What's Going On?? (part 2)

If you read the last post, you know that I was all up in the air regarding my middle son. Well, I felt I owed my readers an update so here it is........

There are a couple things I'd like to share with you:
1. As a mother, it is a great feeling when your children truly grow into who they are. As they grow up, you start to recognize personality traits. If you have more than one, like me, you start to see drastic similarities and differences between them. As they get older (approaching adulthood or just entering adulthood) you have a Glory Hallelujah moment when you really see them embrace their traits and start to BECOME who they are. Having said that, I am happy to report that these drum corps people have picked the WRONG negro to mess with. Which brings me to my next point.

2. When my middle son was about 4 years old, we took an afternoon trip to the Mall (just the two of us) while hubby was at work and our oldest was in school. We were walking along and ran across a caucasion women with her baby girl. My son said "Mommy look at the pretty baby". "Yes, you see the baby girl, isn't she pretty" I said to him, softly in an effort to congratulate him on being observant. "She's pretty Mommy, but when is she going to turn BLACK like the rest of us". At that very moment, I knew I wasn't dealing with your average child....LOL!!

Well, fast forward to this Drum Corps situation. After being very HEATED, my son immediately put his intellectual strengths to work. He's spent the better part of the last 3 weeks researching, looking at internet pics of this corps past competitions and he's gathered some very interesting and well documented facts. There have been young men and women in past competitions with earrings in their eyebrows, noses, lips, gauges in their ears (for all of you that don't know, a gauge is a disc type gadget people use to make a huge hole in their earlobe and it is very popular among caucasian youth and young adults). The funny part of it is, all of these practices are alleged to be against the dress code within the corps that my son plans to march in. He also went as far as to talk to the head drum major of this corps (who is white) and was told; "Man your locs are cool, don't cut them for any reason, unless you want to. There have been people in the past marching with all kinds of different hair styles, tattoos, earrings and stuff, so it's ridiculous for them to try and make you cut your hair". So, my son has decided that he's definitely not going to cut his hair but he is going to march and he will just take the necessary percautions to make sure his hair is tucked neatly under his helment during competitions. Keep in mind that we offered this as a solution when this whole thing came up, but we were told "The Corps has to maintain a certain image when the kids are in competion and even rehearsal". So that very statemtent has caused my son to wonder how multiple pearcings and gauges project a good image and and locs project a bad one.

Needless to say, he plans to push this thing to it's limit and all I can say is, GOOD FOR HIM. Our youth and young adults need to learn not to just take stuff lying down - respectfully ask questions and don't just accept things at face value.

He has to attend a Drum Corps Camp this weekend and plans to inform the 'powers-that-be' of his final decision. I'm sure there will be more to come.

Peace Lovies!!