Suffering Does Not Necessarily Ennoble You.

We Have Chaos Reigning In The Middle East. There Is A Great Deal Of Instability. In The Past, People Would Have Turned To Their Church, And Some Still Do. Counterintuitively, People Are Now Turning Into Themselves To Find Their Roots. The Way You Do That Is Through Your Family Tree. "where Did I Come From?" There Is An Urge To Preserve The Names Of The People Who Produced You.

The Historical Basis For The Gap Between The Black Middle Class And Underclass Shows That Ending Discrimination, By Itself, Would Not Eradicate Black Poverty And Dysfunction. We Also Need Intervention To Promulgate A Middle-class Ethic Of Success Among The Poor, While Expanding Opportunities For Economic Betterment.

Patriotism Is Best Exemplified Through Auto-critique.

My Father, If Anything, First And Last, Was A Man Of Words. He Loved Stories; He Didn't Live For Stories, Exactly, But I Think He Lived Through Stories. I Think, Like Many Writers, He Loved Stories About Things He Had Experienced As Much As, If Not More Than, He Loved The Experiences Themselves.

I Think That Is What We Do By Preserving And Telling Our Stories. If You Don't Tell Your Stories, Other People Will Tell Their Story About You. It's Important That We Nurture And Protect These Memories. Things Change. Existence Means Change. So, The Kind Of Precious Memories About Being Black For My Generation Won't Exist For My Kids' And Grandkids' Generations Unless We Preserve Them Through Fiction, Through Film, Through Comic Books, And Every Other Form Of Media We Can Possibly Utilize To Perpetuate The Story Of The Great African-american People.