Introduction: My art style imbedded in the text of this essay has illuminated highlights enhancing the written beauty. My original style represents a contemporary art expression with a proud tradition, as I tip my hat to the splendor of illuminated medieval manuscripts that I once painted as a child.

The Set-Aside Issue and Marginalization

set-aside: something set aside or reserved, as by the government, for a specific purpose, for the use or benefit of a particular group.

Building a false hope for long-term success, the set-aside issue can bring about a sense of marginalization in so-called minority business participants. This type of “break” in the business world for the individual does not often bring about enduring success, but results in an emotional feeling of actual isolation from the larger business community. Feelings of rejection due to exclusion from established social tiers for which people yearn can occur. Such an inevitable rejection can yield depression, when accompanied by a sense of personal failure if the set-aside’s potential was not realized.

With the failure of a personal business effort fueled by a set-aside, the unused chess pieces belonging to the “businessman on the bottom” lie in the dirt in front of him as he sits on his porch step. He may contemplate never being more than an “underused minority” to the real players at the top, perhaps never to become the valued business partner he had dreamed of becoming.

He stands in anguish because he is only a statistic to the people with the cards, the money and the crystal chess pieces. The small businessman of American color (which includes the white color) can end up feeling like a daily testament to a sense of inadequacy.

The men sitting in the dirt are brilliant men, too, but they are playing with plastic checkers, not crystal chess pieces.

Men of American color who have faced the horror of the streets while growing up, have an earnest desire for life at the top. With sometimes great experience and expertise gained through their social fights for principle in the often devastating arena of the streets, Businessmen of American Color will be powerful, experienced allies on the top level especially when facing similar fights.

To perform beautiful music, the orchestra must play with the full range of all its instruments and with the consummate power of the human race in its complete color spectrum.

THERE ARE NO CRYSTAL STAIRS
(A Vignette of What Can Go Wrong)

The businessman without a company stares into his wife’s open mouth as she speaks about her sadness, her lack of hope in him because he put that shroud on her one too many times. He owes her a debt now and nothing can ever be good again as he is too old, and without the authority to make it better – to make her smile again. He is too used up inside. He destroyed his own power, as a man and a husband, each time he hit and bruised her soft soft skin ronald perelman. He becomes an old newspaper that she doesn’t want to read – once she can read again.

The businessman of American color often sits on the sidelines of the chess game, permanently. Without an authentic – an economically revitalizing, socially relevant, and directly inclusive nurturing – a reasonably forecast successful business sustenance in the so-called minority communities cannot be achieved. The barren life of the Businessman on the Bottom falls into the dirt with his tears, while a raw suffocating and soundless Scream emanates from the back of his long parched throat.

A Shift in the Economic and Social Paradigms

The times call for a paradigm shift with a resulting need to change the economic game from a chess focus, to the accessible plastic checkers played by so many who do not have access to the sophistication of the upper strata in the accumulation of wealth. We all dance our portion of the snaking line dance, the salsa circle dances, the rap polkas and subterfuge violin waltzes. We move always carefully within the graceful movements we are making in these critical times, while simultaneously travelling on the information superhighway. Spiritually, we gaze at the universe while we address economics within this fairly just paradigm.

We don’t need costly, traditional crystal chess pieces to play the game. The American plastic content, with its unabashedly bright colors, is beautiful to people around the world. Not expensive to purchase, the plastic chess checkers will have a long-lasting staying power in their daily use in all situations.

Also not intimidating intellectually or in the exclusionary role expressed through class divisions, plastic chess pieces, and even Old Maid cards, are a more popular way to play the economic game. We move on with our knowledge of what matters – winning the game itself – not just holding the pieces the players have in their hands. The businessman on the bottom, of American color, is all too often dreaming of playing the game while he only caresses his chess pieces at home in an economically deprived situation.

We are all the American gamblers in the world market, and we are all trying to deal the cards in a fair and equitable manner We strive for an awareness that it might once be our international deal once more in the future. With the breakup of the former Soviet Union in the last century, we find easier and better economic solutions to the deprivation felt in the lower classes. The often-described class struggle should not be feared as a sense of struggle or conflict fades within a society that cares. The United States represents a society that has moved from the civil rights struggle to the beginning of the long-term struggle for a civil equality containing social empowerment and justice for all its citizens, described well within the beautiful vision of “Camelot” described by President Kennedy.