FAMILY VALUES

MAY/JUNE

Mookie and I had agreed to go our seperate ways in June of last year. How did it get to be the middle of May? I will tell you.

Lil' Mook adores Bow Wow. She has gone to at least 3 shows, including one in Detroit, under my watch. Along with Omarion, and Chris 'Brutal' Brown, they are parts of the confectionary pop icons in hip-pop music.

Last year, Bow Wow and Omarion did a song titled, "Hey Baby" (Jump Off). Not hearing the full song lyrics, when they were singing 'jump off' and it caught my ear, I KNEW what the song was about.

... I WILL QUIT MY POST WHEN PROPERLY RELIEVED

See, a 'jump off' is slang for the person on the side of your primary relationship, or at the very least the person that you treat with little regard for their emotions. The song is about the different girls that they fling around like I once did passes in the 'run 'n shoot'. In short It is about women being disrespected.

Bow Wow is packaged as a somewhat wholesome alternative to all the ghettofied, raunchy, dead end musicians in his genre. Same for Omarion, who has fashioned himself into a young crooner, I guess. But their audience is mainly the bubble gum brigade, young teenage girls and the boys who can dance a little bit.

I am going to get into this a little bit later on, but I am a HUGE subliminal message cat. Which is why when I finally heard the lyrics to this song, I asked lil' Mook, "Do you know what they are saying?" I thought it relevant, because she was singing along ... lyrics that in essence talked about the maltreatment of girls, women... like her.

PRECISELY like her. She was being encouraged to find joy and excitement in music that ultimately would hurt her if the ideas in the song went from 'theory' to 'practice'. So I asked her, did she know what they were saying.

BUT OF COURSE, I THINK TOO MUCH

This though, was a case of I could have gave a damn. She shares a name with KT, so I treated her as my daughter. What would I have done if it was Skye (and I did have a 'media talk' with her before she shut me out), KT (and we had a 'birds and bees' conversation) or Lexxie (uh, Pecan Sandie didn't assign me that topic for instruction!)??

So I brought it to their attention. It went clumsily, because the squirrel that runs on the treadmill in Mookie's critical thinking center was on a break. And this was when I realized that she was not only out of love with me, I was overlooking that she couldn't have possibly be the person that I wanted to love.

This was something that I knew when we were kids ... before me and the SFC even, who I would prolly run into next, as that timeline goes.

WHEN DOES THE RIGHT THING GETS TO BE BEYOND SOMEONE DOING SOMETHING?

Or saying something. I mean, I could have sat and laughed at the song, and said something crass. "Hey Mook, remember when I played you like that what he said ... HAW! That was some funny!! Made you cry every time you thought of me for a week, didn't I? (and she did, too!)

So I explained to them that I thought that singing that kind of song would desensitize her to the maltreatment it celebrated. It would also signal to an alley cat that she may be 'game type'. He would whisper in her ear, talk that talk and ...

... that was when I shut up. I called my Dad the next day.