Have you ever listened to the jubilant chants and screams of encouragement from spectators at a friendly sporting event? Or seen teammates offer one another consolation when one erred and cost them the game? Have you ever just wondered, “What’s the use?” “What’s the point?” Does encouragement really help? Well, the answer is an emphatic yes! Encouraging others in every aspect of life ALWAYS helps. In addition, not only does it help those you are trying to uplift, it helps to encourage you as well.

Don’t believe me? Consider this. Imagine being in an elevator – everyone you come into contact with throughout the day becomes a passenger on your elevator, but there is one difference – your passengers are not going to tell you where they want to go! You have to decide where you want them to go! So, what are you going to do, encourage them – lift their spirits through a kind act of racial solidarity and bring up the morale up? Or are you going to discourage them and bring them down through some act of negativity?

Before you choose, think of this – wherever they go, YOU DO TOO! Oh yeah, you are on the elevator with them! You are along for the ride! If you bring them up and encourage them on in the right direction, you are going to be effected as well – you are going to rise with and to the occasion. However, if you are a pessimistic rabble-rouser, guess where you will be heading? That’s right, you’re going down – even if you don’t immediately realize it, it will be that way every time!

Okay, you think, so I won’t bring anyone down, and I’ll be fine, right? Wrong! That isn’t right, and here’s why. Who wants a friend or comrade that never goes anywhere? That’s about as bad as an elevator that goes neither up nor down – one that’s always stuck in the middle somewhere! As someone committed to securing the existence of our race and culture, you have to do what it takes to keep going UP! You have to Drive the Ambition every chance you have.

It won’t take long and pretty soon people will recognize which elevators are falling, which ones never move, and which ones are in a perpetual motion upward towards a higher state. Which elevator do you think your kinsmen would want to be on? Which elevator would YOU choose to be in?

Before you begin your daily track each day, stop and consider whether your attitude and personality is going to drive us closer to the ultimate goal, or simply impede collective ambitions?

Douglas Chism