Archive for October 31st, 2006

Bob Barker is retiring!

Does this mean The Price Is Right is going down with him?  I kinda hope so.  Who else can do TPIR right, except Bob?  Unless…

Naw, I like my school and wanna keep teaching.  But if I get a call…

One of the things I find myself having to be very conscious of in my day-to-day dealings with my students is doing everything I can not to, as a great man once said (or a once-great man said, depending on your perspective), “Keep. Hope. Alive.”  It’s really strange when it gets down to the time when grades are due (i.e., right now) and I’m staring in the faces of kids who have done nothing the whole quarter, and they know they’ve done nothing, so they’re not even trying to bargain.  No “Mr. Tooley, can I….” or “What if I….”  none of that.  They just look at me like, I know I’m gonna fail, so why even try?  In a way, that kind of thinking seems to be prevalent in a wider sense.  Not just with school, though, but with life in general.

I was talking to one of my best friends over the weekend and he pointed out to me that one of the biggest differences between this our generation (and maybe the half-generation that follows us) and our forefathers is that they always maintained hope.  Obviously, not every single person at all times, but as a group, they saw the potential for good in the future, even though the situation at the current time looked bleak.  Nowadays, it seems that as soon as the situation starts to look bad, people decide that they can’t cope and check out.  I mean, just look at Philly’s murder rate.

It’s just about to be November and there have been 332 murders in Philadelphia this year.  Thanks to my trusty calendar, I can see that today is day 304 of the year.  I would be outta line if I said it was one a day plus iron, but I would be accurate.  The majority of the perpetrators and victims are Black males around my age or younger.  You can’t convince me that a murder rate that high isn’t evidence of a lack of hope.  It really makes me think of what Bishop said in Juice:

…Look, I ain’t shit. And you less of a man than me, so as soon as I figure you ain’t gon be shit, *pow*! So be it. You remember that, motherfucker. ‘Cause I’m the one you need to be looking out for… *partner*!

Without actually being in their heads, it certainly seems that there are a lot of young dudes who espouse the same sentiments.   Because they feel that their lives are worthless, they treat everyone else the same.   It wasn’t always that way.

Now me, I’m not one to blame the ills of a society on that society’s cultural output, but I would hafta be blind and ignorant to act as if the cultural output doesn’t have some type of normative effect on the people’s behavior.  If anything, it’s a cyclical response.  It’s output because it’s what’s already in there, but because the output is consumed, it sets a norm of expected behavior.  All that to say that I don’t blame this on any genre of music, but I think that what we see these days in mainstream hip-hop is reflective of that same feeling of hopelessness and desperation.  The fact that much of the music does not offer any hope only serves to exacerbate the problem.

It’s weird, though.  Between my friend and me, we kind of agreed that our forefathers would have the supreme ambivalency about us.  On the one hand, they would be absolutely elated to see the type of freedom that we have.  We can talk about how bad we have it, but if seen through the lens of our foreparents, the amount of latitude we have in this society is staggering.  At the same time, if they knew what we were doing with that freedom, I’m sure that one or two of our great-great grandfathers would have pulled out.