Christain??? Whats that???

               What is it to be a Christan?  Isn't a Christian someone who goes to church? 

Its interesting how when i tell people that I'm Christian the first question they ask me is what church i belong to and what that church is like?  Threw much prayer and meditation Ive come to realize that being Christan and a "good" Christian isn't determined by the frequency of my church attendance! 
At its core isn't a christian someone who writes the teachings and values of Christ Jesus in their hearts and lives them in spirit and flesh?  It is also a core belief of a Christian that nobody is perfect and that our savior is the only human being that was perfect, and when we act outside of the will of god we may call upon Christ and ask for forgiveness in his name!
it is not how much money we tithe that makes us the best christian it is more like what we give to God.  It is my belief that when said at the right time to the right person giving God praises can be more effective way to do Gods work than tithing a thousand dollars at the first random church u stumble into.  Don't get me wrong tithing is an important part of being christian!  Its a sacrifice of what is important to us and showing God that we are appreciate him being gracious enough to bless us with what we've attained!  Back in the told testimate people where to sacrifice their livestock because livestock was  what was important and a symbol of wealth!  But trust that God isn't a greedy God that wants you to empty your bank account to show that you are a good christian and there is no amount of money that will buy Gods favor!
Simularly Going to church is an important part of Being a christian because it is a place for people to join in worship thanksgiving and praising of God and our savior Jesus Chirst! but what is more important is that we all continue to strive for Christ like perfection!
My point is that Being a Christian does not start and end on Sunday!  As Rev. Hart said in one of his sermans there are people even high in the church that will step over someone homeless and in need monday threw Saturday and yet come to church on sunday with a fat check (paraphrased).  This hypocracy is partly why people outside of the church have the ability to critisize and discredit the beliefs and values we as christians (at least the "good" ones)  hold so close to our hearts

-Tony-

The Face of Death...or Life

Last week, pro-life activist Ralph Lang was arrested and charged in both federal and a Wisconsin state court for plotting to kill doctors and other medical staff at a Planned Parenthood who perform abortions in Madison, Wisconsin.  Lang was caught after the gun he was planning to use in the murder plot accidentally went off in the Motel 6 (where else, right?) in which he was residing. 

Lang told investigators that he was planning to travel to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after he killed everyone he wanted to kill in the Madison Planned Parenthood to wreak havoc on similar clinics.

Certainly, pro-life groups are tripping over themselves to distance their groups from Lang, just as quickly as pro-choice groups are tripping over themselves to tie Lang to the pro-life movement.  The reasons for both are obvious and understandable.

If Lang is the face of the pro-life movement, its a wrap--mainstream America becomes unsympathetic to the pro-life movement, pro-choice causes and organizations are able to use Lang as an example of how important and also dangerous their work is in fundraising appeals.  So we all get why nobody wants Lang on their team.

 During his interviews with investigators, Lang indicated that he was in Madison a week before he was arrested to kill medical staff at Planned Parenthood, but couldn't do it because he was not "100 percent in sync" with God.

Yes.  That's right church folk.  Lang said that he couldn't kill the medical staff at that time because he was not 100 percent in sync with God.  This means a couple of things.  First, it means that at some point, Lang was out of sync with God but "got back into sync" with God because he was in Madison to kill again.  It also means that, for Lang, being in sync with God allows him to kill dozens of humans with God's blessings.

If one believes that God is pro-life (God is, but not in the politically charged sense of the term), then how does one justify plotting to kill humans?  What does that person say to himself?  What Bible scriptures does he meditate over, what prayers does he say to justify this kind of contradiction?  I simply can't imagine.

Lang will make his way through the legal state and federal criminal justice systems and he will no doubt invoke God as a part of his defense, or an explanation of why he did this or should not be held accountable for his plot to kill medical staff.

Now, I'm no spokesperson for God, but I have to believe that God, like both the pro-life and pro-choice movements, is not all that excited to claim that Lang and God are on the same team.

...And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddlin' kids.

