NOTE: I wrote this and sent it out 2 days before the Academy Awards. The movie did not win Best Picture or Best Director although Daniel Day-Lewis did win Best Actor. I’m satisfied. OK, I'll admit it right up front.  I stopped watching or caring about the Academy Awards/Oscars years ago. Maybe I was just jaded. I'd spent my whole adult career in the ad game and there was something about watching this 2 - 3 hour-long trailer for the movie biz that made me feel er...uh...stoopid - almost as dumb as dropping my hard-earned shekels to go to the auto show. Don't get me wrong. I grew up like most poor, "colored" kids in America. I was as big a sucker for this stuff as anybody else. Bigger. When you're poor, young and black in America, watching, reading and hearing white folks’ half truths, myths and fantasies about themselves is 99% of your "education".  I think I really believed George Washington never told a lie until I heard Malcolm X or H. Rap Brown tell a different version. That was the beginning of my adulthood. But ‘til then, pop culture was all I knew...or wanted to know.  But now I've lived 65 blackyears in America. EurAmerica’s myths and fantasies are not so much fun these days.  Watching the AAs is not a priority. Besides, I'm sure my friends, family and every "news" outlet in the country will make sure I know who won...whether I ask or not. So, at least I give Steven Spielberg's Lincoln credit for one thing. It revived my interest in the event. I’m really in suspense now to know how many Oscars the “Academy” will award this motion picture mess. What does it say ...

 Maybe I shouldn't say this. But, I'm almost starting to feel sorry for Mitt. I said “almost”. Because that would be like a Mississippi field slave feeling sad because his ol' Massa's whip broke. How could anyone fall so far so fast? Last week’s “47%” gaffe makes his past...er...uh... ”misspeakings” sound like the Gettysburg address. He was caught on video saying 47% of Americans are losers and leeches who rely on government for handouts and that's why they'll vote for Obama. The scandal is not that he thinks this. I'd bet 99% of all WWSM (Wealthy White Straight Men) do. It's not even that he said it in public. Although nobody’s ever invited moi, I’d guess they say this stuff all the time at the country clubs, private islands and resorts they own. (And, as quiet as it's kept, the mainstream media’s heard it many times before, in spite of their "shocked, shocked" rhetoric. After all, their owners are almost all WWSM too) No, the only difference is that he said it where some patriot with a camera - ...

OK, I might as well admit it.

When I first heard of the Occupy Wall Street initiative, I thought it was just a group of overfed and overeducated and underemployed “white” boys trying to get their own generational street cred. “New Millennial Hippies” (Mippies?) out to gain a little attention, smoke a little grass (or whatever they call it these days) and hopefully get laid by some arty-cutey from the Upper East Side or Jersey (Or both).

That was just the cynic in me talking. Deep down, the “better angel of my nature” was begging to be heard. But the devil in me still thought... as soon as the cops grab and twist a few arms, break some legs, spray a few faces with mace and kick a little ass, the kids would cry “foul, unfair, not nice” and scurry back home.

Maybe it’s because I remember standing on the corner of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and Randolph, looking south, down toward the Conrad Hilton Hotel and deciding not to walk down past Grant Park. It was August, 1968 during the Democratic Convention. I was a 20-year-old “black” man who’d just moved out of Robert Taylor Homes, America’s largest housing project at the time, after scoring my first decent job – in the big time ad agency game.

Not that I didn’t feel for the hippies and yippies and Panthers getting their heads busted in the park. I was as philosophically on their side as I am on the OWStreeters’ today.  But I was no fool. I opted out for what became a 35-year career creating ads for the biggest ad agencies in America and their clients. Being one of the first and few “un-whites” in the corporate suites then was my version of contributing to the Civil Rights Movement, as Jesse would say – “in the suites, if not the streets”.

Which brings me – quite nicely – to my point. The Civil Rights Movement was one of ...