self-help: Cosby to deliver self-help message

By LYNN FRANEY The Kansas City Star Bill Cosby Bill Cosby thinks that poor people from the central city are “sleeping” and says he wants them to “wake up.” Wake up to keeping up with their children’s activities at all times to keep them out of trouble. Wake up to the concept of fathers staying in their children’s lives. Wake up to the need for good choices — not doing or dealing drugs, not killing one another, not dropping out of school. That’s part of the self-help message Cosby will bring to Kansas City during a “call-out” town hall meeting May 23 at Penn Valley Community College. When people wake up to leading their lives in the right direction, he said in an interview, “there’s a potential for a happy ending.” “We’re trying to get people away from accepting ideas and behaviors that lead people to have to depend on the government, have to depend on other relatives, have to depend on other people to take care of them for them, to never really achieve what’s between their two ears,” he said. Cosby is touring the country, sharing his message of empowerment with low-income urban families in town hall meetings. Organizers expect about 1,500 people to attend. Tickets have been issued to those requesting reservations. Cosby hopes people who attend will “realize it’s time for the elders to not be afraid to speak back.” When elders in the community hear someone who is young saying he won’t live past 24 and that’s why he’s making bad choices, he hopes elders will take the time “to explain truth, to explain the future, to explain that one must never stop trying to learn. That one must learn to want something of value and quality and work very hard to get it. That the short money that they know that comes with drug dealing or prostitution, the violence that comes with those things, there’s a life (beyond that). “Once people wake up, they tell you about it onstage and say they don’t want that anymore.”