Oswald Bates had a mind problem. But at least he was not a bad-minded.
The linguistically challenged Bates was an African American prison inmate on the early 1990s television series In Living Color, who would side-splittingly massecrete the English language.
In the Keep Your Butt In School sketch, Bates, as usual, assaulted the language: “First of all, we must internalize the flagellation of the matter by transmitting the effervescence of the Indonesian proximity in order to further segregate the crux of my venereal infection.”
But he would not stop: “Now, if I may retain my liquids here for one moment, I’d like to continue the redundance of my quote unquote intestinal tract because to preclude on the issue of world domination would only circumvent – excuse me – circumcise the revelation that reflects the aphrodisiatic symptom which now perpetrates the jheri curls activation.”
And while we viewers were catching a fit, an earnest male voice intervened: “Give to the United Negro Scholarship Fund because a mind is a terrible thing to develop without help.” – an obvious play on the widely known slogan of the United Negro College Fund, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
But while one disease of the mind, ignorance such as Bates’, has been the target of strong combating efforts, another kind of “bad-mindedness” has been allowed to flourish.
Negatively judging the motives of other people is one of the clearest evidences of this latter scourge, and it is also one of the greatest disservices we can do to them.
There is a verse in The Bible that says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged.” – Matthew 7:1. People like to pull out that one when others are judging them, adding, “Only God can judge me.”
Commit murder or rape or t’ief and go in court and get a rude awakening, then! That obviously was not meant by Jesus, who later in the same chapter called on people to do things that would require them to judge.
I am advised that he was talking about certain kinds of judgement – maligning judgements or those that, by a kind of mind-reading, unnecessarily presume negative motives in indeterminate situations.
If you have any standards at all, you are going to judge others. A man (or woman) beats their spouse – wrong, we all say. One students takes away another’s lunch and, threatening violence, makes him pay to get it back – wrong, we shout.
So it goes. That is not a problem.
The mind-reading thing, however, goes something like this. Action: Jackie puts in extra hours at work. Mind-reader: “She think she better than anybody else.”
Action: A Barbadian marries a non-Barbadian. Mind-reader: “He/she don’ like they own.”
Action: People criticize a singer, an actor, a somebody. Mind-reader: “They are haters.”
Action: A 1980s graduate of the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) suggests that today’s students should pay more substantially. Mind-reader: “He en want nobody else to get through like he.”
Now, in all the above, you may be right – but you may be wrong. Why, in a situation where there is no reliable way of knowing for sure and, more importantly, where there is no good reason to speculate – are you going to risk being wrong? Why?
Is it because you are trying to make it into the pages of a book called Not A Good Word About Anybody – yes, there really is a book with that title.
Instead, why not exercise your mind properly on the following?
The Barbados Cricket Association has decided to limit how long someone may continue to play for Sagicor UWI in the association’s Elite Division. UWI personnel spitting fire, threatening boycott.
Using my mind positively, I see this (no mind-reading): A set of non-NCAA-type clubs – the backbone of the competition – scramble on (often unpaid) players’ fees, meagre sponsorship and working players barely able to get to practice sessions two evenings a week – and after 4:30 or 5 o’clock.
One club is able to field players who, out of the taxpayers’ money and special funding, are on a privileged kind of “life support”, which affords them all sorts of special training, accoutrements, scheduling and preparation, in effect making them like an NCAA outfit.
If you allow them to play in the same competition, should the NCAA-type team not be restricted if anything called fairness is contemplated?
And this other one: In the midst of a number of incidents at schools, and the consequent calls for beefed up security, some authoritative-sounding people have been putting it to the public that security guards at school are not there to protect people – just to protect property. Now, this is not a bad-minded question: What would be required in protecting a human being that would not be required in protecting property?
Put your mind on those things.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email [email protected].