Just a few days ago, Bishop Eddie Long, the senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Church in Atlanta, reached an out of court settlement with the four young men who accused him of sexual misconduct last year.

And everyone has been quiet about the details of the settlement.  The accusers and their attorney are not talking.  The current and past members of the church aren't talking, and naturally, the Bishop isn't talking either.

While we don't know the details of the of the settlement, we can be sure that the Bishop, in exchange for the accusers' silence, offered them a sizable chunk of money.  We can also assume that the accusers accepted the money.

Now, when the scandal first made headlines last year, Long vehemently denied the allegations of sexual misconduct and said that he would vigorously defend his integrity and reputation both in and out of court.  He went on the offensive, and characterized his detractors as haters and those bend on doing the devil's work to destroy his tthriving ministry.

For their part, the accusers' and their attorney said that they would be able to establish a pattern of sexual misconduct by the Bishop that spanned several years.  Neither acutually side actually did what they said they wanted to do.

And now its come to this--an out of court settlement in a bitter case that leaves all of the parties, including the pew of Long's church, silent.  Now, I understand that there are times when it is more efficient to settle litigation before a costly trial and I also understand that nondisclosure agreements are rather common in civil litigation and settlements.

However, this is a pretty sad ending for a charismatic minister who had the proverbial wind at his back, and the people who loved him.  It is perhaps an even more sad ending of an opportunity for a community struggling with how and whether to embrace homosexuality, to talk about the issue within the context of faith and spirituality.

Moths In the Light

          As human beings created by God for his enjoyment and put here on earth to roam and seek out the desires of our heart we as smart creaters have a thirst for knowledge we always like to find out things.  Our lives are full of retrieving and interpreting infomation.
         We must realize that God our creator is also the creator of the earth and everything else that exists in our relm of reality!  God is the one who creates and determines what is true in our realities!  One thing that God created was his son Jesus Christ.  Jesus taught the world the truth about God his father and people started to call him teacher.  More than people came to Jesus for his miracles and his healing powers people came to jesus for knowledge!  In john 14 Jesus says that God is in him and he is of God and later refers to himself as the truth and the life.  Jesus also goes on to say that everything asked in his name he will give in order to glorify the father!  This means we can find truth and knowledge we seek thru prayer and even more so thru meditation 
        I have found it interesting how we consider knowledge and truth to be light...  When someone learns something they become enLIGHTend when someone has good idea a light bulb goes on!  when someone knows nothing they are in the dark.  As we walk the earth we are in the dark about a lot of questions: what or who is God, who is jesus, what happends to us when we die, recently we've been wondering about the end of the world.  As we continue on this quest for enlightenment are we anything more than moths with an irresistable urge to move towards the light?  We must never give up this quest!  It is this quest that keeps us praying and meditating,  and it is only thru prayer and meditation that we gain enlightenment and become closer to Jesus and thus closer to God!  My fellow moths the light awaits us lets race!!!!!!

- Tony -

Mid Week Meditation: Trying to Make a Dollar Out of 15 Cents...

If you get all of your understanding about salient issues from Fox News, you know that the American economy, the housing and financial markets, and the global economy for that matter, have been in something of a recession.  However, you may not know that the American economy is making a steady recovery. 

If you get all of your understanding of salient issues from Fox News, you may also be reading this by mistake.  In which case, I apologize.  I will, however, make you feel welcome here as everyone is welcome here.  I promise to try to call people raging communists and socialists and if I mention the president's wife, I will use the term your news station uses to describe her:  Obama's Baby Mama.  I want everyone to feel welcome here.

Now, while we may not all agree on whether our economy is recovering from a recession, we all agree that we had one.  And most of us agree on the cause of the recession.

In the middle of the last decade, several banks, mortgage and loan companies, offered loans to first-time home buyers at a special, introductory interest rate, or sub-prime rate, so called because it was below regular interest rates.

After a period of time, the interest rates on these special loans were to move to the regular interest rates, naturally, meaning higher or "balloon" payments to be made by the people who got the loans. 

