CitiZen: SPIRIT & DEMOCRACY
AL YOUNG AND O.O. GABUGAH IN ONGOING DISCUSSION
Al Young
O.O. Gabugah
Al Young: O.O., when you scan the headlines these days, what else jumps out at you?
O.O. Gabugah: Just the fact I’m reading anything at all instead of squinting at a screen — that in itself makes me nervous.
AY: Nervous? Is that because you think people are reading as much now as they used to when you were growing up in Harlem?
OO: Hard to say. I know the stereotypes. You and I hung out with — what was his name?
AY: Willie G.
OO: Oh, yes, Willie G. Once I warmed up to that brother, I got to like the dude. That’s right, we all hung out in them community colleges, where we had to study and write papers on all this social and political stuff.
AY: You remember that class we took about pop culture and advertising?
OO: Oh, yeah, hell yeah! Man, that was great class. I felt sorry for the woman was teaching it, though.
AY: You’re talking about Dr. Kellogg. How could you feel sorry for her. She was pretty sharp, plus she was fine, and she knew it, too.
OO: Would you say what you just said if she’d been a dude? Kellogg, she couldn’t let go of the subject. I mean, she believed so much in what she was teaching that she couldn’t let it float around in our brains enough to give her some feedback she might not like. I know that sounds odd, but you got to let stuff go out and be out there on its own.
AY: Riff on this for a minute if you would.
OO: Well, this is the main problem with 21st century communication. Ain’t no more co. It’s all one-way ‘munication. In Harlem, back in the 1940s, when I was a kid, people would sit across from one another, look directly at one another, and listen and say stuff. Then they’d think about it again and say some more stuff back. Nowdays you sit up and look at television, and all they doing is telling you what it is and how you suppose to feel about it and how it’s all gonna turn out. You really don’t get much say in the matter.
AY: So, in your opinion, what’s the scariest thing we’re facing now?
OO: We Americans, we black people, we human beings, or what?
AY: People all over the planet.
OO: The North Pole and the South Pole is melting, the tunafish people put the mercury warnings right there on the side of the can, and it’s all kindsa articles out on how if you keep a cell phone pressed up next to your head, you subject to brain damage.
AY: Do you really believe this?
OO: Al, c’mon, let’s get real. You know as well as I do that you got to be careful about plugging into everything they throw at us.
AY: You’re starting to sound like an old man, brother. Think about back when the telegraph and the railroad train and the camera were first introduced.
OO: No, you just get to the point where you wish people would start back to believing in something bigger than them.
AY: Was there ever such a time? If there was, then, tell me, when was it?
OO: You ever think about all the people that came before us, how so many of ‘em decicated they lives and laid down they lives for something they believed in? Yeah, we know about the people that got written up in books: Crispus Attucks, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Sojourner Truth, Bessie Coleman, Jack Johnson, Rosa Parks, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jr. But what about all the people we don’t know they names? Take my poor old grandfather and grandmother that scrimped and pinched pennies so they children would lead a better life than they did. The, turn around, and take my folks. They did the same thing. And I need to tell people I didn’t come from no single-parent thing. Sometime we might’ve been broken, but I didn’t grow up in no broken home. My daddy was right there, man, handling stuff and taking care of business.
AY: You heard any of what the veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan have to say?
OO: You talking about Winter Soldiers 2008, right? Oh yeah, bigtime. I been following all that. What’s slimey is how the regular press, the mass media, whatever you wanna call it, ain’t saying nothing.
AY: So I notice.
OO: What I heard the men and women saying gave me a stomach ache and even made me cry.
AY: Me, too. But I need to hear what you heard.
OO: Same as you.
AY: Maybe. We can listen to the same stories and hear them differently. Tell me what you heard.
OO: All right, I will ….
- More forthcoming
