actually fought tooth and nail for the blue collar workforce, West Virginia would be scorned; treated nearly as bad as the Negroes of the south, only they were the whites of Appalachia. In a game of coal that reached all around the world, billions of dollars was trading hands but none of it trickled down into the homes of West Virginians.
No demands were made to share in the wealth or for safer working conditions. Instead, they bargained away everything for the best possible health insurance (West Virginia is the only state to lose population due to no immigration and deaths outnumbering births). In 2012, Patriot Coal (an irony jackpot) held down the fort, when the money ran out and the EPA demanded they clean up the polluted soil. Perhaps if they had known the truth about Detroit, West Virginia would not have followed their leaders down a rabbit hole. Not only did they lose their jobs, but the $400 million dollars in pollution liabilities, and ultimate bankruptcy, wiped out the health insurance, just as black lung disease surged.
Detroit’s End
Upon arrival and settlement, the dream remained out of reach for the newly minted Yankee Black Americans. The high paying jobs and affordable home loans, did not find the Black workers as equals, not even in Detroit. Ghettos began to form, out of necessity for the working class Negro. The wealthy white managers and executives, addressed the combustible issue by moving to the suburbs and pretending the pot was not boiling over.
But in 1967, Detroit exploded into one of the most destructive riots the nation had ever seen, before or since (less Rodney King). No leadership existed to heal a city, and address the needs of the Black constituents before poverty and crime and dependency became entrenched. Instead, the ruling class left Detroit for dead and 61% of the population would slowly disappear, creating the most segregated region in the whole wide world, bested only by South Africa’s Apartheid. It was not just the bodies and the blight, but when White Detroit departed, they took the money and even the keys for good measure. Everyone of us who was alive, from the state and federal government coffers to the richest philanthropist, to the run of the mill activists, just stood back and watched, without even the decency of yelling timber, as the richest country on planet earth allowed its 4th largest city to fall, and then pointed fingers as if it was somehow their fault.
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Battling Blight: Detroit Maps Entire City
To Find Bad Buildings
courtesy of National Public Radio
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(left) Blight in Detroit but Cityscape is hope and promise. (right) Destruction of forest in West Virginia but landscape still rises.
There is reason to believe that the life we lead will never change. For the city of Detroit and the state of West Virginia, what do they believe as a collective identity? West Virginia, the only state to secede from a Confederate state, but their only identity is tied to the coal mines. Have they never dreamed of instilling education and an artistic independence, and an imagination that says to them to think big? And what new plans has Detroit imagined so that law enforcement and community works in tandem. And is the arts in every form, understood by the leaders of its transforming abilities that is empowering, and does more to bind strangers together, as we have politicized the pureness from sport.
The fear and loathing of Detroit West Virginia, are based on who we have been told we are, and how we identify ourselves. We must know the history and understand the struggle, and the failed leadership that has allowed or perpetuated Detroit’s fall from grace and West Virginia staying in its place. But imagine, the inspiration and the legacy our generation can contribute to history, if the nation’s most dangerous city and most uneducated state turn their fortunes around, allowing America to reconfirm its greatest, without tearing anyone down. The Neighborhood proved it can be done, but it takes a collective belief in the collaborative journey.
Above the Clouds/UNHINGED created by Kendall F. Person
How Big Coal summoned Wall Street and faced a whirlwind
Shifting Fortunes, Reuters Investigates
The Great Migration, eblaze
Laura Mine, Old Photographs of Miners
ETA Vetoes mountaintop coal mine in West Virginia,
McClatchy DC Bureau
WV Mine Disasters 1884 to Present
Civil War Facts, Civil War Trust
THE MARCH OF ONE
“I was raised to understand and know
the difference between right and wrong.”
– Curt Schilling
music Tasveer by Mooroo, Pakistan
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THE MARCH OF ONE
written & edited by
Kendall F. Person, United States
There is a difference between right and wrong.
The concept is not simply taught, but instilled in us at a very early age. Tests of sanity versus criminal intent are based on rather we know the difference between the two. Right from wrong is not a zero sum game, however. There are certainly degrees, but none of them are free, when we choose wrong consciously. No one may ever know, the small degrees of wrong, so minimal they are to the universe. We are not perfect people, by design as well as choice; free will gives us even money on every wrong decision we make, and conscious assures, that the piper is paid.
“Right is right and wrong and is wrong,
and when people start getting it confused,
that means, they need to sit down with
some real people.” – Chuck D
On August 5, 2012 Wade Michael Page and Sadwant Singh Kaleka, would meet at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek Wisconsin. It was on that day, at the moment their eyes met, the difference between right and wrong could not have been more profound.
A 65 year old President of his temple was preparing to deliver Sunday Service within one of the world’s truly peaceful faiths, when he was ambushed and forced into combat. But in the split second before he was gunned down by the 40 year old man carrying the 9mm semi-automatic pistol – who had already amassed a body count of one – Sadwant Singh Kaleka would try to stab the attacker, and although he was unable to save his own his life, nor the five more that followed, Wade Michael Page – seeing the righteous stand of an elderly man armed only with a knife – had to know that he was wrong. Wrong in ideology, wrong in his target, wrong in his ill-conceived hate, wrong in his inability to gain control of his life and wrong about how right he thought he would feel.
