ClydeStyle

Category: Justice

  • Attacks on freedom for all people sour July 4th celebrations

    America has made great strides in its  history in an attempt to live up to its constitution. No one can argue that things are better than they were 100 years ago.

    But did this change come from a new revelation that the only God who created the universe made all men equal and that the past treatment of minorities was sinful and would greatly hinder eternal life in heaven? Nope. It doesn’t seem like God has ever stopped the sinful flesh at anything it decides to do.

    So then, white people were free from immediate eternal punishment and could still rob, cheat, and steal from minorities. They could still allow racist systems that would impede the process of minorities moving forward, and they could continue to allow police and other forces to discriminate and incarcerate minorities without real due process.

    And they have.

    What has been a constant with white people is that when you lay their actions before (a tactic mastered by the civil rights movement), then it would guilt enough of them to do the right thing.

    The problem with this is that they do the right thing for the wrong reason. And that leads to resentment.

    Then comes Donald Trump. In his first term in office, he attempted to resend as much civil and human rights as whites would allow. Now, of course, you’re thinking white people wouldn’t allow America to go backward, would it?

    There are too many non-racist folks in Congress to let that happen, right? Well, I looked up exactly how many things he did to destroy civil and human rights, and I wanted to list them all here. I didn’t because there were too many. On average, it looked like at least 70 things each year he was in office.

    I couldn’t believe it myself because you would think that if the democrats knew this, they would have run on a platform that shared it with the rest of us. Could it be that they were resentful, too?

    This link will take you to the list of things he tried https://civilrights.org/trump-rollbacks/

    All of them didn’t succeed, but with this gigantic list, you can really tell that the powers that be are not for minorities. He is already on pace to surpass this list in his second term.

    And now, with Independence Day fast approaching, who really wants to celebrate it?

  • The scam of insurance

    Let’s talk insurance. We live in a time where insurance companies are denying hurricane victims, California fire victims, and auto insurance is overwhelmingly high, especially in no-fault states, and life insurance is too hard to secure.

    Families are suffering as promised benefits are denied while Congress continues to get richer from insurance lobbying. You can not expect to see the current Republican Congress do anything about this. Since 1992, Republicans have benefitted the most from insurance lobbyists receiving millions of dollars for their silence on the issues.

    Democrats have had opportunities to deal with this problem, but even when they controlled both houses of Congress, nothing got done on this front.

    The insurance industries philosophy is to find a way not to pay so the stock holders can reap their dividends. Greed has taken over morality, and the middle class and poor are suffering the most.

    Insurance was actually started as an act of benevolence in Rome and Greece in 600 AD. You can even trace the concept of insurance as far back as 4000 — 3000 bce.

    In the US, insurance had its origin in the late 17th century. Like everything else, it was on the level, and people paid faithfully their premiums and could expect to receive payment on their claims filed during that time. The complete reniging of insurance payments for qualified clients wasn’t widespread until the Reconstruction era, where former slaves were denied claims mostly because of the color of their skin.

    In his autobiography, Malcolm X tells the story of what ultimately drove his mother insane started with trying to collect on a life insurance policy for her husband. In the movie Malcolm X, his father was murdered by the KKK as they bashed his head in with a hammer and stretched his bloody body across train tracks to be destroyed. This left Malcolm, his siblings, and his mother devastated and destitute. She eventually lost her children because she could no longer take care of them because the insurance company denied her claim, stating that they believed his death to be a suicide.

    I would love to tell you that this was the only incident where this happened, but that would not be true. You see, poor Blacks during this could not afford to take the matter to court and secure a lawyer, so the insurance companies knew this and could take advantage.

    Today, billions of dollars flow through insurance companies, and they have found a way not to honor their policies. Over the years, the list of things that can deny your claims has grown tremendously, as have the payouts to Congress for their silence. In just 2024, insurance companies spent more than 117 million to Congress. In previous years the number has been higher than 150 million. They have also spent around 130 million in campaign contributions for the candidates that will ensure no legislation is passed to stop them.

    So, in the meantime, constituents suffer from natural disasters, health challenges, death, and dismemberment and other unpaid claims and the insurance machine rolls on! God bless America.

  • Does America still believe in morality?

    Morality is principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. A hundred years ago, our country based its morality on what was written in the bible. Our country claimed a belief in Jesus Christ and a belief in the bible.

    There were other religions here. Hinduism, Buddhists, Muslims, and atheists were welcome in our country and shared similar views as Christianity.