The people responsible for giving these introductory loans knew that many of the people they were loaning money to would be unable to pay the higher interest rates, but granted the loans anyway.  So, you know the rest of the story.  Mass foreclosures.  Bad loans the federal government had to absorb.  Recession.

So as a result of an ethical and moral lapse on the part of many lenders, who gave loans to people who they knew could not afford to pay the interest rates, we are dealing with the effects of a recession.

I have checked and most business schools either do not require business students to take any ethics courses at all or take one course in business ethics in order to graduate.  Now, I know it would be quite the socialist of me (see, I did it) to call on the federal government to require business schools to do more moral and ethical training of their students before they send them out into the world, so I won't call for that.

But, perhaps this is something the "church" is suited to consider.  Raising responsible business leaders in the pews and in the world.

Caught up in the Rapture...of Love

So May 21st has come and gone.  Naturally, there was no doomsday.  We are still here living and functioning on earth.

The Sight has been silent about the claims that the world would end yesterday with wrath and such.  We believe that the study of eschatology is a sublime discipline and should be treated with care, and so we did not weigh in on the claims because we could not find something constructive to say about the leaders of this movement or the formula they used to calculate and determine that yesterday would be the end.  So silence was a better alternative to anything we could have done.

And as the world awoke this morning to find that the world was still here, there were many "I told you so's" and even more mocking of the subscribers of this movement.  The Sight will not engage in that either.  There are many followers of the movement who are indeed searching for answers, are disillusioned and are feeling perhaps foolish for leaving jobs, selling homes and otherwise dispensing fortunes to follow the May 21st movement.

What we will do is offer our meditations and prayers for those individuals.  They need both in this moment more than snarky articles from a media that irresponsibly gave this movement more attention than it should have received. 

If we can find something positive from this experience at all, it is this:  It is impossible to predict with any credible certainty when God and Spirit intend to make a call for this earth.  What we can know, what is spelled out very clearly in the scriptures, is how God and Spirit want us to behave while we are here on earth.

God and Spirit do not want us to spend time concocting formulas to determine the end.  Rather, God and Spirit want us to...well, love.  To get caught up in the, you know, rapture of love.  To love God, Spirit and our neighbors--love them enough to work to end marginalization and oppression and hunger.  Love them enough that we would give up our possessions and follow that movement--the love movement.

The millions the May 21st movement spent for media ad buys and traveling across the country over the past several years to warn us to prepare for something that did not happen and that the scriptures say we should be perpetually ready for, could have made the would a better place. 

Perhaps it did.

Steven Hawking's Beef with God and Dropping Science

Hip Hop artist Nas has often referred to himself directly and indirectly as "god."  That's not shocking.  He is likely a Five Percenter.  However, if the God Christians worshipped was actually called or named Nas, then Steven Hawking would no doubt be Jay-Z.

Dr. Hawking has had a hip hop-styled, drive-by-shootingesque beef with God for decades.  If you remember, last year in his book "The Grand Design," Hawking argues that God did not create the universe, but rather, the universe created itself from essentially nothing.

Last week, Hawking turned up the heat in his beef with God by claiming that the concept of heaven amounted to nothing more than a fairy tale constructed for people who also are afraid of the dark.

That's real beef.  I'm not going to speculate about why Hawking has a beef with God, but he is right.  Heaven, on a linear and logical plane, is a fairy tale.  Nobody has ever been able to develop a hypothesis that heaven exists and prove that either God or heaven exists in the manner that Christians understand those things. 

Nobody can or has ever been able to produce a shred of physical evidence to corroborate the existence of God or heaven.  Christians can curse Hawking, quietly wish he would suffer some untimely harm, or point to the occurrence of "miracles" on earth from now on, but that still doesn't touch the validity of Hawking's argument.  Believing in God and heaven is really quite silly in a linear, logical world.  Really.

But, isn't that the point?  Isn't that what God and Spirit ask us to do?--to believe in things that are not logical?  Having hope in things that we can neither prove nor see is what we do.  It is the definition of faith.

