Value = 0

When I refer to value, I think of what it means to be a Christian.

I think about what it means to be true to yourself, and true to others.

I want to commend people who make it their duty to show others that there is value in multiple aspects of life.

To those that have shared unity with another person for years in marriage, I thank you.

Thank you for displaying that love isn’t short term relationships, and 1 night stands.

For those that devote time out of each day for God; I thank you.

I thank you for showing that a relationship with God is more than just calling upon Him when you are in trouble.

I wonder if value is appreciated anymore when it comes to some things.

I’m not a mathematician under any circumstance, but it doesn’t take a mathematician to realize that the value is decreasing.

There has to be value placed back into education.

It’s time to stop lying; we all know that our children don’t receive the same opportunities when it comes to learning.

It’s time to bring the value from 0 back to 100. People, we have to once again strive to keep it at 100.

Some of us are jumping into marriages with the knowledge that we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives with the person that we are marrying.

Why aren’t we keeping it 100?

It is sad that many of us can go about each day supporting things that no longer have value.

Instead of supporting things with no value we should strive to place value back.

One for the week: Leviticus 27:17 – “If he dedicates his field during the Year of Jubilee, the value that has been set remains.”

Email me at marcelgamble@ sbcglobal.net to discuss the idea of value.

Lovely Secrets

The Grand Rapids Times

It occurs everyday; millions of people indulge themselves in relationships prematurely.

We experience this thing called love at first sight.

However, unknowingly we ignore the lovely secrets.

He doesn’t ask questions about her, and she doesn’t care to raise questions about him.

The most that many of us know about each other are surface characteristics.

She doesn’t know that he has the capability to take advantage of her; physically, mentally, and emotionally, in the future.

He has no idea that he is just one of her trophies.

The cost is too high to ignore the lovely secrets.

I am someone that once ignored the lovely secrets and someone that once had to learn hard lessons from doing so.

Now, I see young leaders in charge of the future ignoring these secrets.

I see young people jumping in and out of relationships like they’re playing double dutch.

I see young girls continuously hurt, crying more tears then a family attending a funeral.

I see young men seeing more women than a beauty salon on its best day of business.

How is all of this happening – all because people aren’t taking the time to discover the lovely secrets?

It is crucial for people to know their significant others.

Not to put a damper on a blessing such as marriage, but a person can place a ring on your finger one day and place hands on you physically to harm you the next.

Love takes and requires a lot of devotion.

If people are willing to devote the time in effort in loving someone, they should be willing to put in the same amount of time to find out who people are.

We can’t afford to be naïve we have to remember that with love comes the lovely secrets.

One for the week: “The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride.” Ecclesiastes 7:8

Leaves Of Color

The Grand Rapids Times

Once again it is fall; a time of serious weather change and clothing choices.

Besides the changes that obviously affect us during this time, leaves of all different colors, shapes, and sizes hit the ground.

They don’t blow around to segregate themselves; they collaborate on the ground to create tolerable living places.

Today, I looked at all of the different kinds of leaves on the ground and I asked myself an amusing question.

Why can’t my peers and I resemble the leaves?

The government creates zones to seclude some students from attending prestigious schools with other students.

The media isolates many minorities by identifying them with deceitful and exaggerated information.

Some people are deprived and others are hindered by resources that they need and resources that they could unquestionably live without.

Men hold dominance in the professional and social world.

People are defined by their social class and not the content of their character.

Are we capable of being leaves?

Do we have the capability to fall and rise with each other?

Yes, we do; we just have to realize that no matter what, we are all going to be different leaves that fall from different trees.

We all have to be able to land on the same ground with no conflict.

We should be able to attend the same schools.

The inner city shouldn’t be compacted with fast food restaurants when the greater city only has a few.

Churches shouldn’t be segregated when we ultimately are gathered for the same purpose.

We should be like the leaves.

One for the week: May God give you of heaven’s dew and of earth’s richness— an abundance of grain and new wine. Genesis 27:28

Tell us your opinion

The Mid-Term Election is November 2, 2010. What needs to be done to get more African Americans in Grand Rapids out to vote?

Play It Back

The Grand Rapids Times

Once a hit record drops, it receives a lot of airplay through radio stations and by people who like the record. Unfortunately, there comes a time period when songs reach expiration dates.

When this time period hits, some people retire from listening to these songs and some recycle them and choose to continue to listen to them.

