Their Ingredients Will Alter Your Flavor
Opening a cook book & discovering a new recipe is an exciting thing. A cook book clearly lists every ingredient needed & walks you step by step on how much of what’s needed & estimated preparation times. By following a recipe, all measurements are done for you & if properly followed, your cuisine should have a delicious flavor. Lets use a cake for an example. You add your flour, a few cups of milk, crack a few eggs for texture, sugar for taste, baking soda for volume & an ingredient to add flavor. (Chocolate powder or strawberries) Once the ingredients are together, you have a batter. You can taste the batter and add more of something until you reach your desired taste.
The Cooking Double Entendre
Lets now imagine all those cake ingredients are the values, principles & morals your parents mixed together to bake up a sweet & loving human being. We are figuratively a concoction of ingredients that our parents hand blended. Higher quality of standards typically equates to a higher quality of flavor. We are a direct representation of our wellspring so parents will go all out to ensure the recipes & ingredients they select are top tier in hopes of creating a sweet soul. We are all products of natural ingredients until outside additive & preservatives alter the great tastes our parents baked us to be. Here is a list of 3 outside ingredients or influences that changed my flavor forever.
Rodney Glen King
King with fiancée Cynthia Kelley a few months before his death
When I was 14 years old, I got my first cup of salt added to my batter. On the night of March 3rd, 1991, Rodney Glen King was pulled over by LAPD for allegedly leading them on a high speed chase. After stopping, King was savagely beaten by 4 thugs in badges & charged with felony evading. King suffered a broken right leg, a face badly swollen beyond recognition, bruises all over his body from being struck over 50 times & multiple burns from a taser. The attempted lynching of Brother King was caught on video by George Holliday & sent the video KTLA (a local news entity) One would think video evidence of a crime would be enough to convict criminals & have them throw under the jail but during the trial, they found no wrong doing on behalf of the LAPD. All 4 thugs were acquitted. Imagine the bad taste an incident of this magnitude could leave in the mouth of a naïve teenager. When the smoke cleared, King’s charges were dropped & he was awarded $3.8M in damages. For the entirety of my teen years, I couldn’t fathom how Brother King was award money if the police did no wrong? And why did the city compensate him instead of the cops who violated his human rights?
Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones
Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones
On May 16, 2010, 7 year old Sister Aiyana Stanley-Jones was fast asleep on her grandmother couch. A little after midnight, the Detroit Police Department accompanied by an A&E camera crew filming an episode of The First 48 tossed a flash grenade into the home & fired shots while conducting a no knock warrant. The 1st blunder was they raided the WRONG apartment. The DPD gain this incorrect information from a druggie informant. With all the technology that police agencies have access to, they still felt the word of a drug addict was valid.
Once officers realized they kicked in the wrong door & shot an innocent princess in her sleep, the lies surfaced. The shooting officer reported that his weapon discharged after Mertilla Jones (Sister Aiyana’s paternal grandmother) grabbed the barrel of his MP5 submachine gun. Reports from other officers & bystanders conflicted with this story for her fingerprints were NOT found on his weapon. Sister Mertilla reacted to the flash grenade that was thrown through the window & burned Sister Aiyana. Mistrial after mistrial, the case concluded with jurors finding no wrong doing in the senseless murder of this perfect Black princess. Once again, the citizen of Detroit were forced to pay $7.5M in damages caused by DPD & A&E. All of this was caught on camera & still, this was not enough evidence to draw a conviction. One of our future leaders lost her life due to negligence & in the name of A&E’s entertainment.
Tamir Elijah Rice
We can all agree that a 12 year old is still a child. 1 Corinthians 11:13 stats “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child…” Brother Tamir E. Rice was just a child; out doing what so many children. Enjoying childhood. Around 3:30pm on 11-22-14, Brother Rice was at the park playing with an Airsoft handgun. Someone from the park called 9-11 & reported a kid was pointing a gun at random park goers. The caller stated twice that the pistol could be fake but somehow that bit of information, allegedly, was not relayed to the responding officers. Within 2 seconds upon arrival, the responding officer yelled from his squad car for Rice to show his hands & 2 shots were instantly fired & struck Brother Rice in his torso.
Conflicting stories surfaced as usual. Verbiage in the police report was insultingly different from what the video footage displayed. But to add insult to injury, the media attempted to paint Brother Tamir as a villain. They never referred to him as a 12 year old child. They was asking irrelevant questions like why he playing with a toy gun & what parent buys toy guns for their kids? Little white kids are able to fully enjoy their childhood with toys guns, BB guns & even real ones. To push the envelope a bit further, you can find countless video on the internet of grown white men actually shooting at cops & magically taken into custody unscathed. So why wasn’t this kid even given a chance to comply? This was literally a drive by shooting by a thug who was deemed emotionally unfit serve & protect. And once again, police racism & recklessness cost the citizens of the city of Cleveland $6M.
The Finishing Steps Of This Recipe
As we gain knowledge & wisdom in this lifetime, we use those newly acquired gifts to make sharper, more beneficial decisions. Sometimes we have to stray away from a recipe & add our own ingredients to compensate for what the world may toss into your dish. The 3 ingredients I just shared with you are 3 items I could have done without. Stories of our brothers & sisters getting brutalized by city officials that we pay to protect us will add a lot of salt & other unnecessary spices to our batter. I have only named the 3 that hit home for mebut there have been plenty others. Brother Eric Garner. Harassed & murder by badged thugs for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. Brother Alton Sterling. Harassed & murdered for selling music compact discs out side of a convenient store. Brother Philando Castile. Harassed & murder for being a black & legal gun owner. Sister Sandra Bland.Pulled over & harassed for hurting a deputy’s feelings during a unwarranted traffic stop. When society forces these unwanted ingredients on us, we have to remain diligent & dilute them with the items our parents & ancestors handed to us. This world will try to ruin your flavor by making you salty. But in life, being less sweet & more flavorful makes the enemy uncomfortable. Never be afraid to revamp your recipe. Once your batter is properly mixed, the outcome could produce a zestier meal that you could ever imagine.
🤎🖤Black Love ✊🏿 Black Power ☮️ Black Peace to my 🌡 Community.
