By Marc W. Polite
Good evening, my readers. With summer unofficially over, I want to share with you the theme for Polite On Society for this Fall.
This semester’s theme is: “For Health, Not Vanity” – I choose this theme for several reasons. Allow me to walk you through my reasoning. One, as I age, I focus more on health and wellness out of necessity. Making it to see 45 is an important milestone- one which I celebrated in August. When I really sit here, typing this message out, I am grateful for that. What I would like to do with this, is write more about health for it’s own sake, not just about “looking good” for your age. That’s cosmetic. You can “appear” youthful, and still face many health challenges. How about we shift the conversation a bit to optimizing our health as much as possible?
Two, the recent untimely passing of hip hop artist Fatman Scoop over the weekend really affected me. Anyone who went out at all in the late 90s/early 2000’s knows his signature voice, and all of the various club mixes of songs he was on. May he rest in peace.
It’s a major loss, and us hip hop heads of a certain age aren’t okay. We need a way to unpack this as we deal with the reality of health discrepancies in our community. Not by wagging our fingers, but by pointing out matters like the lack of dedicated health insurance for entertainers, and how gig work and shows are how they survive. Let’s deal with structural, systemic issues, not just attack individuals. This is just one example, but there are surely more.
Third and finally, (but not least) is mental health. Here’s an aspect of that I want to introduce to the discussion. There’s a portion of mental health that involves not engaging in discourse that is only meant to inflame, not inform. It is at times necessary to remove yourself from unhealthy conversations and cyclical arguments that will just go nowhere. Not giving conversations that just take all of the air out of the room anymore oxygen. Even when folks have nothing particularly original or thoughtful to say. Online, it is called “rage farming” and the purpose of it is to run up the score and ramp up engagement and views, not help improve people’s lives. Before you ask me “Marc, why are you not covering this issue”? – think of this above point.
So there you have it folks. The reason for the theme, For Health, Not Vanity. I hope you’ll venture with me on this journey this time around. If not, that’s fine too. Until next post.. peace!
-M.W.P.