All We Needed to Do Was Get Some More Guns

All we needed to do was get our small army together, get some more weapons, and make a plan.

People don't understand how brainwashed we are.  From infancy, we sit in front of a television. Our parents from infancy were sat by the radio listening to a brainwashing broadcast.  From the second we're able to understand, we're watching television and going to movies that develop our very persona.  Depending on what kind of television and movies your parents watched, that's usually what you were programed to watch. 


When I was growing up, my Nana watch programs that instituted family values.  That's what was on television in the sixties, shows with family values.  There were steamy shows, but there was an air of class to the seduction.  The movies Nana took me to, however, were filled with sex, drugs, violence - the real deal.  They were the Blaxploitation Movies.  A big black man with a big black gun and multiple women, willing to kill another human being at the drop of a dime if he got in the way of his money.  Also, they all smoked weed and glorified getting high.

This is what I based being a man on when I was growing up because there was no man around.  When you're young, you don't realize that the movies are bullshit.  You believe all that shit you see - people killing each other with no repercussions.  Then these young kids grow up and imitate what they've been seeing all their life in the movies and on television.

Everything people are protesting about today, they glorified in the late sixties and the seventies.  In the seventies you could see a man slap a woman and it would be to calm her down.  If a man punched his wife in the face and was the bread winner, she was encouraged to work it out.

All the things happening today are just kids from the eighties, nineties and the 2000's imitating what they've seen on television for the last 30 years: sex, drugs and violence.  Then with the introduction of video games and people pretending to kill muthafuckers all the time, they've become desensitized to killing.  That's why the jails are full and everybody else is wanting to kill a muthafucker.

Back then, I just responded to a situation the way I was programmed to.  I wanted to seek revenge and I wanted to kill a muthafucker.  I didn't think about the repercussions.  I didn't even think about dying.  I was just going to be like that big black man in the movies.

What is your programmed persona?

Read more: Ghetto Bastard: A Memoir (Volume 1) and Ghetto Bastard 2 (Volume 2)

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by Russell Vann

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