Art imitates life

...or is lif now imitading art.

I watched the VMA Awards last night for maybe the first time in my life. I was disturbed by what I saw.

I was disturbed at the images and messages that young people are getting embedded into their heads thru the lyrics of the music of these people who were performing and/or being awarded. Not all of them were holly weird looking, but the majority.
It struckup quite a stirring conversation between my baby sister and myself when Lil Wayne came out with his damn pants hanging off his ass. I wondered - Is this art imitating life, or is this life imitating art. Too many of our youth are spending too much time mirroring their lives after artist, which is unrealistic. So we started discussing where this pants handing off the ass came from. I said I heard it came from prisons and she went ballistic. Insisting that is false.

"It's an expression of their individuality. It's a trend". She insisted. I insisted that it represents something; it says something and it means something. There IS a message behind it.

After we argued and debated for about an hour, it became clear that we were both SAYING the same thing, but were coming from very different viewpoints.

While we both agree that too many of the black youth are being raised by TV, music, facebook and twitter, we completely disagreed about whose fault it is. She says it's the parents fault; I say it's not the parents fault because they are a part of a system that has failed the parents already and they don't know any better...yada yada yada. Well, this chick was adamant and after about 3 hours she finally had me understanding her point of view.

We cannot continue to blame they system for designing the various traps that our people have fallen for (drugs, alcohol, welfare, section 8, etc). Everyone has a choice. It's all about choices.

As a people, we Choose not to vote.
We CHOOSE not to hold our elected officials accountable.
We CHOOSE to place too much valuse on materialistic things.

Life is all about choices. Choose wisely.