Author Archives: decollins1969

Closing Walls and Ticking Clocks

08 Tuesday Jun 2010

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Source: "Your Time" Kaplan University Commercial, 2009

“I stand before you today to apologize. The system has failed you. I have failed you. I have failed to help you share your talent with the world and the world needs talent more than ever. Yet it’s being wasted every day by an educational system steeped in tradition and old ideas. Well it’s time for a new tradition. It’s time to realize talent isn’t just in schools like this one. It’s everywhere. It’s time to use technology to rewrite the rules of education. To learn how you learn so we can teach you better. It’s time the university adapted to you rather than you adapting to it. It’s time for a different kind of university. It’s your time.”

These words come from a Kaplan University commercial, in which actor James Avery (Uncle Phil on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air with Will Smith) portrays some overburdened professor with a guilty conscious about

Kaplan University Logo

the state of higher education today. This commercial has been running off and on for more than a year now, but seems to be running more of late during prime-time hours on the channels Noah and I normally watch (Cartoon Network, The Science Channel and History International). It’s a shameful commercial, really, as it alleges a reality that hasn’t existed in higher education for at least twenty years.

But that’s almost besides the main point. The commercial, when it comes right down to it, makes numerous assumptions about education, students and faculty that shows a sense of arrogance on the part of the commercial makers and Kaplan University. One, that higher education is only about earning a piece of paper that enables students to get better-paying jobs and a better start to a career. Two, that the main issue most students face is the inconvenience of a traditional four-year college education — because most four-year institutions require face-to-face contact with their students — not academic preparation, financial aid or other social and psychological issues. Three, that a strictly online education can successfully do all the things that traditional four-year institutions are currently doing, and then do it better.

I’m far from the first person to defend traditional four-year institutions, many of which don’t offer evening or weekend classes, summer classes, distance learning or online opportunities at the undergraduate level. But to suggest that it’s “time the university adapted to you rather than you adapting to it?” Really?

By this, does Kaplan mean that students seeking to earn a bachelor’s degree need only a university that meets their needs, their needs for a job, for instance, rather than a place that helps them learn how to think for themselves? A place that helps them understand how and why they believe what they believe in politically, socially, culturally, to expand their horizons, their circle of friends, their networks of contacts for their careers and not just for jobs? Institutions that enable students to look within, to see the persons they want to be for now and the future? Is this what Kaplan University means when it says that typical colleges and universities are part of an “educational system steeped in tradition and old ideas?”

Let’s put this another way. Would “Professor”James Avery, for instance, recommend that aspiring actors hone their acting chops online through Kaplan University, or would he recommend brilliant drama and theater arts departments at “traditional” four-year institutions? There are limits to what can be done educationally speaking online when it comes to social interactions that lead to connections, friendships, business networks and learning. Kaplan University should keep that in mind when it promises the moon and the stars to students whose only concern is a better-paying job. Both perspectives are as short-sighted as a three-month-old baby.

Mea Culpa

07 Monday Jun 2010

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Source: Clara Chandler at http://www.zazzle.co.uk/blackcards

Friendships, relationships and acquaintanceships are strange stuff, especially in the younger years, and even more especially at the end of high school. So many of the people I thought would be friends or lovers forever had relationships that came to a crashing end my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. One friendship in particular between two eventual doctors crashed and sank in the spring of ’87, dragging me in its undertow in the process. I ended up in a fight with one of the friends, an acquaintance since third grade, whom I’m calling ‘D’ for the purposes of this post.

A week before MVHS’ senior awards ceremony, we had a dress rehearsal in the auditorium after school. I was rushing from my locker to the rehearsal area and bumped into D, who apparently was talking to another classmate in the hallway. As I’d been doing for more than three years, I was walking at warp factor three past D when I decided at the last second to tap her on the shoulder and say “Hi” for a second. I spun around so fast that I never got my arm extended, the momentum carried my right hand onto the side of her hip and butt. I was immediately surprised and embarrassed, and started to apologize without thinking. D looked somewhere between angry and confused. She kept saying, “I can’t believe you did that,” as if I was actually trying to get her attention that way.