It's watching a horror flick and knowing that the black couple (you know that "black couple") will be killed while the opening credits role, but watching and praying for the best for them anyway.

It's watching the Chicago Cubs loose every year for the last two or three hundred years and saying, with confidence at the beginning of every baseball season that they will win the World Series.

It's praying for reality TV to disappear, or Paris Hilton to stop having sex and making tapes of it that nobody really wants to see, or K-Fed to become relevant, or watching Lindsey Lohan and saying that she'll turn it all around this year. 

Its knowing that Jennifer Aniston is minutes away from a good performance in a movie that doesn't suck.  It's believing that Charlie Sheen will apologize to everyone for being a tool.  It's knowing that one day some hip hop artists will care more about building than money and rims, and their suburban audience with love and appreciate them for it.

It's knowing Sarah Palin will stop saying silly things about rappers, black politicians and people who don't love guns or her version of her America as much as she does.

It doesn't make sense, believing and having faith in fairy tales and that the impossible can happen doesn't make any sense, but Mr. Hawking, it's what we do...

Perhaps, like Nas and Jay-Z, one day God and Hawking will squash their beef and get along...see, I'm doing it again.

Mid Week Meditation: Everything is Everything or How the Ironic Died...

I am a fan of Lauren Hill.  Her sultry, thick, pain-laden voice, thoughtful lyrics and poetic rhyme scheme, make her a goddess (church folk, you'll have to pardon the expression) among men. 

I am glad she is back from her self-imposed self-exile to perform and create or perhaps vice versa.  I have listened to her new work and enjoy it very much.  It is however, her earlier work that stays with me. 

I am particularly with her "Everything is Everything"-- her manifesto for her life and work.  I dig it.  "I begat this, flippin' in the ghetto on a dirty mattress..." she explains.  I dig it.

I dig it not only because it is Lauren Hill's work, but because it is an allusion to a metaphysical principle that means something to me as well.

"Everything is Everything" is a melding of the philosophical theory and a theory of physics with similar names-- The Theory of Everything.  In both disciplines, the essence of the theories simply try to assign a meaning to being and nature and existence. 

You know, so the theory makes us ask, why is there anything at all or what makes reality reality?

On a very real and practical level, I ask myself every morning those questions in a manner that calls on me to reflect on my purpose in this reality.  I also ask myself weekly what I've have learned in the previous week that helps me understand this end.  I never have sufficient answers daily or weekly and so I keep reflecting.

At the risk of speaking ill of the place this blog get most of its traffic, Facebook has become a reminder of the need for us to continue humble reflection.

For the brief time I was on Facebook, I noticed that folks were publishing minute by minute updates on their lives:  "I just met the most awesome guy," or "awesome workout" or "This experience is going to change my life..."

First, I know these people and their lives are never that interesting in person when I hear from them.  What's more, there is a Facebook and social media reality that exists and it has its own laws and philosophies, the most interesting of which is, that nothing actually exists in the world unless one bears witness to it on a social media.  And what's still more,  is that when we update the way we do on social media minute by minute, we loose the ability to reflect pensively about what "is" and our place in that.

I realize that the fact that I am using social media to reflect on the lack of reflection social media allows, is breathtaking in its audacity, portentousness and, well, ironic.  I have perhaps been an offender of this Facebook updating and that is why I humbly withdrew from it and look for ways to stay humble and reflect and then act.  But, I suppose as long as I don't post this on Facebook or send a Tweet about it, it will never have actually happened.

The Presbyterian Church is So Gay!

This week, the Presbyterian Church as a communion voted to allow gays and lesbians not only to be ordained, but to serve as clergy.  The communion, however failed to approve a measure that would allow clergy to perform same-sex marriages.  Clergy can, according to the communion, can bless a same-sex union or partnership as long as it does not resemble a marriage.

While the move still denies gays and lesbians the ability to marry and have their partnerships recognized by the church, it is a historic and significant.  The Presbyterian Church is one of the largest communions to allow openly gay and lesbian clergy to be ordained and serve in the church.

