Love Poem: Not Your Negro
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Written by: Gerald Dillenbeck

Not Your Negro

Last night I was mesmerized
by James Baldwin
in a documentary
"I Am Not Your Negro"
in which Baldwin reflects on
Medger, Malcolm, and Martin
who were shot in that order
within six years of each other,
all under age forty,
by guns newer nationalistic leaders of the NRA
would most likely celebrate
for sale and use to hate,
retaliate
for sins of uppity last-class birth.

One picture stands out
among several shocking views.
A Birmingham Alabama protest placard
stating
INTEGRATED SCHOOLS
AND MARRIAGE
IS COMMUNISM.

Both Marx and Engels
would have been surprised to read this,
but perhaps such an obvious display of ignorance
merits no alternative definition,
or even grammar,
having more to do with economics
than monoculturing misuse of supremacist politics.

So allow me
this one much belated try.

Communism is an evolutionary theory
of economic development
assuming competition between those who own
and those who do not
will inevitably lead
to falling aristocracies of hoarded wealth,
regardless of race, color, creed,
gender,
gender preference,
religion,
language,
whether you vote blue,
or red,
or green,
much less black and white not together.

Communitarianism
is a cooperative evolutionary experience
in which co-investment between and among co-owners
leads to optimal quality improvement
of healthy wealth outcomes,
regardless of race,
gender,
creolizing mutually enculturing
as above.

Democratic whole Earth system healthy politics,
both sacred and secular varieties,
support communitarian wealthy co-investing economics,
and vice versa.

But,
neither competitive totalitarian communism
nor cooperative subsidiary ownership
and responsibility
and authority of communitarians
is defined by racial integration,
or libertarianism either, for that possibly unrelated matter,
although these might agree
that continuing freedoms for segregation
and its fossilizing maintenance
prolongs and builds higher walls
between those who have most,
those who have nothing,
and those who worry about joining the latter
by waving placard ignorance
for the former,
too busy hoarding their money
within gated communities
to actually show up,
while quietly financing
our most avid absence of integrity supporters.

Enforcing segregation of races
works about as well as
forced separation of food-chain species,
where eventually everybody starves separately
rather than feeding off
and on
each other
together,
more like an actually healthy community.