When installing software into a computer, not all the time, but many times, there will be an option to just allow the app to load and configure itself with the most common components and presets. 

The other option is to use “custom settings” and go step by step to allow or dis-allow things.

It is my belief that most people either don’t want to be bothered, or don’t feel they have the knowledge or expertise to choose what goes in and what doesn’t. In full disclosure, depending upon the software, I often go with the common components and presets… but if it is a software I know well, like the Adobe suite, I will do a step by step.

To me, reading is that way.

Have you actually ever stopped to look closely at the install screen of a computer? It shows component after component, key after key, file after file that is being loaded into your system, and they flash on your screen for a millisecond without you having any idea what-so-ever what it was, is, or the purpose of it within your system.

Globally, (Americans in particular), are being turned from reading and turned to listening to things or watching things. This watching, and using pictures is akin to the “components and common presets”. With common presets there is no real examination of what is going in, no deep examination of what one is listening to – and that is by design.

Nor do most people stop to think that deeply about it.

Listening to people or watching them has become that way.

There is a reason that:

“In most southern states, anyone caught teaching a slave to read would be fined, imprisoned, or whipped. The slaves themselves often suffered severe punishment for the crime of literacy, from savage beatings to the amputation of fingers and toes.” (Cornell University Library, In Their Own Words: Slave Narratives 2022)

For a time, the early church prohibited the reading of the Bible by the “unwashed masses”.

Why?

When one reads – it is almost impossible to ONLY read without simultaneously, on some level analyzing what is being read. 

But we can listen to something – even while conducting other activities like cleaning house, or driving, and absorb what is being said without any kind of deep analysis what-so-ever.

We have all heard the jokes about how Black people don’t like to read, and how a book is like Kryptonite to Black people. How, if you want to hide something from Black people, like money in your house, hide it in a book and so on.

I’d hate with all my heart to believe that that’s true.

But there again admittedly, I used to read every now and then. It is only recently that I began reading EVERY DAY and actually looking forward more to reading something, than watching or listening to something! 

One of my goals, along with my Pro-Black agenda, is to do my part to help our people discover READING again, and by extension, to those of us who are so inclined … WRITING!

And I am one who believes that in order to become a better writer one MUST be a READER also. 

NOT for all the grammar B.S., the rules of which were created by colonizers and imperialists. But because there IS a way to tell an engaging story and a way NOT to, and in reading other works, we can discover (at least for ourselves), what we feel works for us and what doesn’t and then at least ask ourselves if we do one thing or the other.

I find reading to be mind expanding and thought provoking, and now when I hear or see a lot of what is given to us, even when it seems like it’s for our benefit, I can see the code as it quickly flashes on the screen, and the programming to which we are susceptible if we aren’t paying close attention.

Reading helps to bypass much of that!

LET’S GET BACK TO READING!

Citation:

Cornell University Library. (n.d.). In Their Own Words: Slave Narratives. "I will be heard!" abolitionism in America. Retrieved June 10, 2022, from https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/abolitionism/narratives.htm#:~:text=In%20most%20southern%20states%2C%20anyone,amputation%20of%20fingers%20and%20toes.