Upside down world...............

I grew up in the Great Plains region of the United States. My family lived on several Indian Reservations. Fairly remote, poverty-stricken areas with little focus on higher education, lots of addiction issues and few role models for "success", whatever that term conjures in your mind and the minds of those I grew up with. Racism was alive and well for reservation residents who ventured off the reservation. If I had a dollar for every time I heard the term "prairie nigger" I would be a much wealthier man. My late mother always made it a point to teach me to never worry about what people said about me, only about how I conducted myself and my actions that would make me either a good person or a bad person. That's maybe why I always questioned authority and not to worry about it. Maybe that had more to do with growing up in a family where the head man, my Dad, always had a loaded .357 near the door. His career in law enforcement probably required that as he had more shots fired at him than most soldiers in Iraq will ever have.

Now, I don't understand the major fuss of the dreaded word "nigger" in the black community. The fuss should be on getting out of poverty, getting an education, living clean without addictions and achieving success. All things that Native American reservations still struggle with today. Whether you are "urban" or "prairie" you best let those words roll off you like water off a duck.

To worry about what someone says about you is a great waste of time. Wasting time is what I worry about. I need to sleep less and live more every day. The best is yet to come.