    As time moved forward, morality was hijacked by social norms. According to google, social norms are the perceived, informal, and mostly unwritten rules that define what behaviors are considered acceptable and appropriate within a given group or community, essentially acting as unspoken guidelines for how people should behave in a particular social context; they are based on shared beliefs and expectations about what is considered “normal” behavior within that group. 

    The problem with social norms is trying to define what is “normal.” We do not all share the same views on what is normal. Over time, normal became human nature, and human nature depends on a lot of things.

    For some people, it is human nature to take something that is not yours if you want it bad enough and nobody is looking. For others, it is human nature for a man to refrain from crying at a funeral. Still, others believe that it is human nature for men to exercise power over other men and women. They may use the power that comes from money or physical power, resulting in sex.

    Our biases have crept into our human nature, our social norms, and our biblical interpretations. Our constitution was written the same way, which is why it gave no rights to women nor minorities.

    So, where is our morality today? It rests and abides with the rich and powerful. We see this play out in politics every day. Corporations like to believe they dictate social norms. They run most of the advertisements that tell us what products to use, what to eat, what medicines to take, where to vacation, what cars to buy, who is acceptable, and who is not.

    We are riddled with double standards. We have “laws” in this country, but if you have the right law firm representing you, you can bypass the penalty.

    Is it moral for the elderly to suffer in a country as rich as ours? Is it moral for babies to be born in poverty and without healthcare in this country as rich as we are? Our country tends to help many more foreign people than they do citizens. Ukraine and Israel greatly benefited from the benevolence of the US, while there are people struggling in the rural and urban areas of a plethora of things.

    It is hard to believe that America still believes in morality.

  • Leave your bitterness behind

    Some things need to be left in last year. The “newness” of the New Year is preserved in our excitement to go forward with great anticipation.

    Bitterness tends to start slow and stay very long. It slips up on you and haunts you. From moment to moment, bitterness can creep in and change your mood, make you irritable, and steal your joy.

    Bitterness is when you suffer a disappointing experience or you have been treated unfairly. Bitterness is the feeling you get as you continue to be angry about it.

    Many people are living with their bitterness. America gives you a lot to be better about. There are some who believe that certain politicians are making laws against them. Some believe the government is giving away the good jobs to immigrants. Some believe in multiple conspiracies that will negatively affect their life. Some believe the criminal justice system is unfair. Others believe there is systemic racism that has greatly affected their growth. Still, others believe religion has harmed them, and you can’t trust the police.

    Whether these things are true for you or not doesn’t matter, the point here is that all of these things would cause bitterness. So the following are three steps to help with your bitterness.

    1) Put a price on your time and energy. It is extremely unproductive to continue repeating what has happened or sharing it with folks who haven’t heard. This doesn’t change the experience, it only keeps you married to it.

    2) Confront to source. If someone has wronged you, it may be time to tell them how you feel about what happened.

    3) Ask yourself why. You need to know why this is important to you. Why you can’t get past it. And why didn’t you see this coming.

  • You don’t need an apology

    Forgiveness is a concept that our country isn’t too keen on as we are definitely people for revenge. Whenever someone’s crime upsets our social norm, we want blood.

    Mass shooters, pedophiles, rapists, bad police officers, repeat offenders, men who hit women, or anyone who is against the LGBTQ community are all subject to revenge following their miscues. But in actuality, forgiveness doesn’t require an apology. Of course, it would be nice to have one, but it is not required. Forgiveness has nothing to do with the infraction as much as it has to do with you making a decision.

    Forgiveness is a choice. It is frivolous to measure sins or even label them from bad to worse. Forgiveness involves an intentional decision to let go of resentment and anger. Why would you do that? Because hate in your heart consumes. It burns like fire.

    There are 3 types of forgiveness: 1) Exoneration where a person genuinely makes a mistake; 2) Forbearance where the person gives a partial apology, but the offense did not call for a more extreme level; 3) Release where there is no acknowledgement of hurt. The person never even took responsibility for the pain they caused. So which one do you think God would want you to exercise? Here is a hint: God would want you to practice the one you need.

    I don’t know about you, but I need to practice release because that is the one I need from God. The Greek word for forgiveness in scripture literally means “to let go,” and the context is the act of pardoning an offender.

    So, if I am to practice forgiveness from the Bible, it must be the one I expect from God because the scriptures tell us that God is going to forgive the same way we do. Now, who needs an apology?