“I’m sorry, I saw you in the hallway, and I tried to get your attention, and. . . .”

“Why, I never thought you would do such a thing to me!”

“I wasn’t trying to slap your butt. It was an accident. I’m sorry.”

“Of all the people, I wouldn’t expect this from you!”

“We’ve known each other since third grade. Why won’t you believe me when I say. . . .”

“I just can’t believe that you would do this to me!”

I got angry myself at that point. I took my hand, and I slapped her across her left butt cheek, this time deliberately.

“Now you know what a real butt slap feels like!,” I said while in mid-slap.

D immediately tried to slap my face, first with her left hand, then with her right. I caught her left and right arms and held them together, but not before the concussion of her fingernails from her left hand had hit my right cheek. I then let D go, and walked away with the thought, “How did this happen? I was just trying to say ‘Hi’.” This was the last time I really laid eyes on the woman.

I felt bad about what happened, but I also felt like I’d been put in an impossible situation. No matter what I said, I would’ve been wrong. If I’d said, “Look D, my only school interest is Crush #2, no one else, so accept or don’t accept my apology and move on!,” I would’ve hurt her more than any sting I left on her ass. If I refused to apologize, I’d been wrong too. The only thing I could’ve done was to walk away without discussing it at all. No matter what I could’ve done to limit the damage, I realized that somewhere in my unconsciousness was both a sense of compassion and contempt for D, a little girl who wasn’t so little anymore but seemed desperate to crawl back into her shell of shyness.

Regardless of what happened on that day twenty-three years ago, I’m truly sorry. To D, please accept this humble apology. It’s not right that I responded to an accidental tap by giving you a real one. You had enough problems to deal with without dealing with my silliness at the end of our senior year. I hope that you’ve found some measure of peace within yourself and in your world since ’87.

Arrogance at the End of the World

05 Saturday Jun 2010

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Super Comet: After the Impact

American — and to a lesser extent, European — narcissism knows no bounds. It can’t be more clearly demonstrated than in all of the scientific demonstrations of how our world could come to an end. The BBC, The Science Channel and Discovery have all been very busy the past six years or so, working out scenarios in which most of humanity and life on Earth faces complete annihilation. Documentaries and shows like The Nostradamus Effect, Earth 2100 and Super Comet: After the Impact are all examples of

Earth 2100

our obsession with the fall of our glorious civilization. But in our obsessing over our self-deluded visions of self-destruction, we’ve also made inglorious assumptions that say more about us now than any impending doom ever would.

In Super Comet, the producers and writers are especially guilty of narcissism. A comet with the destructive power of the asteroid that burrowed its way into the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago and provided the final death knell of the dinosaurs slams into Earth in the twenty-first century, when all attempts at stopping it have failed. A Latino man working in Texas, scientists at the Hawaiian volcano observatory near Kilauea, a Parisian family and a tribe of Pygmies in Cameroon.

After it’s all said and done — between the fiery impact, the worldwide EMP shockwave, the burning rain, the 800-degree day and the mini-Ice Age — the world limps on, with post-industrial Europeans and hunter-gatherer Cameroonian Pygmies managing to survive. Not to mention a White male scientist hooking up with an Asian female scientist on Hawaii in the process. The dumb Latino guy kept searching for his family until he reaches the impact crater in Southern Mexico, still a smouldering mess four months after impact, while the Black guy who helps get the Hawaiian couple on board a sailboat dies in a massive Pacific storm.

Earth, but in whose hands?

The subliminal message in all of this is that the world can’t continue and rebound without folks from America and Europe, with the bulk of those being, well, White folks. Though not overtly racial in bias, it’s certainly narcissistic. As if 900 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa could be reduced to Pygmies, not to mention South Asia, East Asia, South America and other parts of the world that could contribute to the rebuilding of world civilization after such a catastrophe.