One song that people should retire is “Grudges.”

This song has some individuals making other people pay for their repressed memories.

This song has people that are in their second marriages making their new spouses pay for the bad things their previous spouses did.

This song has mothers telling their sons that they aren’t going to be any good like their fathers.

It has fathers telling their daughters that they are going to be promiscuous like their mothers.

I don’t like “Grudges” because it is played way too often.

It is played when people need an excuse to why they can’t accomplish their goals.

It is played when people are driven to try to live their lives through those close to them.

I understand that we all grow from past experiences, but we also have to remember that they are past and not present experiences.

“Grudges” needs to be retired; it doesn’t deserve to be recycled.

This song is only harming and hindering so many of us from excelling in life.

Somebody needs to cut this song off.

Change the radio station, or put in a different CD.

This song needs to completely be removed from all IPOD’s.

I’m tired of dreams being crushed because of this song.

I’m tired of addictions continuing because of this song.

I’m tired of people inflicting pain on each other because of this song.

It’s time to support a new hit record.

One for the week: A man’s wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an offense. Proverbs 19:11

Black Folks And The Illusion Of Inclusion

The Grand Rapids Times

NNPA Columnist

Unfortunately, too many Black folks in this country are blinded by a debilitating condition best described as the illusion of inclusion.

This was graphically demonstrated at a town hall meeting during which Mrs. Velma Hart, an educated, stylishly-dressed Black woman relayed her deeply felt economic concerns to President Barack Obama.

With a firm voice, Mrs. Hart told the President that “I am one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I am exhausted –exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now. I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class….”

It is very disturbing that an educated Black person could possibly believe that a Black president, no matter what he said during his campaign, could bring about meaningful change in a society where race still really matters.

After all, this is a society that has never, in its entire history, voluntarily given Black folks anything.

Every move forward in the struggle for equal rights, equal opportunity and equal justice came about after many of our people paid the ultimate sacrifice with their lives.

It is a society where when a White male commits a heinous crime, the focus is on the pathology of that particular criminal; when a Black male commits one, the focus is on the “pathology of Black males.”

It is a society where Rupert Murdock’s New York Post can publish an article on Mrs. Hart, a financial officer with a veterans organization, with the headline “Gal Takes Him (President Obama) to Task Over Failed Vow at Town Hall; where Richard Schuman, a University of Michigan sociology professor, in a survey found that Whites consider integration as 15 percent Black, 85 percent White with a White person always in charge.

Noted Schuman, “….when White Americans say they ‘favor’ integrated schools or neighborhoods what they really mean is a few Black students or families in a predominately White environment.”

It is a society where conservative icon, William Buckley, could write in a 1991 National Review article that “….Blacks, yes, are sensitive, but Black lobbies are not powerful enough to punish nonpolitical transgressors against such taboos. (A black book-buyers’ boycott against a novelist would not impoverish.)

If the spoken or written offense is egregious enough, as in the case of the joke told (in 1975) to John Dean by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, a Cabinet officer gets fired.

If a district attorney is named to a federal judgeship and it is revealed that he once made a pot-valiantly genial reference to the Ku Klux Klan, he can be defeated on the floor of the Senate.

And no one running for the office in a state in which the Black population is significant would consider post 1965, violating the taboo. On the other hand, there is discussion of such questions as relative Black intelligence, sexual promiscuity, and upward mobility that still gets a sober hearing in sober surroundings….”

And where Forbes a prestigious business magazine, published an article by Dinesh D’Souza, a self-loathing “tribesman” from Mumbai, India, in which he accuses President Obama of governing with the anti-colonialist beliefs of his father, whom he describes as a “Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya….”

An Indian friend said that D’Souza, who is treated as an expert on Black folks in many academic and journalistic circles, is an Indian equivalent of Clarence Thomas and Larry Elder.

A society with such White supremacist attitudes can’t be meaningfully changed by any single individual, but only by a group of people who are united, alert, focused, determined and knowledgeable.

Journalist/Lecturer A. Peter Bailey, a former associate editor of Ebony, is currently editor of Vital Issues: The Journal of African American Speeches. He can be reached at apeterb@verizon.net

Rosa Parks Sculpture

Have you seen the Rosa Parks Sculpture in downtown Grand Rapids, corner of Monroe Ave and Monroe Center? Tell us what your thoughts are after seeing it?