Many people are pleased by this move; others are gravely disappointed by the Presbyterian Church and believe that gays and lesbians are not fit to serve as clergy simply because they are, you know, gay or lesbian.

Now, as clergy, the greatest and most weighty task we have is articulated by Christ himself in the Great Commission or Matthew 28:16-20--we are to baptize pursuant to the Trinity and make disciples of all nations.

Because pastors are in the care of souls they have added duties to bury their dead, visit their sick, and generally be in the spiritual and administrative management of both the ecclesio as well as the ecclesia (the body of the church as well as message and work of the church).

Its no secret that since the church's beginning in the first century Roman Empire, gay clergy have served the church and God capably, keeping their sexual orientation secret or private.

From where I sit, there is nothing about being openly gay or lesbian that would prevent an individual who has been called to be separated as clergy, from carrying out the duties inculcated in the Great Commission. 

Perhaps I am missing something.  Am I?

Gaining the World, Loosing Our Soul: The Black Middle Class

Ever since the era of George and Weezy, African Americans have had aspirations of "movin on up".  The thought of that "deluxe apartment" gave many blacks in America a glimpse of what the good life entails. It gave us a picture of just how green the grass on the other side truly grows and a belief that despite the oppressive Archy Bunker-esque attitudes of the greater society that we could persevere and make it out.  Perhaps most the important development was the understanding that we as a people are not predestined to live in the ghetto but in fact have control of our own destiny.

As a result we began to envision ourselves experiencing the better side of life. Many pursued education, using this as our ticket to success, with hopes of landing upwardly mobile careers and living the lifestyles of Heathcliff and Claire Huxtable.  This group was able to factor the simple equation that education equals dollars, and dollars subsequently lead to a piece of the American Dream.  I am a part of this population and have found this recipe to be reliable, for the most part.  I stumbled my way through high school, and developed my academic prowess while in college. I have achieved an advance degree, enjoy a professional career, a decent home and several material amenities. This is what has been marketed as "success". But what I've noticed about many of my counterparts in the same position is that we seemed to have neglected a fundamental principle. We seemed to think that graduating into another income bracket would automatically cause our mentality to change.  This, as I have come to see is a fatal error. 

Class is something that cannot be purchased, and perhaps the term "middle class" is somewhat misleading in this regard.  Because you drive an E-Class Benz does not mean that you have developed a sense of tact or couth.  We exist in a dilemma where we have left the 'hood for greener pastures been have taken our 'hood ideologies and behavior along with us.  This is particularly true with regard to our parenting. We are blessed with the ability to give our kids the things we never had, but are NOT instilling the values that would cause them to appreciate the blessing.  We reward mediocrity, forfeit discipline, and reinforce negative norms and yet expect our children to turn out well. It's too the point where being from a middle income household doesn't even give one the head start that it once virtually guaranteed.  Our mentality has superseded our income and in turn diminished our quality of life. So this is it? This is what the Eastside is all about. More money...but more of the same.  I guess we truly are "on our Jefferson's ya'll but we forgot the theme".

If African Americans are truly going to share in the prosperity of this nation, it is going to require a true shedding of destructive allegiances and reshaping of our value system. We must remove ourselves from the delusion that being "higher class" some how makes us "classier".  We have to remember to carry on the traditions that made our communities strong even in the midst of poverty.  We must readjust our moral compass and remember that above and beyond all, we must live lives pleasing to God and manage our families in the same way. We may have a black president and in many ways be in a better position than at any time in recent history. But one thing we cannot neglect is remembering to uphold a standard. The moment we lower the bar, we erase all of the potential benefits of our accomplishments.


-Judah

Mid-Week Meditation

On my long run the other evening, I was listening to Babyface's "Change the World" as sung by Eric Clapton.  The song resonated with me at the moment. 

