The end…
It’s been challenging, it’s been enlightening, it’s been a pleasure discusssing life with you. I hope I (we) made (make) a difference…signing off.
God bless,
Jermaine Harris
Mentor 2 Mentor – What’s your calling?
As a non-profit organizer I’ve lived life with one eye on what may be. I try to look at life from a perspective of what is not quite right, as I search for the answers to many injustices and conundrums. Through my nonprofit LOM Foundation, I am now attempting to duplicate action. We can do it much better than me.
So if you are interested in starting your own community action organization or support group for at risk teens in your community, I would like to give you a little push in the right direction. Contact me via my e-mail address (professorjermaineharris@gmail.com) and I or my trusted and knowledgeable colleague, Wallace Russell will converse with you just to help you develop an action plan. We will assist you in bringing what is already a desire within you, into focus. Our goal is to branch our efforts to grow a strong tree rooted in the development of a positive sense of community across America. The phone is ringing, answer the call.
Self-Image Part II
What crosses your mind when you meet people and you size them up as you get to know more about them?
Self-Image – Part I
Have you ever been overly concerned with what people think about you or say about you behind your back? Many of us are so far off when it comes to our actual image compared to our self-image. Many people hold themselves to a higher esteem than most other people will agree with. “Shoot, I’m da man, they all want a piece of me”… Oh brother, this dude needs a reality check.
Some of us have very low self esteem that is simply an unfounded fixture in our heads. “I’m so fat, no one truly loves the person I am”. Regardless of where we may fall on the spectrum of self-image, we should all take a moment to reevaluate how we feel about ourselves and how the people close to us may feel about us. Read more
Confront your demons
Ignoring problems is not an effective strategy to rid yourself of them. It is guarantied that an ignored problem will eventually bite you in the ass in the future. Whether it be next month, two or twenty years from now. No matter where you stash them, they will again see light of day. When they do, your ship may be sunk. So confront your demons and battle them to resolve them and deliver defeat to their cause. Put them to rest and become a better person on the other side of that fight. Read more
What’s on your mind?
This site serves as my outlet to release what’s on my mind. It helps me cope with the struggles of my walk. If any of you would like to post your own article about a challenge you face, please send it to me anonymously. If I elect to publish it (and edit), you can direct your acquaintances to it or just see how my readers respond.
Sharing is healing.
Send your correspondence to: professorjermaineharris@gmail.com
Fight – Don’t let life knock you out!
Have you ever been through a very tough situation and after it was over and done, you felt stronger? You felt better about yourself due to the lesson you learned? Each day presents a situation that will either pump you up and make you feel good about yourself, or it will feel like a Mike Tyson blow to the chest and take the wind right out of you. You stagger and think to yourself “should I lay down, or
will my knees stop wobbling.
As parents, our job is to stand close to our children and make sure we reinforce and celebrate each daily success our children encounter. We also are to be there to talk to our children to point out the lessons within every defeat. We must make sure that each blow to the chest our children receive is accompanied by a discussion of what, why and how not to have that happen again. Good parenting technique balances the punishment and the lesson of encouragement. Read more
How do you not revert back to your tribal instincts?
Have you heard this popular saying from the 1950’s negro migration North: “You can take the nigga out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the nigga”. I used to hate that saying. Even though I didn’t subscribe to it, I knew there always was some ghetto in me that I could pull out at any given moment. How about this old popular saying of the 1960’s in the South: What do you call an educated black man?… A nigga. If I make the wrong move, I can be locked up with all the other fools through a court system that hates black men almost as bad as black men hate themselves.
How you build a pyramid will influence your rationale (see my article on pyramiding- entitled Complex game of Chess). But that can only take you so far. If you are like me and you came from the hood after building a juvenile criminal record that would be the pride of any life long criminal, then try to emerge into a world with limitless boundaries, you have to learn how to suppress the urge to act on the tribal instinct that you were taught in tribal societies. In a governmental society, the police and civil court is a legitimate way to resolve big problems. On the other hand tribal warfare will be fueled by rage given the need to display your ego publicly. In a tribe, you can not show any signs of weakness, and often times that translates to not showing any signs of intelligence. If you don’t know the difference, that is a discredit to your level of intellect. Because they don’t read
I was having a conversation with my son’s best friend Kareem, my surrogate son who will be a senior in high school next Fall.
Jermaine: Kareem, are you going to take my summer class for early college credit?
Kareem: No, I know it’ll be a lot of reading and I don’t read. What subject is it anyway?
Jermaine: Economics, the study of M.O.N.E.Y., you like money right? We study why rich people are rich and why poor people are poor.
Kareem: Why are poor people poor?
Jermaine: Because they are stupid. Read more
Barack Obama is Jesus Christ
I was doing the most unthinkable, inappropriate thing with my assistant in my office the other day. 
We were talking about politics, religion and even a bit about sexuality. My boss already warned me once. But my assistant is very unique in her perspective. She is a stanch Obama supporter, with screen savers and photos of the Obama family at her desk. She is a “church going women” who loves her some Jesus.
We were discussing the Christian religion and all that makes it unique, the belief that Jesus was the “son” of God, who was persecuted on the cross and died for our sins. These two are the biggies… who rose from the dead and is to return to Earth to claim his children. I omitted the conversation about Mary being a virgin. So I asked her a huge question, and she did not hesitate to deny the inkling of the possibility.
The question was:
If Barack Obama called a press conference on the lawn of the Whitehouse and told the world that he is Jesus Christ, while making the entire Whitehouse levitate two feet off the ground would she believe that he was truly the “son” of God???
She could not wrap her head around that possibility, she was not prepared to fathom the possibility of her two most favorite people are one in the same. You have to admit, a Black man as President of the United States of America is about as close to walking on water as we may ever see in our lifetime. That dwarfs the slam dunk from the free throw line. I wonder, how much faith does it take “Christians”, let alone non-believers, to believe when that moment comes. I challenge you to seek a “believer” and ask them this very question. Come back to Jermaineharris.com and let us know if faith is just a word that people cling to for the sake of belonging to something greater than they, or if it is a personal spiritual conviction.