But these kind of scenarios aren’t limited to Super Comet or Earth 2100. Every post-apocalyptic vision of the world after nuclear war shows civilization kaput, gone, the world without any future at all. I didn’t know that hundreds of missiles were aimed at Accra, Lagos, and Dar es Salaam, Sao Paolo, Montevideo and Rangoon. It’s as if because the rest of the developing world is in such dire straits that the producers of these docudramas have already written the Global South — not to mention ordinary indigenous people and folks of color in America and Europe — off.

It seems to me that until we get over ourselves in the US and Europe that we are doomed. Not as a world. But certainly as the world that we think is ours stops revolving around our riches and power.

Generation Gap

03 Thursday Jun 2010

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Off and on for three years, I’ve waled on the ’60s generation and its own obsession with its achievements. Not to mention its occasional turn to Generation Xers and those younger than us, as if to say, “Well, why aren’t you more like us?” For years I thought that this was the stuff of arrogance, a sense of superiority that the Baby Boom Generation felt toward us young folk. But I’ve come to the realization that it’s just the opposite, that the folks who marched with Dr. King and shut down Berkeley and Columbia were themselves attempting to fill shoes larger than Shaquille O’Neal’s size twenty-threes. And no, this isn’t about my generation.

For the umpteenth time, I watched most of the Band of Brothers series on Memorial Day (it was on Spike TV, of all places). If it’s possible for me to have a man-crush on anyone, it’s with Damien Lewis playing Col. Richard Winters, as well as the man himself. So moving, so inspirational, and so hard to live up to. Especially since another 16 million men and women served in the armed forces during the Second World War. Millions more worked hard in factories and on farms, in shipyards and railroad yards to supply these folks with food, equipment and ammunition to fight.

The generation of folks born between 1910 and 1930 are part of what Tom Brokaw and others have called the “Greatest Generation.” That’s going a bit too far, given that the generation born in the 1880s and 1890s helped make them this way. But given the times they grew up in — the Roaring ’20s, the Great Depression, and the Second World War — it’s hardly a stretch to say that as a generation, they rose far  above their circumstances to achieve great things, to build and rebuild our country, to make the US as great as it would become after the war.

Sure, there are a variety of tensions in this assessment, racial segregation and discrimination not being the least of these tensions. In this case, then, you could argue that the generation of Blacks born between 1915 and 1930 were the “Greatest Generation.” They’re the ones who marched on Washington in ’63, who helped do the leg work for Brown v. Board of Education, who fought segregation and discrimination to fight valiantly in World War II, where leaders like Dr. King, Malcolm X, and so many others emerged. To act as though Whites from this generation weren’t themselves fighting against racial segregation, economic inequality, and gender discrimination is to deny the tensions that existed in the world in which Baby Boomers grew up in, the mythically placid ’50s and early ’60s.

So yes, the ’60s generation was one that was radicalized by civil rights, Vietnam, social unrest, politics (and eventually, a distrust for government), it was also one that, for all its denial, was following in the footsteps of the generation before. It would be nice if folks from this generation would put their narcissistic biases aside and give a fair and complete assessment of their own achievements and their own role in creating the narcissistic generations that have followed in their footsteps. But they’re probably not going to do that. Oh well.

That’s The Way of The World

31 Monday May 2010

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We’ve come together on this special day
To sing our message loud and clear
Looking back we’ve touched on sorrowful days
Future, past, they disappear — Earth, Wind & Fire, 1975

Today’s day and date marks twenty-eight years exactly since my stepfather beat my mother unconscious not more than twelve feet from my bedroom (’82 calendar = ’10 calendar). It was a traumatic experience, something like witnessing a nuclear explosion but somehow surviving to tell the story, with my vision fully intact. I talked about this before, on this blog, in a number of posts over the past three years. It’s unfortunate that Memorial Day for me is more about this event than it is about patriotism or brave soldiers long gone. Especially since I embarked on this Boy @ The Window project of mine five years ago.