I want to change the world.  I get up every morning believing that I can.  I practice law because I believe that I can.  I am in seminary because I believe that I can change the world.  My actions are motivated by my underlying desire to change the world--to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, heal the sick and practice humility in the Stoic sense of the word. 

And, yes, I understand that to have a desire to change the world means that I believe that something is fundamentally wrong with it.  In short, there are not enough people to "love on" other people without motives or conditions.

While Clapton's desire to change the world revolved around his love for a single person, love like that--the kind he sings about, is the kind of love I mean.  Visceral.  Unconditional.  Universal.

And there's no doubt that other people want to change the world like this.  There are any number of organizations and individuals who have devoted countless hours to changing the world.  Even  B.I.G. is noted to to have said that "You can't change the world unless you change yourself."

I love B.I.G., but I hope that he's wrong about that.  I hope that we don't have to change who we are fundamentally in order to change the world.  The scriptures are  full of examples of flawed humans like David, Noah and Solomon who changed the world while still being flawed.  And there are perhaps more examples in the scriptures, in our world, of humans who appealed to an internal system of virtues, were righteous and changed the world without changing themselves.

And I don't mean change physically.  We all loose weight, or undergo a physical metamorphosis.  I mean internally, metaphysically.

The world needs us just as we are--always transforming, always internally the same.

Steven Seagal...The Pastor?

It looks like Osama bin Laden's death is having unintended consequences for all of us.  The pastor of a Bible fellowship church has recently had to admit that he made up a story about his military service record. 

Specifically, the pastor had to admit to his congregation, to his family, to the national public, that while he served in the Navy, he never actually served in the Vietnam war or as a Navy SEAL as he had claimed for the better part of two decades.

The pastor apparently melded together stories from Steven Seagal's 1990s action train wreck, "Under Siege" and Demi Moore's "G.I. Jane" to create his own tale of his own Navy service complete with tales of water boarding and kitchen duty for his bad boy attitude.

Pastors are human and live in a messy and fallen world.  We do too little to allow pastors the space to be human.  Because they are in the care of our souls, we expect them to be perfect and when they are not, we make them pay for it by allowing them to fall very hard.

While pastors have special duties outlined in Paul's epistles, they are not unlike other Christians--they are working out their own salvation and space in this world.

I certainly understand how this pastor's story could very well have begun as a harmless omission and ended in an admission to millions of people.  I have seen over-worked and under-paid pastors plagiarize sermons, or neglect the sick and shut in under their care because they only have enough hours in the week to attend to the fiscal matters of their church.  I understand all of that and have compassion on pastors.

But, what I struggle with in this instance and in other instances is that pastors and clergy must sync the messages they send in the pulpit with the messages they send outside of it so that they do not become walking contradictions. 

If we preach against homosexuality in the pulpit, but engage in homosexual conduct, we loose moral authority to lead.  If we smoke, or drink, or even lie and say that we do not and encourage others not to, but we find ourselves drinking and lying and smoking habitually, we loose the capacity to lead in a spiritual context.

I embrace rather than hide the skeletons in my closet.  I occasionally curse, even when I am preaching, I have hustled and relate to hustlers, I love everyone including gays, lesbians, drug addicts, the marginalized and, as Reverend Judah has eloquently said in another article, I am not morally opposed to drinking.

For some that makes me unfit to lead in the spiritual setting.  However, what's worse, someone who walks the same way that he speaks or Reverend Steven Seagal who tells others not to lie but does so himself?  

Where's the Patriotism in...

Naturally, we are all awaking to the news that Osama Bin Laden has been killed.  To be sure, to be very sure, our president received an intelligence briefing regarding the whereabouts of Bin Laden.  Our president then made an active decision to order U.S. troops and special forces to execute an operation to find and kill this man.

First, as we process the news, those who have served as our president's detractors will find a way to not give the president credit for making such a decision.  I have already seen them giving credit to the previous president, the military rank and file, the forces of other countries for the operation.  I have also seen them continuing to call our current president incompetent and a host of other recycled names they have called him at other times of his presidency.  It's almost as painful and laughable as watching Mary J. Blige thank both God and Jesus for her Grammy award a few years ago.

