“Life Changes”

“Life Changes”

(That Stand the Test of Time)

By Glenn Peppers                           June 26, 2017 4:50am           

A friend of mine's dad was sitting on the front porch one hot summer night, back in the day, laughing at us kids goofing around kung fu kicking each other, and just being kids. He told us that "One day, you all might not be around each other, or see each other as much when you guys grow older!" 

We asked him why! And he said "Its because people change! Life changes, and life's circumstances begin to move people in different directions!"

My Friend's dad said, "When you're just getting outta high school, you may see most of your friends a lot, living in the same town. Bopping around here and there in the neighborhood, at the corner store, or at the movies, and at parties, etc! 

Then when you're 25 years old or so. Some of you may get married, some will go off to the military!" Others will get run over by a car, or get a job working in the factory, while some of your other friends will play professional football, or go to school to be a doctor! 

Then when you're 45 years old or so, you'll find that a lot of your friends will have moved out of town. Certainly out of the old neighborhood! A lot of people you grew up with, and came along with, you'll lose track of completely! 

Facebook has been a big reconnection link for many of us Baby Boomers! Putting a great lot of older people back in touch with folks we might not have ever seen again in this lifetime! 

I found that as I got older, like a lot of you. I've experienced some of the friends and people that I went to school with have passed on, become crippled and disabled; while others in time have revealed themselves to be Gay, or have switched over to being Muslims, or shown themselves to be Mentally ill! 

While there will always be that one friend who'll appear to be the same old person they were coming along in life when you were kids playing in the mud. 

No matter how many years its been since you've seen them! As life moves along with you and them in it, the surprises are worth it alone!

My friend's wise dad told us that "By the time we reached 55-60 plus years. We'll barely see any of the people we came along with in your younger years! Many of them will have passed on. Or moved out of state!" 

I've found that after almost a lifetime of close and or distant friendships. Some friendships survivor battles will reveal people who were and are alcoholics, cancer survivors and even people who have been suffering with depression! 

Sometimes we may be dealing with a drug habit that we've been fighting since our teen years!" And if this be the case, So What!... That's LIFE People! Things happen! No matter who They are. Good bad or indifferent; They'll still always be my friend! No Matter What!

As I've grown older. I've found a great lot of what my friend's dad said to us that hot summer evening to be true! 

Now in my older years, I have only a handful of friends that I grew up with, knowing them from grade school that I talk to. 

Then there are my life-long friends with whom I still associate with! We may not see each other everyday, but we still  know each other as people from a soul-core perspective! We know where each other's head is at!

As people grounded in wisdom, humor and life, no matter how far we get separated, we always seem to pick up where we left off from the last time we saw or talked to one another! 

God blessed me with friends who know me well enough, to understand my need and want to sometimes disappear, and go off to my quiet space, within myself from time to time!  

I found that by the time you reach 60 years old, you may be in touch with possibly only 3.1 of those people on a regular basis that you grew up with. 

To this day, I still know and love and keep in touch with friends whom I've played in bands with. People I've DJ'ed with, and hung out at parties with! People I've studied the martial arts with, and gone to concerts with! And people I've sat and cried with! 

I still have those friend's I've gone to amusement parks with, and witnessed getting married and having children! And all the while, throughout the years, never losing touch with each other for very long, as we all came along with an Unspoken Old School--Code of Honor! "Friends for Life!" 

Friends are just that! FRIENDS! You don't have to say it out loud! It just shows! It's something that just happens! 

Friends at the movies clowning

Friend's listen to music together! Friend's act a fool and clown in the movie theater on a Saturday afternoon! Friend's will tell you when your pants are flooding way up high, or talk about your old brown ass, out of style tennis shoes in a way that will crack you up!

Friend's chill at home, eating junk food, watching horror movies, or soul train, and sitcom comedies on TV while eating burnt popcorn. 

Then there are those times when friends'll just they sit quietly with you, designing and/or building and making things by hand, together! 

Some people make friends, and along the way discover that God has given the both of you an extended family in the process of living life! 

When you're young, and even many times when you're older. there'll be no need for you to go looking for good friends. 

Life and God will weed out the people around you who really don't care for you; leaving only those frank and honest enough to bust you upside your head with a water balloon. Laugh about it, and take off running! Now that's friendship!  

You'd be surprised at the people you knew growing up who still live in the same neighborhood you both grew up in! Actually that's a good thing!... Its grounding! 

Yet there are people who'll sometimes see you quite often when you go back and visit your old neighborhood, who'll rarely speak to you, for whatever reasons! 