The worst thing about this day and date for me is that it reminds me of loss, sorrow, my past hate, my renewal of forgiveness for myself and for my family. For at 3:30 in the afternoon twenty-eight years ago, my childhood ended. It didn’t matter how much of a child I was, how goofy or weird I may’ve acted afterward, or how much child-like wonder and joy has remained over the years. I can never go back to being the purposefully naive twelve-year-old I was back then. Not at 3:32 pm on May 31, ’82, and certainly not now.

That’s the way of the world
Plant your flower and you grow a pearl
A child is born with a heart of gold
The way of the world makes his heart so cold

It’s too bad iPods didn’t exist in ’82, because I could’ve used a moment or two to give my last rites to my youth through one of my all-time favorites, Earth, Wind & Fire. That is, after helping my mother regain consciousness, feeding my younger siblings, making my older brother help me with my mother and generally being upset with myself that I didn’t call the police. Unfortunately, my idiot stepfather loved Earth, Wind & Fire as well (at least their earlier funk and later disco hits, nothing of substance, thank goodness). Still, the lyrics to “That’s The Way Of The World” fit the emotions of that day as far as my life was concerned. That’s The Way Of The World

My mother swears to this day that she doesn’t remember the incident. Good for her, I guess. My ex-stepfather, now almost sixty, is a Type-2 diabetic whose kidney functions have been non-existent for seventeen years, and as of a year ago, lost a leg to a disease of his own overeating making. There are times, I must admit, that I’m all right with the fact that this man’s life has become a nightmare over the past two decades. That I get a sense of reckoning out of his downward spiral. But those thoughts are quickly followed up by the urge to forgive, and certainly not for his sake. Strictly for my own. I wouldn’t want his health situation, for myself or for anyone else.

You will find peace of mind
If you look way down in your heart and soul
Don’t hesitate ‘cause the world seems cold
Stay young at heart…

So I’ve come to on this special day to say my message loud and clear. That the ways of this world will choke the youth and life out of us if we allow it. The only reason that I’m still able to feel child-like most of the time is because of my hopes, dreams and vivid imagination, as well as God’s grace over the years. With Noah these past seven years, I’ve stayed young at heart (and, for the most part, in body as well). “‘Cause you’re never, never, never old at heart.”

When I See Me Smile

30 Sunday May 2010

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Sometimes people say the most brilliant of things, so much so that they make you stand at attention. On Thursday, former MTV Real World star, Vibe magazine writer and editor, author and political activist Kevin Powell (not to mention a 2010 candidate for Congress from Brooklyn) wrote the following on Facebook:

“Often people put you in a box, relate to a you that no longer exists, a you they may have met, seen, or heard about, rightly or wrongly, years back, a you that was trying to figure out who you are. But if those kinds of people insist on not seeing you now, smile, be polite, and keep it moving as far from them as you can. They are imprisoned by their own minds. Do not become an inmate in their prison.”

Powell’s pearl of wisdom said as much in eighty-two words as I’ve been saying off and on for the past three years on this blog. That despite all we may have accomplished in our lives, many folks tend to see us only in the ways in which they decide to see us. That’s too bad, more for those folk than for us, but too bad anyway.

In my case, the past five years of working on Boy @ The Window have revealed much of what Powell expressed in his short yet wonderfully well-written statement. During one of my interviews for the book, a former classmate said that one of her first images of me after we’d reconnected was my “great smile.” A good number of my former teachers and classmates, in fact, remembered me as someone who smiled a lot, as if I had much to smile about. I don’t recall smiling very much during the Humanities years.

I was deliberate with my facial expressions, like Rob Brown’s character Jamal Wallace in the movie Finding Forrester. I was so deliberate that they were second nature by the time I reached Mount Vernon High School. I had a sarcastic “No shit!” look when I sniffed bullshit. I cracked a smile when others were in a cheerful or unhappy mood, either in admiration or to help them smile as well. If anyone had cared to notice, the only times I truly smiled were the times I laughed out loud, or the times I couldn’t help but act goofy, or when something I had heard on radio had momentarily put me in a good mood. Otherwise, the “smile” I had on my face was an almost perpetual facial expression, a smirk really by the time we’d reached eleventh grade.

