social activism | Filosofa's Word

I’ve been friends with rawgod for many years now, and I have to say that this is by far the BEST post he has ever done! It is a timely post, a humanitarian one … a reminder to us all. The video is particularly interesting and I learned a lot from it about Apartheid in South Africa only a short 50 years ago … and as I watched, I thought, “Is this where the U.S. is headed?” (I recommend using the closed captioning for the video, as the narrator’s accent is sometimes difficult to keep up with, at least for me) Thank you, rg, for this excellent post.

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

On Sept. 12, 1977, Bantu Stephen Biko was murdered by the South African government. They considered him the biggest threat to their apartheid way of life. Little did they know that he had already accomplished his goal of raising the consciousness of the black people of South Africa. It took another 17 years before Apartheid was officially ended, but it would not have happened without the hard work and great insight and organizing ability of Stephen Biko.

I have been singing his praises for more than 40 years now, but few seem to really care. So, when I found the video below, I just had to post it. It is only a summary of his life and work to make South Africa free, and does not present the real struggles he went through daily, but it is something.

So why do I keep coming back to the life and accomplishments…

View original post 290 more words

I have only one ‘good people’ today, but I think he will be enough to remind you that there really ARE good people out there, doing good things for others.

What would you do if an older teen accosted and robbed your 12-year-old nephew at knifepoint? Would you go looking for the teen, and if you found him … what would you do? That was the dilemma Winston Davis found himself faced with back in July. His 12-year-old nephew had been on his way to buy a chocolate bar when the teen stopped him and, using his knife as a threat, took the young boy’s bag containing his money in the village of London Colney, north of London, UK.

When Winston Davis, a heating engineer and social activist, found out and sensed that the police had bigger fish to fry than a stolen bag with only a few pounds in it, he decided to go in search of the boy. He scoured the CCTV and doorbell camera footage from businesses in the area, had a pretty good idea what the teen looked like, and a few days later he bumped into the lad. Davis confronted him, told him he knew what he had done, and asked the boy to return the next day with the bag.

“I said to him look, I’ll help you if you return the bag. We made the agreement that he would go get the bag and come back the next – and fair play to him that’s exactly what he did. He agreed to come back to give us the bag. The fact that he came back to give us the bag, I was like wow. Yeah, you’ve done something really bad to the family I love, but that fact that you brought it back says a lot about you.”

Some people might have taken the boy straight to the nearest police station, some might have given him a stern lecture, some might even have taken the law into their own hands and hurt the boy. But Winston Davis wasn’t those people. Instead, he listened with his heart when the boy told him he was broke and needed the money. Says Davis …

“He’s 16 years old, been in and out of detention centres, lives in a supported living place and has no qualifications…Despite this he wants to work in computer engineering…”

Davis recorded a video of the interaction and posted it on TikTok and encouraged anyone who might be able to offer information about career routes or training programs for the boy to get in touch, and as the video went viral Davis found himself inundated with offers. The post received more than 900,000 views on TikTok and was shared far and wide. A few days after the post, Davis said that a lot of people had reached out, offering to help get the teen’s life on track. In a moment of compassion and understanding, Davis said …

“There’s people that say, ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’ But actually, do you know what, a lot of the time there’s people that don’t really want to do the crime.”

Winston Davis has been there himself. Years back he went to prison on a drug charge and after he got out, vowed to change his life. Since then, he has opened his own heating business and has been an activist for social change.

He saw that the teen could use a break and hoped that the opportunity presented by this moment would change the direction of his life.

“He’s got an opportunity to really, if he takes the opportunities that are presented to him, to really change his life. It’s just, can he see far enough into the future? To be able to take advantage of the good nature and goodwill of so many people?”