Getting Shot

I play video games. I also work in retail electronics. What this means is that I track new video game releases. What THIS means is that I know that there is a new Fifty Cent (the rapper, not the price) video game coming out. The first one was universally panned by reviewers and sold like radioactive dog crap, but I guess that some egos just can’t be stopped.

The net result of a new Fifty Cent video game coming out is that I am again swamped by media reports and fans telling me how many times Fifty Cent has been shot. I believe that it is eight… if I am wrong, please do NOT correct me, because I don’t really care all that much. My point is that the guy’s been shot a lot of times.

Which begs my first question… and no offense to Mr. Cent… but just how stupid do you have to be to put yourself in the position of being shot more than once? I mean, aside from… say… being a police officer or in a war. And in those professions, getting shot a couple of times… say two, three, five, whatever… earns you a pension. But EIGHT? Come on, Fifty, you’re among friends here, you can tell us… how many of those shots were in the head? And do you still have a slug lodged somewhere in your reasoning centers?

Part of the problem here is that kids and especially (yes, I’m going to say it, cover your ears liberals) black kids and conditioned to believe that it’s cool to get shot. Granted, this has not changed since I was a kid, or probably back to the invention of guns before that. I mean, when a neighbor would return from Viet Nam with a cool new bullet scar to show us, us kids loved it. The gorier the better. But there was a hierarchy. A vet who got shot was WAY up there on the “wow that’s cool” scale. Some redneck who got shot by some girl’s daddy was way down toward the bottom. Probably the bottom was when some idiot got drunk and shot himself. (I say HIMself not to be a sexist, but because women seem almost entirely immune from this particular form of stupidity.) But kids today don’t seem to question why the person got shot. Getting shot… FOR ANY REASON… is cool. Therefore, the more times that you get shot, the cooler you are. This seems to be another argument against evolution to me. Evolutionists, can you explain to me why people who venerate getting shot as a worthwhile survival skill keep surviving?

To me, we should venerate people who manage to get shot once and then are smart enough to get themselves out of the situation and not get shot anymore. I’m fortunate enough never to have been shot, despite being surrounded by adults when I was a child who loved that wonderful combination of beer and shotguns.

Yes, yes, I hear my liberal friends out there whining now that kids like poor little “Fitty” don’t have any choice but to be in a gang. BALDERDASH! Of course they do, with some help from the adults in the ‘hood.

First off, stop venerating the stupid gangs. Stop teaching your damn kids to venerate the gangs. Yes, I realize that, a lot of times, gangs are the only way to make money in the inner cities, so how about this… STOP TEACHING YOUR KIDS TO VENERATE MONEY SO DAMNED MUCH! I can’t think of one gang-banger posing rap star who doesn’t profess Christianity. Well, hypocrites, Jesus not only said “Don’t kill each other”, he also said “Hardly will a rich man enter the gates of heaven”. So if you’re really a Christian, venerate personal growth higher than money and STOP KILLING EACH OTHER.

A quick side-note here on the term “baby-daddy”. I think that a big problem with urban culture is the removal of not only the role of father from the lives of these kids, but the loss of the TERM “father” itself. I was deprived of that title by a mentally ill, manipulative ex-wife. I honestly can’t understand how males will deprive themselves of it voluntarily. I shudder thinking of the day when I’ll be filling out a form with a “relationship to child” box on it with the options “Grandparent, sibling, aunt, uncle, mother, father, baby-daddy”.

Having said that, I will use this reprehensible term in the next paragraph because it is appropriate. A lot of these “baby-daddy’s” are little boys of little life experience.

Girls… women… ladies… sisters… stop being gang ho’s. I mean this sincerely. If you have a baby, and the kid’s baby-daddy was in the bloods, and winds up getting killed because of that association, teach the kid better. Leave the gangs. I realize that it’s not always possible to find a safe place in today’s cities, but find as safe a place as you can. And as far away from the gangs as possible. Teach him how stupid it is to hate each other based on your neighborhood or what color doo-rag someone wears. After all, here are so many BETTER reasons to hate someone.

Finally, folks, SNITCH! Snitch like crazy! It amazes me that people will watch their neighbor killed by gang-bangers and then allow themselves to be convinced that it won’t happen to them if they don’t snitch. WRONG-O, brothers and sisters. If you snitch, that gang-banger goes away and that seriously reduces your chances of getting shot. At the same time, you might be able to get in the witness protection system and get OUT of the poisonous environment that has bred gangs.

Okay?

So to all of my gang brothers and sisters… to all of my brothers and sisters who feel trapped by the gangs… and to “Fitty”…

Peace.

Randal