by Colin Hyde

I am yet to give TD Jakes any ear time, and maybe I should have after I saw a quote — I think from a post by the very interesting Sharon Marin Lewis on her fb page — that resonated deeply. Call me biased, but I don’t too care to listen to pastors who keep some of their riches. But thinking the man, maybe, might be a well, I Googled his famous quotes looking for more pearls. That I didn’t find any could be all the fault of the character who did the collection. Hmm, maybe that one who did the compilation is a paperweight. Jakes’ famous quotes weren’t that bad, or boring, but none came close to measuring up to the one in the post I had read.

Bah, the gem wasn’t in the list. So then, remembering the substance of the quote, I went to the Google, and there I found it in a space called Moodscope, put in there by a guy or gal named Lex.

A girl named Oprah Winfrey now enters this story because Lex drew the quote from an interview she had with the very rich and popular Jakes. This Miss Winfrey, she’s mighty rich too, richer than Jakes. That riches thing came about because of her even more gigantic following.

I am guilty of not giving that Winfrey girl any ear time either. I say, whoever declared me a misogynist was dead in the water between first and second base, but I will admit that the first time I scrolled channels and landed on Oprah and saw her audience, all women, I was overwhelmed. Oh, I know that women being people too, she deserved my ear, but I wasn’t man enough to hang around. Hey, there really are things we and they have in common, and for sure some wisdom shared in an exclusive women’s space has spillover.

Zeroing in on the quote, the credit for this one might actually belong as much to the woman as the man. But let me curb the gender issues and get on with it.

Writing about parent/child love in a 2018 story titled, “Do You Have a 10-Gallon Capacity for Love?”, Lex said they’re certain that “few parents know how to love us as we’d like to be loved.” Lex said their mom loves but “struggles to show it”, and their dad “shows it in the very British ways he knows best.” Lex said they’re hug-type persons, and their parents are not.

Lex said the conversation between Winfrey and Jakes was so “rich in insights” that they thought it best “to try and share as much of it word for word.” It isn’t that long – who said wisdom only resides in an 800-page book? – so we’ll take it from the page as Lex put it down. Thanks, Lex. And thanks, Sharon, for shining the light on that Jakes bohga and this pearl.

Okay, the following is ALL from Lex. Here goes: “Firstly, Oprah says, ‘You’ve got to meet people where they are, and love them at the level that they can receive it.’ I’ve got to agree with that. I am way too much for some people – so I’ve had to learn to curb my enthusiasm, and yes, my ‘love’. Bishop T.D. Jakes explains that our parents were ‘broken’ when we received them – just as we are. Broken people can’t do all that we might want them to do… they don’t have the capability. This means that our ‘ideal’ is often at odds with ‘reality’.

“His suggestion is that some of us have a 10-gallon capacity for love, and that some of us with this capacity are born into families who only have a single-pint capacity for love. When you are a 10-gallon person, you naturally want love on a 10-gallon level. However, when we are around with one-pint-people, they could be giving us ALL they’ve got!”

And now for me, all I’ll say to that is, WOW! You go, Jakes! You go, Winfrey!

Wa, Harvard prez accused of plagiarism for this?

It’s not a good thing, stealing the words of another, failing to give them credit for their thoughts. That’s called plagiarism, and it is the charge that forced a black woman, Ms. Claudine Gay, from the president’s seat at Harvard. The charge came after she had promoted or tolerated what the Jewish establishment categorized as anti-Semitism. We’ll ignore the anti-Semitism charges, and the counter charges of racism and gender bias after Ms. Gay resigned.

I think the charges against the lady were iffy. Bah, there’s just too much falsehood about. And you know all falsehood always leads to a bad ending. Haha, I bet some of you remember the story, “cry wolf”, the one with the boy who took it for sport to holler that a wolf was after his flock, and after a time his neighbors got tired of being duped. Unbeknownst to the lad – my, my, children know so little – yap, unbeknownst to the lad a wolf was watching his little game all along. And that wolf noticed that the boy’s neighbors were absolutely exhausted of running to his aid, only to find out that he was using them for his kicks. Aieee, you remember what happened next!

I think the first thing to check before making any suggestion of plagiarism is the originality of the thought. Was it really from the person who is said to have been plagiarized, or is it some generic thing that the person used and it came to be attributed to them?

I can’t believe the plagiarism charge that was used to bring down that Harvard president. In her story, “Harvard Finds More Instances of ‘Duplicative Language’ in President’s Work”, in The New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler said examples that her accusers gave of the Harvard president’s perfidy “range from brief snippets of technical definitions to paragraphs summing up other scholars’ research that are only lightly paraphrased, and in some cases lack any direct citation of the other scholars.”

Schuessler wrote: “In one example that has drawn particular attention and online ridicule, the acknowledgments of Gay’s dissertation appear to take two sentences from the 1996 book acknowledgments of another scholar, Jennifer L. Hochschild. Hochschild wrote of a mentor who ‘showed me the importance of getting the data right and of following where they lead without fear or favor,’ and ‘drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.’

“In Gay’s dissertation acknowledgments the next year, she thanked her family, who ‘drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.’ And she thanked her thesis adviser, Gary King, who ‘reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor.’”

Now, Braa, you will tell me that Ms. Hochschild “owns” something as generic as, wa, “drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven”? The Amandala really should allow expletives. Haven’t you heard words like that a thousand times in a thousand different places? I bet such words have been spoken by sages in every language on the globe.

I remember how some sections of the American press went after Melania Trump, accused her of plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s work. Sometimes, these Americans astound me. I Googled the story and it came up on BBC News, under the title: “US election: Melania Trump ‘plagiarised’ Michelle Obama”. Here is an example of the criminality of Mrs. Trump according to the US press, as reported in BBC News.

“In a section, Mrs. Trump said: ‘My parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect.’

“Mrs. Obama’s speech in 2008 carried the lines: ‘And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them.’”

I guess in politics everything goes. I would love to think that if they weren’t in the heat of an election, Mrs. Obama would have said, ‘no, no, those thoughts are common, Mrs. Trump can use them anytime, and I’m so glad our values are the same because just like me, when people go low, she’ll go high’.

Oh no, no, no, we can’t give an inch to plagiarism. But we cannot endorse the sillinis.