Latest / Wanzology / Looking Back To Go Forward
Transcript
- Looking Back To Go Forward Bomb-ba-dee-da, bomb-ba-dee-da-da-dahhhhh!! Hey! Ayeeee! Ayeeeee!! How ya doin’? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY, I am your host, The Wanz . In case you were wondering, the reason that I start off with a little melodic diddy is to confuse the speech interpreter that transcribes each episode into words, right? So when I give it, Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee dah-dah-dah-dah…you hear it one way, but the interpreter hears, I don't know what that is. I have no clue. Fine then. I hope today finds you well and all those that you care about are doing well as well. Today, I am caught in between a couple of things. At the time of this recording, we're in the middle of September in 2025 and this country is in a very interesting place. One week after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the nation as a whole is in a very precarious place. Sort of reminiscent of what the nation was like in the summer of 1968. Now, if you know your history, you know that 1968 was a very, very, very consequential year in this country's growth process. There were riots, there were assassinations. There was, there was just a lot of unrest, a lot of division, and we got through it. Now, how did we get through it? One day at a time. We got through 1968 by realizing that the sum of all the parts of the country were more important than its individual states or pieces. One group was not any less or any more important than another and until people as a whole, citizens, non-citizens alike in the United States of America, started realizing their commonality, things started to change. Now, they didn't change dramatically, but they started to change. Today, I want to encourage folks to look backwards. Look backwards in the history of your town, your city, your county, your state, and your country, because all the answers that this country needs have already been gone over. All the positive things that have gotten this country from the fifties to the seventies to the nineties and beyond are the things that we need to go back to now. We need to go back and refresh our memories. Refresh what it was like. I'll start off with this story. I grew up in the seventies. I was a seventies kid and I went to a multi-ethnic high school back in the day. It was very easy to divide people based on their appearance. Black people were black people. Asians were Asians and so on. The only difference was we didn't care, we didn't care. I had Filipino friends, I had Chinese friends, I had Japanese friends, and we would all make color jokes about each one of us, “Oh, Charlie, go get me so fried rice!" And we didn't think anything of it. I don't mean to talk like that in a derogatory way, but there were a lot of us who admired different cultures. It was always about the respect for the culture of someone else. And we showed it in a way that was comedic. We took it as comedic. Why? Because imitation has always been the sincerest form of flattery. And we didn't necessarily, I mean, me personally as a black kid, I didn't want to be Speedy Gonzalez, “But I don't mind talking ike Speedy Gonzalez! I don't mind saying, oh, I'm sorry, gringo, I'm going to go get me some burritos’n rice. Huh?” What you say? I used to imitate Monty Python’s flying circuses! “Sir, what you have there is a dead parrot!!” Everybody was fair game. Everybody was fair game in a way that cannot be duplicated in this day and age, because we're all too damn sensitive! As a small kid in elementary school, I got beat up a lot. People used to make fun of my last name and I had a quick temper, and I would get in fights and I'd almost always, no, no, almost about it, I always lost. But it wasn't until I got out of high school and into college before I discovered why I did that. I was misinterpreting what was happening, and there was really no one to explain it to me. My parents didn't understand it. My peers really didn't understand it. I was being made fun of because people liked me, which is so counterintuitive. But, if you look backwards, you remember in elementary school and middle or junior high school, when you're teasing someone, you teased them to see how they would react, but people you really didn't care about, you didn't bother. Ever. Ever notice that pulling on Sally's pigtails or teasing George about being fat or, Julie having weird shaped eyes or a goofy haircut. I used to get in fights all the time. That didn't change until like eighth grade, ninth grade, and by 10th grade in high school, I had learned the art of the ‘comeback’. People were ranking on me and downplaying me, and I remember being in a confrontation and somebody's making fun of me and then they started talking about my mama, and that was a sin back in the day, right? I, I don't know how I found it, but I turned and looked at the person who was ranking on me and I said, “Yeah? Well at least my mama's knuckles don't drag the ground when she walks!”, And all the attention turned from me and went on to the other guy. And when it went to the other guy, I left. And ever since then, I've kind of taken the position of being quick-witted, sarcastic, somewhat derogatory, but I'm derogatory in a way that is, um, what's the word? For me, it's a way of showing affection. I fool around with and joke with people that I like, people that I don't know very well and that I don't like, I don't talk to, I don't mess with, I won't carry on conversation with, not because I don't like them, but because I don't know them. I can't really say, there are people that I don't like. I may not like what they say or what they do. I don't not like them as a human because I'm a human too, and in my mind to not like or to be against another human instantly comes back and is reflected on myself as a human. And now all our situations seem to be circumstantial. What works for you won't work for me. What I believe you don't believe. So now the country is in this Charlie Kirk division game, and I call it a game because one side is summarily judging the other as a whole and saying that those people are the problem, they're ‘the evil’. They are not letting someone have free speech, as it were. He should be able to express his views. He was killed for it. Oh, you mean like Medgar Evers? I don't know John Kennedy. How about Bobby Kennedy? How about Martin Luther King? Martin's a great example. Martin Luther King used to be, to this government, one of the most dangerous people in the country, so it was no surprise that he got shot for spouting his views about equal rights. It was no surprise. Did that come from the liberal party? Was he shot by one of his own? Nope. Now we're in a position where someone who is espousing their views and people are starting to grasp his concepts and a lot of them are really taken by it and attracted to it, and they like the way that he speaks and the things that he speaks about, and one of his own shoots him and kills him. Now all of a sudden, everything that happened in the past has no relevance in the present. And that's wrong. That's wrong. There is a passage that says, “I shall not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.”, because if you don't learn from your past, you're doomed to repeat the mistakes that you've already made. Everybody knows that. Everybody's been told that, at least in this country, as far as I know. If you don't