  • American satire: The media’s usual vision for covering news

    In America, it used to be that Fox News would slant stories more to the conservative end, and MSNBC would slant stories more to the liberal end, and we could rely on CNN to land somewhere near the middle. Today, media coverage is extremely biased and used more as a weapon than a resource.

    The only exception is when it comes to race. Last weekend in Mongomery, Alabama, on the riverfront where ironically slave ships dropped off its cargo, the media told us that a fight broke out involving many people, and lots of arrests were made.

    Those are the details, and that would be fine if we didn’t know what actually happened. If Black people were the aggressor, the media coverage would have been something like: “Several gang bangers were arrested after starting a brawl on the riverfront.”

    What actually happened was that a security guard was instructing people to move their boat from the area where they docked it. Words were exchanged, and the patron punched the guard, and the fight began. Several people came to the aid of the patron, and in seconds, they had the guard on the ground, punching and kicking him.

    Onlookers were outraged and came to the aid of the guard. So the fight that should have taken place 250 years ago on those same docks took place then. The groups were, of course, divided by race. Since the aggressors were Caucasian, the Caucasian media just called it a brawl – like it just started like a fire. Caucasian aggressors don’t fit the narrative. When Caucasians do aggressive things, the language is cleaned up to make it less horrible.

    Most mass shooters have been white males. There is actually a psychological reason for that, but I won’t go into it here. The point is that you would never hear the media say, “Yet another Caucasian male has killed several students and teachers in a school, police baffled as to the reason.”

    For decades, the media has villianized Black men in news reports, and we hear it so often that it sounds normal. The videos of the Montgomery incident have gone viral, and memes regarding the event are everywhere.

    Many are asking the question, what would you do if you were there? What side would you have taken, or would you have stayed out of it completely? For many, this was more than just a brawl. It was more than just some strangers coming to the aid of a man in need. It was finally the response that Gen z and Under would rather have learned in their history books. It was the response that mirrored what many have said they would have done if they were present back in the Jim Crow south. Finally, Black people banded together and fought back.

    Will this make future incidents worse?

  • Judges Thomas and Alito are just the tip of the iceberg

    Life constantly proves that we are flawed. As a part of our moral development, we should seek to excel in integrity, goodness, truth, and character, but we have lost our way.

    If we can no longer expect our Supreme Court justices to be honest, how can we expect it in other courts? It seems that there is always a problem when people don’t speak out against injustice. We made that a habit in our country, and it still hinders us today.

    The only thing needed to start a revolution after slavery ended would have been for whites to stand up and acknowledge wrongdoing. If some would have just called it as they saw it because never is it ok to make people property.

    During the Civil Rights movement, our legislative, judicial, and executive branches had a golden opportunity to move our country light years ahead by simply speaking up for what is right! Today, there are horrible police practices that many police, if they were not guilty themselves, could denounce as evil, but they stand silent. Some of the districts that our children are supposed to be educated in are failing. Some of that failure is “teacher failure,” but no one is saying that. Prison conditions in America are deplorable, and very little is being done to change it. Veterans still don’t have all of their promised benefits, but again, we are quiet.

    It’s hard to name an area of interest that isn’t corrupt. Pastors in churches are taking advantage, and some are even getting paid to sell a bad version of hope. And even in the presidency — from Trump to Biden — there are major struggles with integrity and truthfulness.

    Sadly, it seems that we declared independence from the wrong things. Where we should have set ourselves free from lies, laziness, selfishness, and bigotry, we embraced these and would go on to forsake fairness, honor, moral virtue, and serving others. Our freedoms are not for the better but the worse in America. We are free to dishonor our constitution and look out for number one — self!

    There are more justices guilty. We will see more police brutality, bad teachers, and corrupt politicians. And unless there is accountability being enforced, America will implode from within. We won’t have to worry about foreign enemies destroying us. We’re killing ourselves.

  • Life with a twist…

    What if we were all born with severe handicaps? I mean, literally, each person born was blind, mute, and lame and as you grew older, you had to prove to God that you were worthy of being healed.

    Sounds crazy, right? To think that you could earn such things from the Almight God is absurd given that he never worked that way. But it does place a unique value on your right to live, doesn’t it?

    It seems people here have such a sense of entitlement and walk around like they own the planet. We don’t take care of it, but expect it to function normally despite our abuse. We allow dysfunction in such an unhealthy way. What makes it unhealthy is that we are not ignorant of the dysfunction. Instead, we allow it.

