I don’t care about anything else but my people being free. Everything else is low priority.

My career, any brass rings that they hand out to me, I don’t give a shit. I don’t feel comfortable with my quote unquote success.

I feel like it’s just the most ephemeral, fantasy set of circumstances to live in if I can have that but this shit is going on.

Then who the fuck am I? Nobody.

And if I don’t use the power that I’ve been given in the world to address this shit then I might as well just go lay in the casket.

And just, you know, just go lay down. ~Mos Def

These videos from 2-cent.com, no relation, are from 2009 when they took rapper/actor/singer “Mr. Do It All” Mos Def to a post Katrina New Orleans.

A lovely, engaged and oddly youthful looking Mos Def takes in the sights, sounds ind information given to him on his trip.

It’s hard to watch a video like this and not wish more Black entertainers would respond to Black people like this instead of complaining about what a hard town Hollywood is to survive in for them.

There are people who are having a hard time surviving and when Black entertainers try to conflate our plights it’s disrespectful, ignorant and wrong.

Anyway, I like that there are actual activists involved in this video because they are really the forgotten soldiers more often than not.

In part 2 our protagonist visits the Lower 9th Ward Common Ground Community. There he visits Malik Rahim, a former Black panther and long-time housing and prison activist, creator of Common Ground. Rahim shows him a righteous irrigation system to collect rainwater to irrigate their gardens and a composting/sanitation system born out of necessity after the devastating hurricane.

I wonder if we will be living like this in a few years as something will drastically need to be done to prevent the already rapid acceleration of global warming and climate change. Would it be such a bad thing to reuse rainwater?

I know post Katrina and even during it there were conversations about the so called first world, the third world and who is more deserving of living in an austere way or just with less. These issues need to be addressed if we are to get anywhere in this country.

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