The never ending pursuit of the beautiful -- part 3

For this installment we have Bill Cosby. Even as a kid Mr. Cosby had a great influence on me through the moral and good teaching of Fat Albert. I got my mom and dad to send away for Picture Pages so I could follow along while Bill Cosby did the Picture Pages during Kaptain Kangaroo. As of late Mr. Cosby has come under fire for comments like these:

"Brown Versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We’ve got to take the neighborhood back (clapping). We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It’s right around the corner. (laughter) It’s standing on the corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk. “Why you ain’t where you is go, ra,” I don’t know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk (laughter). Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with “why you ain’t…” You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving ahead on this. Well, they know they’re not, they’re just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you’re just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.

Now look, I’m telling you. It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing. 50 percent drop out. Look, we’re raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. There’s no English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re angry. Oh God, they’re angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza? And then run to the poor cousin’s house. They sit there and the cousin says “what are you doing here?” “I just killed somebody, man.” “What?” “I just killed somebody, I’ve got to stay here.” “No, you don’t.” “Well, give me some money, I’ll go…” “Where are you going?” “North Carolina.” Everybody wanted to go to North Carolina. But the police know where you’re going because your cousin has a record."

Comments like this are exactly why I love Bill Cosby. He taught me as a kid and is still teaching all of us. It takes guts to speak truth to power. It takes something much more to speak an unpopular truth to your peers. The motivation behind his comments were to see those he cared about do better. To see people improve themselves and take responsibility for themselves. Someone who agrees with us is our buddy. Someone who speaks an unpopular truth to us to help lead us where we need to be is our true friend. Because Bill Cosby has the nerve and the care for people to do this I celebrate his beautiful life.