How Black People Were Turned into Backyard Pets – Welfare, Food Trucks, Jim Jones’ Successors, and Van Jones
by Sabrina Dawkins
“No man can give anybody his freedom.” – Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power” Speech at UC Berkeley, delivered October 29, 1966, Berkeley, CA
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/stokelycarmichaelblackpower.html
My grandfathers were born before the national welfare system was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They knew of a time in which you worked to provide for your family and didn’t have the government to depend on. You were forced to make a way for yourself and become self-reliant. They provided for their large families, each with six children. My dad remembers as a youth growing crops in the yard, and my mother remembers her father raising pigs for meat (which I don’t recommend doing because it is unclean meat). My grandparents are no longer living, and today’s grandparents and elders, born after the 1930s, are the first generation to be born within an established national welfare system.
Semi-tractor-trailer trucks have turned many people into pets. They don’t even know how to grow crops anymore. They wait for their food to be delivered and then drive a short distance to a restaurant, gas station, or grocery store to pick it up. They might go to work and do what they are told for a paycheck, but they have no idea how to live on their own, how to conserve, how to be disciplined through hardship. For example, they might still maintain their routine of eating at fast-food restaurants and going to the movies while in debt or dependent on the government. They remain obese even with deadly health problems, expecting a doctor to give them a quick fix. They drink alcohol or do drugs to try to reduce stress or out of boredom. They are overcome by addiction, dependency, and spiritual darkness.
Grown black men who should be father figures giving me their wisdom from a life lived moving forward and bravely overcoming life’s challenges, without asking about my financial situation, instead are asking me for free food as if I am now their surrogate owner, crops from my yard that they watched me labor in for four years to make the soil optimal for growing crops. Even though they have lived in their houses for a long time and have their own yards and room to grow crops, or have lived long enough to start putting money down on land if they are renters, they have never taken time to create a garden to grow their own food. And they’re not interested in learning from me how to create their own garden, since that would take actual work.
I look up and down my street. There are no gardens, only pets, both two-legged and four-legged, people who have become completely dependent on those food trucks to bring their food daily. And instead of wisdom for the younger generations, including their own children, they can only seem to teach them how to play outside for hours each day and the directions to the nearest public school, where most of their teachers will be white women.
Well-fed grown men and women with cars, clothes, and houses much nicer than mine estimate in their pet minds that because they see green plants growing in my yard, I must have much more than I need and therefore have extra to give away for free, even though I weigh around 120 pounds and am clearly not stuffing myself with food so that I don’t have to share it. But they can’t understand the fact that crops grow slowly—they have never grown crops. And they must put out of their minds the sight of me driving to the grocery store from time to time when the weather is cool and my crops aren’t growing fast enough. And some things I don’t have room for, such as more trees for a large supply of fruit.
Pets don’t have the responsibilities of people. It could be a more comfortable life, I suppose, but a humiliating one. Pets have a mowed lawn and no crops, or only ornamental plants, and are therefore completely dependent on others for food; they prefer a life of luxury and comfort: people bringing them their food with little or no effort on their part. They feel entitled to food because they exist. So instead of teaching their own children how to grow crops and live off the land, they give them a fun childhood consisting of a lot of playtime and teach them to get a good job working for a stranger when they grow up—then they too can live in luxury as pets, with cable TV, a nice apartment, air conditioning, painted walls, nice carpet, a shower, nice clothes, a nice car, and plenty of restaurant food.
In a pet’s mind, success is not measured by how well you can live off the land, how you can compost and live in harmonious sustainability with God’s vision for his earth with little to no waste. To a pet, success is mainly being bought by the wealthiest owner on earth, in other words, working for established or successful corporations and therefore being able to afford being waited on hand and foot by servants who will reliably bring food. It seems like a harmless dream, right? Until you realize that you will be the servant. You will be the one to serve these full-grown pets who never felt the need to learn how to grow their own food, who expect, feel entitled to things they didn’t work for or haven’t been brave enough to take on, who partied on the weekend and sought new servants during the week.
Pethood destroys people, keeps them trapped in a never-ending childhood in which they never acquire wisdom, or courage, or mental or spiritual strength. They remain in the backyard of their master’s house, waiting eagerly to receive food, willing to roll over and play dead to get it. Unfortunately, the roll over and death becomes permanent after a while. And in spiritual death and as cowards, they get fat back there in that back yard, addicted to a life of relative ease, and a chain is no longer needed to keep them there because they have stopped trying to jump over the fence to achieve actual freedom.
Being free used to mean struggling and being courageous. Today in America, however, being a man means watching sports on the television and yelling at the screen over bad referee calls. A modern man doesn’t fight for his freedom and dignity, he watches the TV and waits for other men to do it for him. I want you to watch Van Jones’ performance as he cries, relieved that Democrat Joe Biden was elected president. His performance was to release any built-up pressure in those who would think to challenge the system in frustration: “See, everything is going the way you wanted it to go. Racist Trump is out. Jim Jones, I mean Joe Biden is in. All is well. You can breathe a sigh of relief.” You have been betrayed by your talking head paid prostitutes. You are not free. You are in a television matrix, and the goal is to keep you weak, dependent, and in the dark as you deteriorate in the backyard.