The 2010 Year in Review: My Auntie Got Enough Problems of Her Own; Nigga You're Supposed to be Grown!

Funny enough...a few weeks later this dude broke into my crib and stole my laptop...

A view from the couch…


Sunday mornings are made for peace. The kind of peace that comes with going in to service and getting your soul cleansed to end or begin your week, whatever your perspective is. The piece of mind that comes with the tranquility of your block being still on Sunday morning before you spend the rest of the day watching football.

The peace that you don’t expect to be intercepted by a barrage of MF’s from a brother that’s moved into his aunt’s house when the rainbow wasn’t enough. There’s a disturbing trend of aunt’s taking in their nephews without consulting the neighborhood watch. In many cases these are down on their luck brothers, getting theirs asses kicked by life and constantly fighting the system, fighting addiction and in the case of my new neighbor, fighting his girlfriend!

Hey I moved in with my aunt too, but I was 19 at the time and my circumstances were much different; I wasn’t 35 without the means to feed myself. The crisis of the trifling Black man has disintegrated to the point where even moms are checking out, leaving aunts, grandmothers and baby-mothers to take in grown men that should be the head of their households, not living in the basement.

Maybe little boys are coddled too much, maybe there’s disconnect in the skills needed to navigate life, or maybe too many of us believe we’re Peter Pan, you know, we don’t want to grow up and need women to raise us well into our forties. It’s definitely a mixture of them all combined with the collateral damage of Reagan’s war on Urban America and the hopelessness of those who gave up on life years ago.

I think back to those fallen soldiers I wrote about weeks ago and hope they are seeing their futures acted out as the police attempt to restore peace before kickoff. I’m hoping the pain of the natural progression is enough to cause a shakeup, but the reality is, stagnation is oftentimes stronger than dreams…