Make sure you read Part One to get all The Boondocks life lessons handed down thus far.
Throw a chair to start a brawl (Season 1-Episode 4 “Granddad’s Fight”)
Music and video award shows are known for several things: impressive performances by artists both past and present, grateful award recipients, and moments of emotional weakness that turn into hostile situations. Items two and three were perfectly represented during Riley’s viewing of rapper Eat Dirt receiving B.E.T.’s Artist of the Year award.
Mr. Dirt took a flying chair to his nasty-looking head as he approached the stage. Putting two and two together, Riley theorized that if someone throws a chair around a group of people, a mob fight will break out. Riley took his hypothesis one step further by stating that the chair wouldn’t even have to hit a person; just be witnessed by said group. During his grandfather’s fight with an ornery, blind man who will be covered in a later lesson, Riley had a chance to test his beliefs; throwing a chair at the fight’s attendees when they became angry after round one ended in a knockout.
Surprise, surprise, Riley was right. Seeing the chair land in the mob’s only open spot, every person who wanted to take their refund out of Riley’s smart mouth turned and fought each other. If you want to start an all-out brawl featuring a group of seemingly levelheaded people, throw a chair. That piece of furniture will be the trigger you need to complete your goal for violence (or get someone off of your back about a refund).
Statistically, men are more likely to be raped in prison than anywhere else (Season 1-Episode 5 “A Date with the Health Inspector”)
Rape is not fun, nor is it funny. For attorney Thomas Dubois, being anally raped wasn’t just something he hoped would never happen to him, anal rape became his biggest fear. The childhood trauma of watching a man be raped in a prison movie turned Dubois into the goody-two-shoes that helped him get through law school while avoiding the pitfalls of theft and drugs. Tom went as far as to delete illegally downloaded songs off of his wife’s iPod. Sadly for Dubious, his job as a criminal prosecutor would produce a great instance of irony when he was falsely accused of a murder he didn’t commit over a game of “Madden” on the Xbox 360 video game system.
Narrating over Tom’s situation, Huey dropped a statistic that if you’re a man who fears being anally raped, the worst place to be is in jail. Tom almost admitted to committing the crime in hopes of avoiding the possibility of being anally raped. In the end, Huey helped solve the mystery of the true “Xbox Killer” and save Dubois from facing his greatest fear.
If you too have a great fear of being anally raped, make sure you live a straight and narrow life because doing crime will mostly certainly end with you either dead, in jail, or being anally raped in prison.
Don’t pretend to be blind just to get a tricked out car and a renovated house (Season 1-Episode 8 “The Real”)
Some people just aren’t satisfied with what they already have. They could lounge in a beautiful home, drive a nice car, or live on a comfortable fixed income. Riley Freeman was (and pretty much still is) one of those people. With MTV shows like “Pimp My Car” and “Cribs” warping impressionable minds by making them unappreciative of what they own that’s functional enough as it is.
While watching his grandfather stumble around the house because he refused to take off his “Bill Cosby” sunshades, Riley came up with an idea to get Robert Freeman’s car pimped out that would feature himself, of course his grandfather, and Uncle Ruckus playing Robert’s chauffer. Granddad Freeman went along with the pimping simply because his want for women was enough for him to forgo his morals. The plan worked so well that Riley took things one-step further.
By saying his grandfather used his home to house orphaned youth and homeless adults, Riley convinced the team at “Extreme Home Makeover” to add a wing onto his house. Everything seemed to be going all well and good until Robert made one crucial mistake – he forgot he was blind upon seeing his tricked-out car.
In the end, Robert Freeman was left with a destroyed home, the bill to cover the car’s pimping costs, and having to live in said car until the repairs were done. Please, be happy with what you have before thinking about going to such extremes as pretending you’re blind to have more. It won’t work out like you think.
Too much black television will make you dumber and can kill you (Season 1-Episode 12 “Riley Wuz Here”)
During a very Riley-centric episode, his big brother Huey decided to test the threshold of television’s greatest threat to someone’s emotional and potentially physical well-being – shows featuring mostly all-black cast members. The reason for Huey’s experiment was due to the death of 21-year-old Shaquoia Peterson in 1999 after making it through thirteen of a twenty-four hour “The Parkers” marathon before succumbing to what seemed to be a heart attack (though no true cause of death was ever determined).
It didn’t take long before the effects of watching too much black television started to show. Huey’s short-term memory began fading. By the eighth day, Huey couldn’t form coherent sentences, let alone remember how to check his blood pressure. Even Riley – who isn’t a purveyor of knowledge – considered his brother plain stupid after two weeks of viewing. It would take something miraculous to save Huey from the clutches of ignorance. Or maybe simply changing the channel on accident to something like the National Geographic Channel would cure Huey (which it did).
Like all things, black television is only good in moderation. Watch too much and you’ll end up a socially inept individual begging for grape soda and dropping the n-word every five seconds.
There is a heaven for every race (Season 1-Episode 15 “The Passion of Reverend Ruckus”)
For those who don’t know by now, the show’s primary pseudo-antagonist for all things black and/or African American is a portly, lazy-eyed fellow with more jobs than you can’t count on two hands, yet lives in a shack on the edge of town named Uncle Ruckus (“No relation.”). The problem with Ruckus is the fact this obviously black man hates himself and everyone like him to the point Ruckus has claimed many a time to be, “…French, Native American with a splish-splash of Irish.” For Uncle Ruckus, being around black people is almost a hindrance to life in general (though his only real friends are Robert Freeman and Tom Dubois). Ruckus’ self-hatred even bled into his dreams after being diagnosed with having a cancerous tumor; or in Ruckus’ words, “…biggus backus tumoritis.”
In a Ruckus-believed vision, our favorite racist encountered his spirit guide, Ronald Reagan. Yes, the former United States President Ronald Reagan. There, in this magnificent place supposedly Heaven, Ruckus was informed that since there are so many different races, God created different Heavens so everyone could get along in the afterlife without having to be around each other.
Ruckus would take the knowledge President Reagan imparted on him to create a new form of Christianity that involved white people physically assaulting their supposedly cursed counterparts (black people) in hopes of beating the evil out of them so they too could go to Heaven. It wasn’t long before Ruckus got struck by lightning and made to forget about an all-Caucasian Heaven while being cured of his fatal tumor.
Maybe America was wrong in ending segregation and tampered with God’s ideal vision. Or maybe Uncle Ruckus and people like him are plain fools; and we should all accept each other and look forward to spending time with everyone to understand different cultures and beliefs.
