Banana Hit

This is my lil cousin. He and his friends are film students. They created this amusing short. What makes it even more funny is that my cousin is one of the most peaceful people you would ever want to meet. The thought of him being involved in a sinister plot is pretty funny. I am very proud of this young man. He is working very hard to make his dreams a reality.



Interestingly enough, this skit fits into a category with YouTube eyewitness accounts (videos) of violence in classrooms. There are films/shorts of teachers beating students and students beating teachers. I have personally worked with young people who have attempted to intimidate me, and threatened to become violent. I'm about 6 ft tall, 210 lbs and I have been threatened by 8 year olds! I can laugh at most attempts to intimidate…BUT… How must it feel to be in a classroom with a group of violent teenagers?

I was having dinner with a friend last night who is subbing in an inner city school. He told me a story about how he bumped into a 13 year old accidentally in a hallway at the school. The 13 year old, in an act of bravado, stuck out is chest, looked at my friend and said "What! You wanna go?!" My friend was shocked, but gathered himself and said something to the effect of, "Son... I'm an adult." After a brief exchange, my friend did something that I thought was brilliant. He looked at the young man and said, "You are a child. You don't even know your purpose yet. You don't even know what you were born to do... to be." The young man's face, to quote my friend, "went from anger to bewilderment."

So many young people today are trying to emulate MTV's "studio gangsters" and aspiring to a culture that glorifies violence, misogyny, and all sorts of deviant behavior. My heart goes out to these young people, because they will have to realize at some point that “thugging” gets tired, and is not tolerated amongst civilized peoples without serious consequences, as evidenced by the legal troubles of the rapper T.I.

“Many rappers make a living from portraying the aggression and profanity they say reflects the reality of U.S. inner city life but this year record companies and civil rights leaders have waged a campaign to ban hip hop records that use curses from radio.

T.I., who was born Clifford Harris, faces up to 20 years in jail if convicted of charges that he tried to buy unregistered machine guns even though he was a convicted felon. He was remanded in custody on Friday for a further week.
His arrest last Saturday stunned many hip hop fans because it came just hours before he was due to star at a major hip hop awards ceremony in Atlanta.
"It (the arrest) is going to fit into the stereotype of the violent young black male and of course it will look like he did something incredibly stupid with no reasoning about it," said William Jelani Cobb, the author of a recent book of essays about contemporary black culture.

That impression is exacerbated in T.I.'s case because, after two No. 1 albums on the U.S. billboard charts and an appearance in a forthcoming movie with Denzel Washington, he appeared on the verge of joining hip hop's elite.
Cobb said that if found guilty T.I., who is 27, will have likely thrown away his career.

He will also be seen to have failed to separate himself from the negative influence of some of the people he grew up with and to have fallen into the trap of living out the reality on which he based his music, Cobb said.”

When will things begin to get better?