You'll find as you get older, past your middle years, that old girlfriends (and boy friends) who once dumped you back in the day will look all worn out and un-pretty! 

You'll also find that you'll be totally grateful for that teenage Unrequited Crush you had on that girl you thought was so fine! 

You'll be glad that your clamoring heart, and dissed love had remained unrequited once you've seen how "he or she" turned out in their middle years......... With all them darn loud ass, ill mannered grand babies!

I feel that God gives us friends and confidants along the way in life, because as human beings, we need companionship! In our youth, we need peer interaction as children and teenagers, and even as young adults! In other words, As we grow, "We need a CREW!" 

Coming along, all of us needed social interaction as young adults to learn how to get along with all kinds of people! How to work with people, etc! 

But as life moves its mortal timeline along with us, we begin to change! Some of us marry, some of us become hermits. And some of us spend our lives swinging from one relationship to the next. Remember, Life is Our's to Choose! 

As we get older, our immediate friends list tends to become smaller and smaller! It's nothing personal! It's mostly drudged out of availability, time factors! We're not kids anymore! There's work to be done, meetings to attend! You have family; and again, life's many personal changes will come into play! 

As an adult sharing a life, with a spouse or partner. You've began to mold that life for yourself, along with your significant other and your children! 

One thing I have to say, and it is this!..... Remember, if you live long enough. You will be older in life a lot longer than you will be a young person, physically and mentally in this life! 

I've found that one of the keys to living a happier life in our golden years is to learn how to enjoy one's self, every minute of the day! A big ingredient to this formula is laughter! Laughter is Key!

Laughter is Medicine! 

Never be ashamed to be silly; or to be a big kid at heart! Getting older means you have to learn how to work harder at playing harder! You have to work harder at feeling good! And I know I have to work hard as heck to look sharp and stay halfway youthful in appearance, in my AARP years! 

Hey, if something makes you look and feel younger, and makes you feel good, and doesn't hurt anybody including yourself. I say, DO IT! 

Still the fact of our not needing a whole slew of people surrounding us as friends as we get on in years proves one thing. And that is, as surly as you've entered this world alone as an infant. When we leave this world in our twilight years, we will surly exit it the same way in which we all arrived! 
                                            
So learn to enjoy the best friend you'll ever have in this whole wide world today! And that best friend is YOU!

Glenn Peppers

“Jealousy and envy of the enigmatic talents, intelligences and natural abilities (Physical and otherwise) of the Black Male!”

Idris Elba

“Jealousy and envy of the enigmatic talents, intelligences and natural abilities (Physical and otherwise) of the Black Male!”

(We are Real, and we are Here!)

By Glenn Peppers

Jealousy!..... This one thing has been the backbone and motive in just about every hate crime committed against blacks in this country, and the world over! Especially against black males! 

This deep-seeded jealousy and envy of looks, athletic, and intellectual abilities, along with sexual prowess has cost the lives of many a person of color! yeah I said it!

Black Male Sensuality

Number one on the list of mixed ingredients in this primordial jealousy soup for those who abuse and go after you is simple. First they look for, and try to find anything they can to belittle you. Then go after you!... Most times, its an accusation of Sexual Harassment! 

They'll set their ducks up in a row. Gather a boatload of so-called witnesses, and come out of the woodwork after you like a fire brigade to a flaming tower!... Can you say Bill Cosby? But that's a whole other story in and of itself!

Serena Williams

Take for example another situation of Jealousy and Envy of ones blackness! Case in point. Serena Williams! Because her opponents couldn't beat her on the tennis court, they started saying that she was a man, or that she was on steroids, and claiming that she was taking some sort of performance enhancing drugs. Simply because her skills, and her hard earned muscular body makeup and made her into the champion that she is! She earned her championships, honing her skills since childhood, and over a lifetime!

Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder

Then there are the ones who offer dumb uninformed, and black hearted remarks like the ones made by, former sports announcer, and odds maker on game betting during football season, Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder! His racist remarks were and are totally inaccurate, and flat out racist! Here is just one of his ignorant comments!......

"The black is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way, because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs and he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade...the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid."

Note the words from this former sports announcer, Jimmy the Greek Snyder! This clown had no idea that we were and are, who we are well before we ever set foot in this country! Slave breeding has nothing to do with our genetic body makeup, and gene-pool genetics that stems back thousands of years to Africa! Nor does Snyder's slave-fantasy breeding madness explanation explain how we've generationally come along from the start, in Africa! 

It was Snyder's ignorant ideals floating around in his head, that made they're way out of his mouth that got him fired and kicked off television!

