“I got love for my brother but we can never go nowhere

Unless we share with each other

We gotta start makin’ changes

Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers”

– Tupac, Changes

Tupac’s words have always been true, perhaps more so now than in his own lifetime. Black men are under siege. We’re being attacked on multiple fronts. We’re living under geocentric rule. We are victims of laws and policies that incentivize the absence of father. These same laws have aided and abetted women in denying men custody, or in some cases, visitation rights to their children. We are subjected to a system that unfairly and disproportionately saddles us with unfair amounts of child support and alimony

We’re racially profiled by the police and are victims of police brutality. We account for an absurdly high amount of the people who are killed by the police.

The very idea of masculinity, especially black is under fire. Look around. Black men have increasingly had femininity pushed on us. You got rappers wearing dresses and leggings. They’re attempting to make rompers an acceptable article of clothing for men.

As I said, we are experiencing a war on all fronts. It is more important now, than perhaps ever that we as men, particularly black men stand together. As the founding father Benjamin Franklin said, “If we do not hang together, we most surely will hang separately.”

Wars are not won with weapons. Make no mistake; the enemy has weapons of mass destruction at its disposal. Chief among these are the gynocentric media that uses words like misogynist, sexist, or chauvinist to discredit us anytime we dare to have or voice am opinion that runs counter to the gynocentric establishment.

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. This is only possible when everyone is united. History is littered with examples. Greece as we know it today didn’t exist 2500 years ago. It was just a collection of city-states. Greek as a unified nationality didn’t exist until the Persians invaded Greece and the city states sent a unified defense force to defend the pass at Thermopylae. This lead to a unified Greece and years later a Macedonian by the name of Alexander, later now as Alexander the Great, attack, defeated, and subjugated the whole of the Persian Empire.

Haiti was founded as a slave colony of the French. As we know, the Haitian slaves rebelled against their French masters, expelled them, and became an independent nation. In more recent times, the Viet Cong were able stop the greatest military power, the United States, which the world has ever seen.

These are put a few of the many examples from history that I could cite to prove my point. What do all of these examples in common? It is simple. None of them would have been possible without unity and the ability to put aside petty differences for the greater good of their people.

We have got to be better brothers to each other. We have got to stop seeing each other as competition, but as cohorts. A rising tide lifts all boats. Outlets such as this one are powerful. It gives voices to those that otherwise would never be heard otherwise.  We have made strides and are gaining traction. All that can and will be undone if we continue our infighting.  We must stay focused on the task at hand.

Make no mistake about it. The task should be the uplifting of all men everywhere, but especially black men. That’s the primary goal and anytime that gets in the way of that must be discarded, because, brothers, that is the big picture, the end game. You are but one man, and no one man is more important than the whole. As Spock famously said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”