Read Online The Busting Out of an Ordinary Man by Odie Hawkins - Free Book Online Page A

And how you gonna get ’em that way?”
    Lubertha shook the dregs of her can down her throat, a warm, deliberate calm settling over her. What other way, and how? “Let me put it a couple ways, Daddy. Number one, I think we ought to change the jive political system that doesn’t guarantee the best standard of life possible for all the people.”
    â€œNawww, no m’am, you ain’t gon’ take me all over the world, I’m just dealin’ with the U-nited States, let’s just stay up in here for awhile.”
    She listened to his slight slurring carefully, aware that she would have to be a little more diplomatic now, knowing from past experience how easily his aggression was set off by her theories.
    â€œO.k., just in America, hugh?”
    â€œThasss right, just in America!”
    â€œWell,” she started in again, the brew and her thoughts swirling around, “I don’t wanna get placed in a position of havin’ to say that this should be done before that, or vice versa.”
    Ed Franklin, up to pull the last two brews out of the box, spoke over his shoulder. “I don’t give a damn what order you put ’em in, just lay it out for me. You always talkin’ ’bout changes ’n revolutions ’n whatnot, well, here’s your chance! Run it out for me.”
    Lubertha accepted another can, took a deep sip. “Well, to begin with, the best thing we could do to start off with is to equalize things make certain that there were no outrageously rich people or outrageously poor people.”
    â€œOh, you talkin’ about communism then!” he announced smugly.
    â€œNo, not really,” she answered, her mind wandering. “That’s the trouble with how we get hung up between semantics and concepts. The concept of everybody havin’ enough to eat, a decent place to stay and good clothes to wear doesn’t mean communism. What I’m talkin’ about has to do with the people being granted the human right to live like human beings, minus all the fake hustle and drummed up drama that the people who control things lay on us.”
    She paused for a long sip, into it now. “I mean, look at it this way, Daddy this country is too rich for anyone to be poor in it. It just doesn’t make sense. Like, is it really necessary for some ol’ dude to be livin’ in a fifty room house, just because he manages to cheat somebody out of a million bucks a year?
    â€œO.K., startin’ with the wealth factor, spread that all the way out, that way you wouldn’t have Big Money runnin’ the political setup. It might mean that the best man could be found for the job of runnin’ the country, or the county, or the city or whatever, rather than the one who has the most oil money behind him.
    â€œI could stay for a long time on the money thing because that’s what messes up a lot of other things here.
    â€œBut it’s so tied in with the racism thang that you really can’t separate the two. The white people who run this place, the altogether racists, not the All in the Family racists, have such a vested interest in institutional racism that they are even thinkin’ of, if not actually callin’ their own children niggers, not in the sense that they called us niggers, but in a different kind of way, simply because their children don’t want to be oppressors like their mothers ’n fathers have been.”
    Ed took a long pull on his beer, eyes shining, waiting for a mistake to happen that he could figure out.
    â€œSo, along with equalizin’ things on the economic front, we should have a complete overthrow of the racial scheme of things, and I ain’t talkin’ about integration either. I think it would be stupid to try to legislate social habits. What we should have is a system that guarantees, absolutely guarantees the best woman or man the opportunity to do meaningful work, for a living wage;