Happy New Year…

Sylvester Ogbechie, Avatar III, watercolor, 2000

 Happy New Year 2015 to all my readers. The previous year ended for me in great introspection. I found myself worrying about the constant barrage of news about black men, women and children being gunned down on the streets of the USA, and their killers not being held accountable by the judicial system. What seems to be open season on blacks in America, in my opinion, merely continues a gross system of human rights violation that against Africans and their descendants that the USA has not come to terms with, black president or not. I worry that the younger generation of African Americans are looking at this situation and increasingly distrusting the old civil rights message of non-violence, seeing as it doesn’t seem to have done anything for them in the 50 years since Martin Luther King was assasinated. Obviously, I worry about these issues as a black man, but more as an American citizen who sees clearly where the country has continuously failed its own citizens. I hope the new year brings greater consensus on the need to fully integrate blacks into American life, instead of treating them as a problem to be exterminated. I don’t expect things to get better but one can hope that it does… as I hope, in this new year.