Mo Than Just Say No!

The Legacy of Nancy Reagan and ``Just Say No’’

 

By Mr. Tracy Charles Gibson

..**Many Black people made fun of Nancy Regan’s anti-illegal-drug slogan `` Just Say No.’’  They really should not have. I understanding them, our Black community, scoffing at the thought of how easy the Nancy Reagan slogan made things sound and the fact that it never took into account how difficult it is to overcome hopelessness when your job is taken over by a White person, and your home is taken over by a White person, and your fellow Black person just snatched all the life out of you by killing a loved one.  This anti-illegal-drug slogan ``Just Say NO!’’ stands as something not taken very seriously facing all those difficulties including homelessness, poverty, an open availability of illegal drugs in the hood, poor educational opportunities, and a penal system that where houses Black men and Black women.   It still needs, however, to be the positive battle cry for many Black North American communities.  If we say no to illegal drugs more often, we open less healing places that are assigned to treating Black people with drug addictions.  That treatment process usually takes several hundred thousand dollars and several years of an inability to work or do anything much that is very productive for oneself or one’s community. Certainly there are exceptions.  Gil Scott Heron was drug addicted as he made history in producing some of the greatest pre-rap, poetry- inclined albums of all time.  Several other Black performers made it through drug addiction by producing great music such as Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.  But if they had listened to the former First Lady – who many Black People didn’t like at all – they would have been able to stay alive longer and maybe even produce much better music and hold even greater live performances that might even have been as memorable as they were important to our Black community.  The moral of this story is, don’t turn things out of hand right away just because they come from a messanger we don’t like….  Just Sayin.