As children, we are shaped into thinking individuals by the right and wrong decisions and choices made by our families, our elders, our communities, our schools, our churches and our government. The teenage years offer what we believed to be the first real resistance to authority, but in actuality, they are testing parameters, truths, limits and internalizing for themselves, the hypocrisies in religion and war and politics and love and peace and self.
But if the guidance instilled in us since birth – God from our Grandfathers, education from our Mothers, self worth from our communities, humility from our peers, and an unbending belief in liberty and justice for all, entrenched in us every day of elementary school – regardless of our divisions – then right and wrong, when clearly defined and contrasted with all that we know and with all that we are, should lead to discrepancies of high emotions and raised voices in worse case scenarios.
Wade Michael Page was not born a mass murderer or a hate mongerer or white supremacist He was not born predestined to give up on himself nor to give up on right. Did he become a victim of his own profession? Did he seek out and receive mental health support as a veteran? Important questions that deserve answers, but more importantly, on August 5, when he walked across the parking lot and into the Oak Ridge Sikh Temple and killed all those innocent people, why was that not enough, for us to stop pretending, that our terrorist problem is not home grown? Michael is part of greater societal issues of race, immigration and class, that must be addressed on all fronts.
But the march of one, however, is an individual reckoning. And along with a sense of purpose or fear of God, we must force ourselves to search for and understand right, for there are times when wrong cannot be stopped.
THE NIGERIAN ABDUCTION: 82 CHIBOK GIRLS RELEASED
“If you want a happy ending,
that depends, of course, on
where you stop your story.”
– Orson Welles
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Nigerian Girl
by Akin
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The Nigerian Abduction:
82 Chibok Girls Released
by Kendall F. Person
Flight or Fight
When blue skies give way to rolling black clouds and howling winds drown out the sounds of the city, we know a storm approaches, so we race to safety. Driving across the tracks, lights and sounds of an approaching locomotive, sends alerts from the brain down to our feet, triggering an immediate reaction of pedal to the metal. And when we hear the sound of glass shattering, we know we are in danger and are bodies either stiffen with panic or strengthen from a rush of adrenaline.
April 2014
Flight or fight, a psychological reaction occurring in response to a perceived harmful event, attack or threat to survival. It allows the ability to mount a defense or counterattack. If it is nature’s wrath upon us, flight or fight reasons, that even the strongest man could not out box a hurricane Katrina, so the flight indicator is selected….then we run.
But even our natural-born instincts have their hacks. Cunning, patient and misguided sense of entitlement, people who take what they want, but only from those that are defenseless, blindsided or both. They infiltrate the immediate surroundings, blending in with the appearance of the average man. Crafty, shifty, cunning, lying low like a tiger, analyzing the environment, prepared to pounce. Sociopathic, brainwashed, terrorist, a bad person or dead inside, the actual definition or plea, makes no difference to their victims or a humane society, when they ambush innocence: stealing the fight, then blocking exits to prevent flight.
Chibok school girls released October 21, 2016, VOA Africa (Reuters)
April 13, 2014 Chibok Nigeria
He Abubakar Shekau orchestrated the kidnapping of 276 young girls from a Nigerian Secondary School in a rural part of the country by them Boko Haram, a terrorist group if there ever was one. The Chibok girls – as they have come to be known – were just students, kids learning from their teachers arithmetic and writing, having no idea that hell was on the horizon.
Killing two guards in a lengthy gunbattle, Boko Haram then took what did not belong to them, then beat their chest in a mock bravado, with the audacity to invoke the name of Allah “There is a market for selling humans. Allah commands me to sell.” All the world could do was wonder and hope that time would not run out; and #BringBackOurGirls rung out around the globe.
3 years later
As it turns out, the April 13 2014 Chibok girls abduction was big enough to bring an ongoing Nigerian problem to the world’s attention. But according to Amnesty International, about 2000 boys, girls and women have been kidnapped by Boko Haram in the same time period, with many used as sex slaves, fighters and even suicide bombers. Nonetheless, the families and nation must be overjoyed to know they are alive and home. But the reality is clear: school girls before their brazen and merciless kidnapping – but now, some are mothers, and others, according to reports, appear to be traumatized and shellshocked, unable to talk about the atrocities endured.
But they survived. And we hope they are able to heal, from an unimaginable ordeal.
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To our many neighbors and friends in Lagos, please feel free to express your thoughts in the The Neighborhood forum below or on post in The Neighborhood facebook. Much love, more hope and most prayers, that the rest of the girls are brought home safely and that this story within their story finds a happy end.
— The Neighborhood
References
When the Abuse Stops, The Neighborhood
VOA Africa
BBC News Africa
Al Jazeera
Amnesty International
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ABOUT ME
Kendall F. Person Answers Questions on Quora
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