I have also seen images of Americans, "Americans" in the streets cheering and celebrating the death of Bin Laden.  Yes, ccelebrating. 

I cannot find the patriotism in celebrating this operation.  While I will not comment on whether the president made an appropriate and morally defensible position or not, I have trouble understanding how we can be celebrating at this moment.  There will continue to be terror within the boarders of this country and abroad. 

What is more, this war against terror, and the actions that led up to it, have produced hundreds of thousands of casualties.  American soldiers.  American civilians.  World civilians.  Christians.  Muslims.  Jewish.

Our prayers and thoughts should be with our president and the families who have lost someone in these actions.  We should be humble, solemn and sublime and even deliberate in our actions and not look to, you know, spike the ball or whatever metaphor works better here. 

But, I am convinced that we will look back on the cheering and celebrating crowds one day, and as a Christian nation, as a spiritual nation, be ashamed of this.

"If I Don't Like, I Don't Like, That Don't Mean That I'm Hatin…”

So, whatever happened to constructive criticism? It seems that in the world we live in, particularly the African American community, accountability for our words and actions has been vanquished with the usage of one all-encompassing phrase, “Don’t hate”. 

In modern society, nobody wants to be called a “hater”.  Of all the kinds of persons one could be, a hater clearly has to be the worst. Imagine that! A myriad of insults have been hurled since the beginning of time, but the thing that people fear being called most is a “hater”.  There’s something laughable about that to me.

So where did this term come from and how did it enter into the collective psyche of modern pop culture? Well, if I’m not mistaken, the phrase “playa hater” was first introduced by Bay-area rapper E-40 in the mid-90s. E-40 said it was a term already used heavily in Northern California to identify anyone with an extreme unwarranted dislike for a prosperous person, or “playa”.  This “hatin” is usually fueled by some form of envy or jealousy.  Over the years, this term was exported from Cali and appeared in rap lyrics and the everyday language of people across the country. Eventually the first half of the term was dropped leaving us with the modern version—“hater”.

The problem I see with this phrase is it’s given people a convenient excuse to provide whenever someone challenges opinions, performance, words, etc.  In fact, it has completely rid us as a society of the responsibility to adequately defend our positions or perform any self-reflection, because when all else fails, we can always just accuse someone of “hatin”.   

We’ve fallen in love with our perceived haters to the point we dedicate our every thought and actions to them. We wear shirts that pay homage to them (ex: I love my haters), create catch phrases about them (ex: don’t hate congratulate), and even make mention of them in our tweets and facebook statuses.  We are utterly flattered and overcome by the thought of someone making it their business to plot our demise.  Unfortunately, for most, this is not even the issue.  This is a fabricated reality brought about by the rejection of anyone who says anything contrary to what we perceive as right—even if the criticism is legitimate.  So that if a person tells us we have great potential in a certain area but need some tweaking or could improve in another department, we can easily make them and their commentary magically disappear by saying, “don’t hate!” It’s just that simple. Poof! Presto! Vamoose!  It’s like a credit card with a never ending limit! Accepted everywhere for everything!  It beats the old way of paying “cash” and earning things the old-fashioned way. 

Now whenever you’re posed with a challenge, just use the “hate card” and “charge it to the game”. 

The problem with this scenario is whether we know it or not, we are not escaping our responsibilities.  On the contrary, much like that credit card, we will pay for it later.  When we leave our communities and enter a world unamused by our excuses we will regret all the times we didn’t listen to constructive criticism. We will relive those moments we didn’t think-through or develop critical thinking skills, when life throws us challenges and proves to be less forgiving then others.  As opposite to the phrase as it may sound, many of the very people who we feel are pulling us down actually care enough about us to tell us the truth, even if it hurts.  So, before you give into the temptation to use the “hate card”, consider the words of legendary emcee Common, “If I don’t like it, I don’t like it. That don’t mean that I’m hatin”.

-Judah