I needed to express as little emotion as possible back then, between my classmates — who I saw as self-absorbed and uncaring — and my family — where a flash of my anger could lead to a fist connecting with my face. So I wore a permanent weak smile on my face. I wanted no questions about my home life, no arguments or strife, no incidents with my now ex-stepfather to run away from. My true smiles were rare, and were reserved for private moments, for me and only me.

That may well be my loss as much as anyone’s. After all, it’s not as if anyone outside of myself would’ve known the difference between my moments of true emotional expression and my blank slate face, right? Well, my late teacher Harold Meltzer did notice. He told me once, whenever his lessons had caught my full attention, that I was fascinated, that “even though [I] never moved a muscle in [my] face, [my] eyes used to flash.”  “I could see that, ” Meltzer continued, “no one else could see but I could see . . . .”  He was right, as usual, that when I smiled, I smiled on the inside.

Now when I smile or express any other emotion, I think I’m pretty obvious about it. That much has changed. But in looking at myself through the eyes of others, especially others from my growing-up years, I see so much that they couldn’t see, and some who still can’t see me, the past or present me. It may be easier to remember me smiling above anything else, if only because my smiles were so rare, for them and for me.

First Impressions and Brandie

27 Thursday May 2010

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Half-Sleep Mug Shot

A year and a half before me and Brandie were together in Humanities and 7S, my father Jimme took me and my older brother Darren to his “girlfriend’s” two-bedroom apartment on Mount Vernon’s South Side. The place felt bigger to me than it actually was. Maybe it was because of the day we made this visit. It was a Saturday in May ’80, when May used to mean early spring, and not May showers, October winds, and August heat and humidity, like it does now. It was sunny, and that sunshine found its way into that apartment that day, highlighting heavily polished wood and making the yellow walls brighter. Even though Brandie’s mother and Jimme were having drinks and paid me and Darren little mind, it was nice getting out of our sparse space at 616. It was good that Jimme actually showed up this time.

About an hour into the visit, Brandie walked into the apartment door. She held several bags in her hands from shopping. All I noticed was that Brandie was taller than me, and wider too. I saw her as a woman of massive girth, somewhere nearing six feet in height, the stereotypical Black woman whom people like my mother had spent the previous decade of my life making fun of. I couldn’t resist. Like a mindless idiot, I said “Wow, she’s fat!” with glee in my eyes and a welcoming smile all over my face. For me, it was as if I had said, “Wow, you’re gorgeous, and your skin has a wonderful glow!”

Brandie’s reaction was one of stone-faced, speechless shock. Jimme gave me a semi-chuckled “Donald!” to let me know that I had said something inappropriate, but other than that, nothing. Brandie didn’t scream or holler, Brandie’s mother said nothing about it, and everyone — including Brandie — carried on with conversations until we left for home. I learned that Brandie attended Grimes and about Humanities for the first time. I didn’t know that I’d be a classmate of hers sixteen months later.

We ended up fighting inside of six weeks of being together in 7S. I thought I was the “smartest kid in the whole world,” while Brandie thought I was a “dumb ass.” After punching her in the breast, I was also a “pervert” — and pathetic me didn’t even know what “pervert” meant — for the rest of the year. Boy, I really was a dumb ass back then!

It took me until the end of high school for Brandie to see me any other way other than the idiot ten-year-old that I’d been. By then, she had changed as well, and mostly no longer cared for Mount Vernon or most of us as her classmates. But, she didn’t hate me anymore, at least. Brandie and I hugged at our high school graduation in ’87, but not before saying, “You’ve changed a lot over the years. You used to be an asshole you know!”

She was right, of course. Unfortunately, she’s not here for me to say that. Or to say that I’m sorry. Not just for calling her fat. Not just for my prejudice toward people with obesity. But for not revealing my truer self, my better self to her, not in ’80 or ’81 or ’87. Despite all evidence to the contrary, sometimes we really only get one chance to make a good impression on others.