Helping others requires ability to help oneself

[Noah_The_African]

Human interactions and transactions are like accounting in that for every credit, there exist a corresponding debit. As we gain one thing, we lose (or someone else loses) another in the exchange. Thus, to help another black brother or sister means that one has to give up something, be it time, money, resources or all the above. In other words, you have to debit your personal account to credit the account of others.

A prerequisite of being able to help others is the ability to help oneself. But the catch 22 is that it takes time to help others and it takes time to help oneself. Thus, every moment of time spent trying to help others, means a moment of time taken away from trying to help or improve oneself, which results in a zero-sum gain, at the very least. I mean if someone is drowning and cannot swim and you jump in to try and save them, but you cannot swim either, then you have will likely have two dead folks instead of one. In order to really help, someone has to have the ability to swim not only well enough to support him or herself, but to also well enough to support another.

Another prerequisite of helping others is satisfaction or contentment with ones station in life. If a person is still competing for victories in the competitions of life, then it will be hard to find time or resources to give up; or debit in exchange for helping/crediting others. It would be like a professional boxer tying to simultaneously become the world champion and also trying to create champion young fighters in their quest to rise in the profession. Every moment the fighter spends training others, is a moment taken away from time that could go to towards advancing and honing his own skills in his quest for being the champ. On the other hand, if he spends his time and resources working toward achieving his personal championship, he will fail in his efforts or goal of training young fighters to reach their full potential, because of lack of time and commitment to that objective. Thus, the jack-of-all-trades becomes the master of none. So the best approach is to achieve personal goals and aspirations, then reach a level of satisfaction to debit ones own life to credit others.

The problem is that most Western people are conditioned to never reach a level of satisfaction with their lives. We here are conditioned to constantly compete for status and goals right up to our expiration from our flesh. Thus, we are always wanting and seeking personal advancement, manifesting or ranking via material processions and titles. Such a mindset fixated on personal advancement will never debit their individual accounts, which will set them back in the competition, to help credit anothers account so that they may effectively compete in the competition of life. IN fact, we are so competitive that many do not help others for it would simply produce more competition to ones own status, thus threating it.

Most Americans are conditioned to be hyper competitive to drive our consumer driven economy. What we are competing for is status via material possessions. These material possessions cost money, which is created by jobs, for the most part. Thus, there is a competition for the jobs that pay the most money in order to get the money to have a higher order of status. These scarce good paying jobs that produces income to receive high status, produces a competition for education and other skill sets. My point being that engaging in the competition is TIME CONSUMING, which leaves little time and resources for helping others. Thus, one must exit the competition before they can truly allocate time to helping others. That Is not to say that one cannot compete and help others, but only that the problem at hand requires more people to offer more of their time and resources to rectify.

If we are to rise as a people, the best and brightest of our people need to reach of point of contentment and exit the competition in devote time and the resources of knowledge, skills and capital to help rescue those of our people still left behind. However, we should manage our expectations of what the resultant will be. The resultant will be more intra-black economic egalitarianism, but the persistent economic inequality between the races will not change much. The reason being is that for black peoples to increase economic egalitarianism between the races of black and white requires whites to debit their accounts to credit the accounts of black people. This is because their rise was precisely the resultant of debiting the lives and resources of black peoples, and others, to credit their lives and create their current status. Thus, reparations are in harmony with natures prescription for what ills black humanity.