African Man watching as Slave Ships come to Shore

What this man didn't think about was the fact of, why those slave traders chose to take Africans as slaves in the first place. It surly wasn't because we were a weak people! Who travels over an ocean to gather up sick, small, and frail individuals to make slaves out of?... 

These evil men traveled over troubled seas, halfway around the world because we were a strong and wisdom filled people from day one, living in a land, and a climate, and a culture that demanded all our strength, in order to survive and live in mother African! In fact, they were so impressed at our physical makeup that they felt compelled to forcefully take us at gunpoint!

Our biggest mistake and weakness at the time was that we were just not an inherently violent people!

Still, I can hear that tinge of jealously in Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder's comments! He hated the fact that some black men even gave the appearance of being physically stronger, and were often times more superior on the track, the court and the field, etc! Therefore, he had to create an explanation in his mind that would satisfy his insecurities.

Any dumb ass theory in order to belittle the black man's performance, and take away even the most remote idea that his God given, and hard earned ingenuity, and thinking skills had anything to do with his or her's earned ability to play (or strategize) a ballgame, or any sport!

Thus in his mind, there had to be a reason (outside of the truth) as to why! In Snyder's mind, a black man just simply could not be a thinking, intellectual individual. Someone capable of deductive reasoning and powerful physical abilities all at the seem time! As if in order to function, a black man had to be engineered by white men in order to be any sort of human physical specimen! 

If that were the case. Then why didn't (or couldn't) they Engineer their own kind into their so called, Perfect Race?

This deep-seeded jealousy over the black male's physical attraction to white women, and penis size, has caused an unspoken hatred of the black man to fester in america for almost two and half centuries!

The seeds of this kind of jealously is what made white men destroy an entire town of Greenwood, Oklahoma in 1921. 

Black Wall Street after whites destroyed the town, killing hundreds

Charred remains of a black man in Greenwood, Oklahoma after the attack

A town nicknamed, Black Wall Street because of its lucrative black community built by blacks just outside of WWI! Greenwood, Oklahoma. An entire town, wiped off the face of the earth, and simply because within Greenwood, black people literally owned their own community, and all manner of businesses within it, such as an airport, a hospital, supermarkets, and cleaners and city block after city block of well constructed homes and new cars, etc.

Jealous hearted white men created a lie that concerned a black boy assaulting a white woman. This is a commonly created excuse for white men to form a mob (a posse), and from there then start a riot, and set out to kill someone!  

So as a result of this lie. These angry white men formed a mob and set out to kill thousands of black men, women and children, all within a 24 hour period! Burning, bombing and destroying close to 10,000 homes and businesses. 

This included any and all structures that sat on any black property! in the process they killed (gunned down and burned) and injuring hundreds onto maybe even thousands of men, women and children in one day and a night.

This jealousy and Envy went even as far as bombing the Greenwood from the air with an aerial attack! And all out of mere Jealousy, Greenwood, Oklahoma became America's first domestic terrorist act, committed by white men, and executed on american soil! 

This was, and still is considered to be america's most flagrantly bold genocidal act of war and hate crime put against black people in american's unsung history! 

A history that has been swept under the carpet, and kept quiet! Until recently!

There are maybe only a handful of people still alive who can attest to this shameful act! It was as if these people were supposed to stay alive for this long in order to tell the story, firsthand of the inhuman carnage done to black folks back in 1921, because of this Green Eye'd monster called, JEALOUSY and Envy! Combine this evil with hatred and you have an explosive combination! One that ends in death!

Police Brutality byway of a choke hold!

This jealousy has shown itself in many ways since we've walked the gangplank off the slave ships, onto this place called america! This jealousy reveals itself through Extreme Police Brutality, and a host of many police killings of all kinds, down to simple school yard fights with kids whose parents have taught them how to hate children of color in their classrooms. Right down to the burning of a young man's body by a gang of jealous whites. All simply because he had good looks, and athletic skills!

When it comes to the many varied forms of discrimination and hate, white males show themselves to be the true purveyors of FEAR and the evil emotion of Jealousy! The truth and frankness of this matter has always been, Hush-Hush and Unspoken in america! 

In fact Jealousy of the African male descendent in this country is a topic that is long unspoken and unchallenged. Yet the results and consequences of this passionate jealousy has cost people of color much over the last two centuries! That being the lives taken of thousands of black men, women and children, as a result. This makes the reality of such an unsung thing, quite real indeed!

By Glenn Peppers

In the words of Jesse Williams....

“Just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real."

                                                                                             4-21-2017    1:45 am