by Khari Gzifa
You ever find yourself wondering why we fight the same battles over and over. Police brutality, discrimination, unemployment; I mean these arguments are as valid today as they were 100 years ago! With all of the attention seemingly paid to these issues over the years, certainly some progress would have been made, right? The evidence clearly answers, no. My theory is this; we don’t put our energy in the RIGHT direction. If we put as much energy into solving our issues as we put into all of these completely trivial issues maybe we could really see some change.
My prime example, on September 9, 2014 TMZ released a video from inside an elevator in a hotel casino in Atlantic City, NJ. The elevator just happened to be holding Ray Rice, running back for the Baltimore Ravens, and his now wife Janay, on what would prove to be a fateful night for the two. The video shows Ray physically assaulting his wife and knocking her unconscious. The ensuing media storm catapulted them to front page news on pretty much every "media outlet" imaginable and they quickly became cultural currency in everything from sermons to street corner debates. But while the woes of this millionaire and his obviously dysfunctional relationship became ubiquitous and spawned varied punditry and what seemed to be genuine empathy for the 2 individuals involved, their story was certainly not the only newsworthy event during that time period. Just a few days earlier on August 27, 2014 there was a way underreported press release. In it, WILLIAM W. THOMPSON, Ph.D., a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control admitted that in a 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics, he and his coauthors omitted statistically significant data, which suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism! This is no small thing. The rates of autism, for any race, have absolutely exploded in the past couple of decades. According to ABC news as recently as 2006, rates of autism in the country were 1 in every 166 children, but as of 2014 that rate is 1 in 50! That’s an incredible growth rate and I could fill up pages talking about the various theories and evidence that help to explain this dramatic jump but I don’t want to stray too far from the task at hand. So to be clear, Dr. Thompson's press release represents an undisputed admission of scientific fraud by one of the biggest quasi-governmental international agencies in the world (CDC) and there was no fanfare at all for this story. Why is that? Do you think that as a collective we just didn’t think this was as important? Or could it be that once again we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated into only expressing righteous indignation on "approved and censored “topics, chosen for us by others? Let’s get into a few facts about the two situations and see if we can determine if we are responding appropriately or if the unseen hand is once again playing us for puppets.
First let’s look at the level of interest and concern for the Ray Rice situation where there was, at a maximum, one or two victims depending upon your definition of the event (in no way do I mean to belittle the assault suffered by Janay Rice), and compare it to the level of interest given to this story where the potential number of victims of the critical and purposeful omission of information from that report, is greater by several orders of magnitude. The Ray Rice story was so big that a day or two after it broke I was at the gym on the treadmill and there are probably 8 TV screens visible from my vantage point. At one point during my run, every single screen, though they were all on different channels was showing that video and talking about the facts and speculations around it. EVERY SINGLE ONE. By comparison, I would bet my right arm that almost everyone reading this article never heard a word about the press release from Dr. Thompson until right now. I certainly never heard a word about it on any mainstream sources. I learned of it through what most would call "alternative media"(but for me it’s the only media I consume so it was mainstream news in my world).
Next, let me briefly show you just what a vastly different picture we are looking at in terms of the sheer number of people affected or at least potentially affected by this fraud of the CDC. Using numbers from the Census Bureau's 2012 annual report, if we just take the average of around 600,000 births in the Black community every year and split that in half (though the birth rate actually skews to female at a greater rate than this) and call just the males our potential pool of victims...we are talking about 300,000 people a year!! If we backdate that to allow for the time elapsed since the cover up in 2004, we are talking about 3,000,000 people!! People whose lives were callously risked by the medical establishment and for what, increased profits for pharmaceutical companies?! To advance a eugenic agenda?! I don’t know, but these are interesting questions and they are ones that the majority of us are not asking. To go back to what I said earlier, it’s about pointing our energy in the right direction. I don’t think ANYONE would argue that if we were all given a choice between throwing our whole weight and energy into helping to save either a group of 2 people or a group of 3 million people, there really would be no choice at all. But instead we allowed others to direct our energy for us, and point it toward frivolity instead of where we could really make a difference. This has to stop! We can’t just continue to be led around by people who clearly do not have our best interest at heart. It's up to us, the few remaining critical thinkers, to lead the charge on reclaiming our own ability to focus our energy and denying the power structure that convinces people like Dr. Thompson to commit these abhorrent acts, the right or ability to do it for us.
I hope my point is clear and easy to understand. I mean, I heard calls for Ray Rice to be imprisoned, fired and all but tarred and feathered, and that was from the Black people! But in the case of Dr. Thompson (and kudos to him for being a whistleblower and finally stepping up), there was not even a peep for what he and his coauthors did that damaged so many more lives. We have to start deciding for ourselves, what is valuable to us, what is important to us and for whom we will reserve our sympathy and scorn. Until then, we are doomed to repeat some of these same scenarios, ad infinitum. I suggest we make this switch to being a more analytical and feeling people instead of being led to other people's pre-drawn conclusions about what WE SHOULD THINK and DO. Because if you haven’t figured it out by now, let me fill you in on the big secret: they are not influencing us through some altruistic sense of what's best for us, they influence us only to benefit themselves. I hope you think about that for at least a little while.