AkiliVisual - A Visual Arts Company is a tumblelog.

It’s Visual Friday on Tumblr

Visual Friday on Tumblr!

It’s a Rainy #VisualFriday!! My favorite day of the week.

I feel like changing things up a little bit so I’m doing #VisualFriday from our Tumblr blog today :-) You can see it by liking the AkiliVisual Magazine Page or you can follow us on Twitter.

AAAAND, i also think I’m gonna do a lot of client shots today, I bet you’ll look twice trying to tell the clients from the models. :-)

I hope you have a super duper dope weekend lol enjoy the images, share this message and tune in to Visual Friday and later on tonight Visual Friday (after dark). ;-)

Akili

#RealTalk - America is crumbling…next comes The Black Death

America is crumbling. Not just the potholes and bridges, not just our public educational system and, social security, and financial systems, but the entire government itself has reached a state of decline that I, for one, have never seen.

It could be that being a neophyte to politics the sad state of American society is just status quo, but I’ve come across some interesting facts recently that has me really concerned about life in American Society as we know it.

1)     Class System: America is absolutely a class system, if you doubt it open your eyes middle class. But that isn’t the killer, the thing they don’t want us to realize is that this class system has become even more like serfdom than ever before. The Kings & Lords (Upper class aristocracy of big corporations) provide the serfs (us middle class and poor) with money (jobs) healthcare, education, retirement, etc. etc. In ancient Europe you worked the land, in todays society we work their information, same thing, different tools. Without a job as a serf, obtaining any of those things is impossible without becoming part of the peasant class. The peasant class is the class whose every life necessity is entirely dependent upon the magnanimous nature of those with the means to provide food and shelter to those who otherwise can’t or won’t obtain it for themselves.  (welfare). You are in one of those three classes for certain with minor nuances that can be debated, self-employed (freeman), part-time, whatever, still you are in one of those classes.

2)      In serfdom, and most definitely in American slavery, education was denied or severely limited as a tool to keep them oppressed. In todays society education is not openly denied, but if you are a serf and you are forced to attend one of the many terrible public schools of their choice, then you ARE being denied an education that will allow you to better your class position. There are those among us who are fortunate enough to provide private schools for our children, or attend ‘good’ public schools, thank goodness, but so many of us are not, and don’t realize the handicap we are placing on the child, or we realize it and don’t know how to do a damn thing about it.

3)     The rich are getting richer and poor aren’t getting anything but poorer. This article on the state of the wealth distribution in America says it all. The wealthy have seen their fortunes QUADRUPLE, literally QUADRUPLE, in the last thirty years (coincidentally or not so coincidentally  it began with Reagan’s presidency and the implementation of “Reaganomics”). While the middle class has all but disappeared the rich have become the Super-rich, and we are the first generation that overall are not better off than our parents. That is a sobering reality to me.

4)     American is truly crumbling. The situation that became the catalyst for me was an article about  Wisconsin democrats, in order to protect the unions (an entity that “maphia aside” is set up to insure quality wages for the middle class and prevent corporations (kings & lords) from unfair labor practices) had to run out of Wisconsin and hide in Illinois and from the Wisconsin State Troopers to avoid the passage of the bill that would essentially eradicate the unions.

5)      There is a quote I heard recently that went something like this: The last stage of a government before it fails is governmental gridlock. Republicans and democrats are so far on their respective deep-ends that they no longer care about the people they are supposedly fighting for. They just want to be right, they want to be re-elected, they want more money on the side, they want more money for their corporations, they want everything but what is best for you and me unless they benefit from it as well. Government regardless of political affiliation, I thought, was to do what is best for the people regardless of whether you claim red or blue. Obviously I am mistaken. The reds care about getting what they want using the vehicle of conservative views and the blues get what they want using the blue views, but neither actually gets anything we want, which is education so that the playing field of business and making a living is level.

“History shows that it does not matter who is in power… those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning.” — Dr. Carter G. Woodson from his book Miseducation of the Negro

America is crumbling, and unfortunately those of us who rely on the whims of our Kings and Lords of corporate America will be left with nothing when money and resources become truly scarce. Serfdom is alive and well in America, and you see how it turned out in England. They called it “The Black Death”.