learn from your mistakes, you're gonna repeat 'em. Even my dad told me that, “Son, you know, those lessons not learned in life will be repeated!” That has been my experience. If I hadn't learned how to save money after many, many, many, many failed attempts to save money, I would've never learned how to save money. But I always bring it back to something simple, we don't learn how to walk, we just learn how not to fall down as much anymore. And now I see this country, my country, your country is in a position to learn from what has already happened. And if you can't learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. It's that simple. Unwittingly. You will, because now it looks completely different. There are people who like the Nazis, but there's really no Nazis. There are people who really, really don't like white people, but they're not segregationists against white people. There are people who don't like conservatives, they don't like liberals, they don't like almost anything. They just want to be themselves, which is great, go the hell over there and be yourself. No one's gonna bother you unless, unless you start saying, ‘you should be the way that I am.’ When people start saying, you’re living your life wrong, you're making bad decisions, they are quote unquote wrong, the best answer is, “Wrong for who?” Because the other person's not gonna really be able to have an answer unless they put you in their bucket. Unless they say, well, if you were A, B, or C, you wouldn't make that decision, and I would counter with, “How do you know that? How much of my life have you lived?” This country is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave? Are you brave enough to be free, and are you free enough to be brave? Are you free enough that you're not threatened by somebody else's expression of freedom. “Oh, if you burn the flag, you should be drawn and quartered!! You need to go to jail. You need to go prison!!” Look up, ‘How do you get rid of an American flag?’ You burn it! It's nationally known. You have freedom of speech, but not if someone else doesn't like it. I'm sorry, once the words leave your mouth, you really can't be responsible for how they're interpreted. How often do you ask for clarity on what you've heard? It's a very hard lesson to learn. Simple, just not always that easy. “What did you mean by that?”, “Did you just say and then you repeat what you heard?”, and then you ask again, “What did you mean by that? What does that mean? I don't understand. Help me understand.”, man, those three words…I was knocked out when I finally noticed that a friend of mine said them to me all the time. “Help me understand…”, and then would say what I had said or an opinion that I had. “Help me understand.” I think the majority of the people of this country, the U.S. of A we're brought up learning how to help other people. I think that because of interpretations of situations, some have learned that helping other people is conditional, which I can understand. But if you don't admit that it is, or if you admit that it is why it is, how is someone else going to interpret it? You don't wanna be agreed with? Well, yeah, you do, you'd like to win every argument, but it's not about that! The difference to me, my personal opinion, is the difference between an argument and a debate is that in a debate, no one is ‘trying to win’. You exchange ideas in a debate, you WIN arguments! I would really love it if you're hearing this particular episode and played it for someone who you don't agree with and talk about why or why not they may agree or disagree with what I'm saying. It's not wrong to disagree, what's wrong (for some) is to not obey, to not do as you're told. My ancestors were slaves, so I can totally see why I'd be a bit rebellious about doing what I'm ‘told’ as opposed to being asked to help. Don't tell me how to think. Don't tell me what to do, don't tell me I'm right or wrong. Disagree with me, but don't tell me something ask me questions. Maybe you don't know enough about my perspective or care enough to learn about it. I really try hard to take that, ‘help me understand’ approach with people. We have to start learning or we're going to lose. ‘We’, the collective we, all the populace, whether they're citizens or not in this country, the United States of America, need to learn. We need to learn the most important thing, there is only one species of human being on this planet. God didn't create any favorites. He just created us. We made all that other stuff up. ‘We’, the collective, we were given a choice to follow or not to follow. We weren't told to follow, we were just given the choice. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the problem and the solution is always choice. So what are you gonna do? Are you going to unite by finding out more about things that you don't like? Or are you just gonna increase the divide and believe what you've been told is true without discerning whether it's an opinion or fact? Are you going to totally discount factual objective information as being biased because you don't understand how it was determined or because a certain person or people said it? Where I come from, that's called “contempt prior to investigation”, and it inhibits learning. The more you know, the more you can do. There are obviously things in this life that you don't like. You know why you don't like them. Own that. Some people don't like broccoli. Why? Well, they'll tell you. Well, some people don't like black people, but they won't tell you why, If you're a black person. Some black people don't like white people and they won't tell you why, if you're a white person. Some people don't like Latinos or Latinas, but they won't tell you why and if they do tell you why, it's not an idea they came up with on their own. It's not based on their personal experience. All the answers to our future are in the past, and if you don't think so, I would conservatively propose that you are unaware of your history, and when I say “your”, I mean collective history, not personal. You're unaware or may have forgotten or may have gotten a distorted view of what happened, because I can tell you right now, our evolution as a person comes from what we used to be like, what happened and what we're like now. I'm almost positive that if we all could go back to who we were in the sixth grade or the fourth grade and treated people like we treated each other when we were that age, would we have the problems we do today? I doubt it. I really doubt it. Look over your past, all of it. Remember when you were the happiest, are you still that same person? If not, why not? If you've been that person before, who's stopping you from being that person again? Who is stopping you from being the person who loved to ride their bike and stayed out until the streetlights came on? Who loved to play in the sprinkler, drank out of the hose on a hot day, loved to bake with your grandmother. Go to the store with her joke and laugh with your uncles, aunts, where's that person? I think everyone has one of those inside of them, and when more of us find and try to emulate that person, I think a lot of our problems, culturally, will be solved. Looking back to go forward, it's just a suggestion. Try it. What do you got to lose? I appreciate you. Thanks for being open! Hopefully you can convince other people to be as open and consider another perspective. I'll see you next week. Be good, Ciao!!