    Injustice is another allowance. We allow it until it happens to us. Things are unfair on purpose, and greed is way out of control. So, it would be interesting if we had a scenario of proving our worth. The handicaps would make us accountable to our abilities. I would have to be worthy of sight. Simply put, if all I’m going to be with sight is greedy, then I’m not worthy. If all I would do with my voice is cause mischief, teardown people, talk hate, and be rude, then I am not worthy of a voice.

    And then if I gain these items, at any time I could lose them again in folly. I thought of all this because I wanted to see if there was a scenario that would make the world a better place. The thought was that losing these precious things would bring our attention to our wrongdoing and would rehabilitate us. I thought this would be the proper motivation and would deter evildoers.

    Well, this year, in February, three Sudanese men were sentenced to hand amputation for stealing. This was the first time in almost a decade that the country’s courts handed down such a sentence. They do the same thing in Somalia and other countries, yet stealing still takes place.

    It would seem that God giving us intellect was for the purpose of giving him glory as a faithful creator. Instead, we have squandered our gift, and we’re set on a course to destroy ourselves.

  • Holmes in prison is poetic justice

    Elizabeth Holmes, the perfect unicorn

    Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was either brilliant or crazy when she quickly built her start-up company on a lie, raised billions, and now owes more than 450 million in damages and is serving 11 years.

    Her vivid imagination fooled thousands, and she went further than she should have. Why? Because of two things: White Privilege and greed.

    Nothing about her story was impressive. In fact, her claims were so outrageous that if you could imagine any other race saying the same thing to the same investors, you would quickly see how unextraordinary they were.

    College dropout. Discovered what? What about this quitter would have made wealthy investors not vet her and trust that she must be on the cutting edge of something that would revolutionize an industry? She had absolutely zero knowledge of this field and no skill. What an insult to the egg heads currently spending years trying to do the same thing.

    She was the unicorn every greedy, wealthy person dreams about. Ground-floor level of new technology. And her whiteness made her believable!

    The bottom line is that on paper, she was a complete fraud who had done absolutely nothing to get the trust given to her, except she was the right color. Greed was also a contributing factor and works as a blinder – the men she hustled were fools, and the old saying is true: A fool and his money are soon parted.

  • We have problems we don’t want to be fixed

    Last month Tyre Nichols was funeralized in the usual fashion of a victim of police violence. Al Sharpton did the Eulogy. Various dignitaries spoke out against police violence including Vice President Kamala Harris. We always talk a good game when these things happen but history has shown that when a problem can easily be fixed and we don’t take the steps to correct the problem, then the truth is we don’t want to fix the problem.

    America rules the world in violence and in creating weapons for violence. One of the many lessons we should have learned from our civil war is that we were not mature enough and do not value life enough to use weapons. We should have learned that our nation is not stable and we will always turn these weapons against ourselves.

    When the drugs that our government poured into urban areas back in the 80s got out of hand (which was the plan), we created the war on drugs and we put many Black and Brown men in prison. Even though cocaine was heavily used in the suburbs by whites, they could possess 280 grams of cocaine and a Black person could have the same amount of crack cocaine (or any drug), and the person of color would automatically get 10 years in prison even if that was their first offense. The reason? Mandatory minimums. This is a rule by Congress to stop the trafficking of certain drugs in urban areas and a judge had no choice but to enforce the mandatory minimum.

    With guns and policing this principle of mandatory minimums would deter crimes if they are enforced. What if you were a gun owner and your son took one of your guns and shot up his school? If the gun owner would suffer a mandatory minimum of 10 years, I would bet his son would never get near his guns. Or what if the seller of the gun was held accountable? There would be no shortcuts in background checks then.

    What if police officers got mandatory minimums for lying on their reports? Ten years for falsified documents, 3 years for not turning on your body camera, and 5 years for witnessing any wrongdoing by an officer and not reporting it or intervening to stop it. Shooting an unarmed suspect when you should have used any number of non-lethal options like pepper spray, tasers, and nightsticks should be a mandatory 20 years. There would instantly be a great decrease in police shootings and school shootings if this plan was implemented.

    Of course, the best plan would be to get rid of handguns and automatic weapons for good. The police would not need to carry them and they could adopt the same plan Japan has. In 1989 they had their last mass shooting by banning weapons for civilians. Their police force carries no weapons but they all have been trained in martial arts. When will our government feel that we are too civilized for weapons?

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