FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTRODUCTION

It must have been about 20 years ago when I first began thinking about creating a "Cultural Salon" as a reaction to the mundane social circles In Washington D.C. The richness of intellectual and artistic interchange had died, college friends had moved, the internet had not yet become the phenomenon it now is... I romanticised about the Salons of the mid to late 1800's in Paris, London and Berlin and the cultural dynamo of the Harlem Rennaisance. I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman, an artist who lived and traveled with James Baldwin... Jimmy he affectionately called him, and he spoke often of their small cottage in southern France and of the many Artists, Poets and Luminaries that dropped in to chat and relax. Well, the impressionists, cubists, modernists, etc. all hung out together famously in those days and shared their ideas with one another creating a creative greenhouse in a world that was rapidly changing. I longed to have lived in those times, to have met Cassat, Rodin, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Baker, Balwin, well I did finally meet Baldwin and others purely for the joy of intellection upon the arts. This was in the late 1980's and by the mid 2000's I happened to run into a friend of mine from Hampton University who had been living in New York since he graduated in the early 90s. Well, I was surprised to hear him comment that in all of the wonder that is New York he never met anyone who ever really had anything interesting to say about art, literature, architecture, science, fashion or anything... I was so surprised to hear this since it had also been my experience. Well here I am in 2011 attempting the Virtual Salon...

Saturday, July 20, 2013

ZIMMERMAN AND BARKLEY: A Tale Of Two Males Who Never Became Men…

A childs fantasy with guns is innocent and naive


ZIMMERMAN AND BARKLEY: A Tale Of Two Males Who Never Became Men…

A real man (left) who mentors and understands  youth (right)  helping to bring them into manhood.



The provocateur and catalyst of the despicable chain of events leading to Trayvon Martin’s assassination was George Zimmerman.  Zimmerman failed to act as a mature, ethical adult, he allowed racial bias to prevent him from exercising manly restraint.  As an adult it was his responsibility to demonstrate a more structured approach to the situation than the 17 year old minor he methodically murdered with malicious intent!  Zimmerman is not a man at all he is a profoundly disturbed and immature male with a mind not much more developed than your average teenager playing violent video games and chewing bubble gum.  Lamentable as this all is it does not absolve him from his crime as a cold blooded murderer and racial profiler! 

Violence is tempered with maturity in manhood...


So the question is, “Did Zimmerman allow himself to sink to the level of a teenager when he pursued, fought with and murdered Trayvon”?  Which person, the 17 year old boy or the mature adult should be held accountable for having the ethical fortitude and basic maturity to back off?  In virtually every culture on every continent of this planet a man is held accountable for having more restraint and maturity than a child!  So the next question has to be the obvious, “Was Travon being treated as an adult”?  If so then he would have been seen as entering into a debacle with the minor, his mental, (and apparently physical), inferior George Zimmerman the younger or George Zimmerman the child, whichever suits your taste.  So the trial was really about how George Zimmerman the child murdered in cold blood Trayvon Martin the man a true David and Goliath saga.  Would that Zimmerman actually possessed the physical prowess of either the legendary David or Goliath; the reality is that he is and shall be remembered by history as the biggest “Wuss” of all time!  For now I will go with pursuing this topic with Zimmerman as the cocky, immature, troubled teenaged child and Trayvon as the mature adult because that is how it ended up playing out!  Travon faced a very adult dilemma which was the task of defending his life against a crazed assailant with a loaded gun.  Few adults have ever had to face such a perilous fate as Trayvon, how many of you can say that you have?  For Zimmerman it was an easy game, he had a gun, he had a height/weight advantage and he had the support of a racist police department and community.  For Zimmerman the boy it was a fun manhunt to the death, the personification of a twisted boyhood fantasy and for Trayvon the man it was a real game of survival, being hunted down for no apparent reason like the hundreds of thousands of black males over the span of this blood-stained countries history.

Many conscientious men have have hearts big enough to reach back into troubled communities who desperately need their love and wisdom, such as this man.


Recently Charles Barkley was quoted and I cannot imagine why since this basketball star has no legal credentials whatsoever, as saying they both should have just called it quits!  How insane a remark is this coming from someone who claims to have followed the trial as closely as Mr. Barkley did?  This is evidence that two people can see the same thing but one of them sees and knows nothing after it is over.  Obviously Mr. Barkley has never had someone threaten his life with a gun face to face but I have!   I know what it is like to have someone pull a gun on me and hold the barrel at my body, to be desperate to find some means of defense against an unfair advantage.  From this moment on the man formerly known to me as Mr. Charles Barkley will be known effectively as Charles Barkley the moron! Trayvon the man knew he was fighting for his life. Zimmerman the child took a hard beating from Trayvon the man that humbled his improperly calibrated sense of manhood and he went off the deep edge to the point of no return murdering Travon the man in cold blood!  Charles Barkley the moron has no goddamed idea what it is like to have his mortal existence threatened by a man with a loaded gun pointed directly his life!  Let me say this again.

Violence and Murder at too young an age creates sociopaths who have no respect for human life


Charles Barkley the moron has no =*&@#%  idea what it is like to have his mortal existence threatened by a man with a loaded gun pointed directly at his life! 

Shut the =*&@#% up Charles Barkley the moron and go back to your privileged, secure life free of vigilante’s with loaded firearms pointed at you with deadly intent!  You are no longer part of the real world where simple ordinary people get caught up in crazy downwardly spiraling tragedies by just by innocently walking home on a warm summer night! 

The real question here is, “Does anyone in this country recognize that adults should be held to a higher degree of accountability than a child”?  Is this country so jacked-up on sex, drugs, greed and hyper-consumerism that they do not recognize the responsibility of an adult to demonstrate a superior level of judgment as compared to a child?   Perhaps not and this I attribute to the fact that so few adults poses the level of maturity traditionally typified by adulthood.  How much the world has changed…

So for Zimmerman the boy let’s add to the charge of murder that of acting as an immature child, let’s charge him with failing to be a man!  Zimmerman is not a man, he is a kid acting out some adolescent fantasy garnered from True Blood, Rambo or any one of the myriad hunt and kill films of our violent culture!  The problem from the start is that we have been acting as if Zimmerman the boy were a man when in fact he is not.  A man, a real man, would never have allowed himself to be sucked into a dark, downward spiral of murder and denial such as Zimmerman the boy did.  A real man would have come before the American people, confessed his lack of maturity, judgment and restraint and begged them for forgiveness for committing this most villainous crime!  A real man would never have acted as Zimmerman the boy did and so the conclusion of this court is that Zimmerman the boy is not a man at all, he is yet another example of a male who has never matured and self-actualized as responsible man in the zany cultural anomaly that is the twenty-first century.  Zimmerman the boy if convicted should have been tried as a minor because that is where his mind is… he has the mentality of a profoundly disturbed child…

And to Charles Barkley the moron I have this simple advice….. “WAKE =*&@#% THE UP OR SHUT THE =*&@#% UP”!

Many men who mentor youth are able to save them from the streets and direct them into manhood.


Written by D. Vollin

1 comment: