[img]583|right|Eric L. Wattree||no_popup[/img]I was on the corner of Vernon and Central the other day, just after school let out. Had it not been that I grew up in that area and recognized my surroundings, I would have thought I was in Mexico.
What used to be an almost exclusively black community now was filled with happy, playful – and mannerly – Hispanic children coming home from school. I saw thriving Latino businesses being patronized by poor, but thriving Latinos. Intrigued, I decided to take a detour through the neighborhood.
I don't know whether the area is primarily Mexican-American or filled with illegal immigrants. But the area was changing. A new vitality was there. Fathers and teenage boys in the yards, both at home, enjoying the love of family rather than hanging out in the street. The neighborhood no longer was threatening. It was free of young men glaring at me, or waving me over as I drove by. The neighborhood now said family instead of gangster. It was trying to make a comeback.
Felt good to see my old stomping grounds rejuvenating itself. I felt a twinge of guilt and envy, though – guilt because my teenage antics contributed greatly to dragging down the neighborhood to its previous state. Envy comes easily to most cultures but seems elusive to mine. I felt more than a tinge of fear because to anyone familiar with Charles Darwin's theory on natural selection, the black man is swirling around the horizon of a massive black hole. If we don’t get our young people’s attention soon, the black man will become irrelevant, perhaps the new Neanderthal.
The Way It Works
According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, considered more fact than theory, nature is in a constant process of selecting which groups or species will survive to perpetuate itself, and which will die out. Called natural selection, it is popularly known as survival of the fittest. To insure that only the most adaptive, strongest life forms populate the earth, nature eliminates the weak to insure they won't procreate and contaminate the earth with their weak offspring.
The process of elimination starts even before an individual is born. Every individual starts out with as many as 40 million potential brothers and sisters, all scurrying toward their mother's egg. Most die off before they reach the mother's egg. That you were born means you are not just one in a million—you are one in 40 million. You were the strongest and most viable of over 40 million others.
Nature takes the survival of the fittest seriously. Anyone who has watched a dog or a cat give birth to probably have seen first-hand how brutally serious nature can be in this regard. When was the last time you saw a puppy born with a birth defect? If an animal is born defective in any way, the mother will kill it on the spot, and eat it. Nature does not provide animals with a welfare office. They know by instinct that they and their young must to be able to hold their own weight or die.
A life form does not have to have a physical defect for nature to weed it out. Nature will eliminate things that are maladaptive or have an inability to adapt to the environment, like many of us. God made birds to fly, fish to swim, and man to think. If a bird refuses to fly, it cannot survive. If a fish refuses to swim, it will not survive. The same rule applies to man. If a man refuses to think, he will not survive. That has become a serious problem in the black community. Many young black men refuse to think.
The End May Be Near
It is as though we are on a mission to ensure our own extinction. While men of other cultures have no problem solidifying the family unit, ensuring their children get a running start, we are abandoning our children, and referring profanely to the womb of our culture.
If we are not killing other black men over drugs, we are killing ourselves with drugs, then struttin' around braggin' about it. When not killing ourselves, we are making dumb decisions causing us to have to spend years at a time locked up in jail like animals. Many have embraced a philosophy of manhood that enforces a moral obligation to be stupid, as if you are not a true black man unless you take a pledge to remain ignorant.
Nature already is at work winnowing out the black man out. We are giving her the help she needs. Each time one gang member or drug dealer kills another, that is nature at work, upgrading the gene pool. Every time someone dies of an overdose, nature is right there. When you go to jail, that takes your seed out of circulation.
The biggest impact is right around the corner. Look around you, black man. While you are acting a fool, nature is selecting traits in black women allowing them to do without you. Black women are becoming better educated, and getting good jobs. Brother, nature is rendering you irrelevant. You no longer are a suitable mate. Nature is preparing the black female to do without you.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.” Mr. Wattree may be contacted at Ewattree@Gmail.com http://www.whohub.com/wattree or Http://wattree.blogspot.com or Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
