So here’s Michael Vick’s chance to begin to make things right. Can he be man enough to stand up in front of the world and convince us that his disturbing rise and fall was of his own doing? Can he resist the urge to wrap himself in the blanket of the victimization, can he admit that it was his own foolish behavior that has led him into a career-wrecking prison term?

The toadies, sycophants and apologists will make it hard on him, because they continue to line up around him with these wrong-headed alibis. They will continue to send out all the wrong messages that perpetuate this attitude some parts of my black community that makes a man returning from prison hailed like a conquering hero and the kid on spring break from college is a chump to be ridiculed. The standards are all wrong, and it has to change.

Yet the apologists can’t see the corruption they are creating when the only lesson they choose to cull from this sad episode is that Michael Vick was unjustly persecuted. I already hear some of them lining up to preach this message as if it is gospel. But this can’t be the lesson. That can’t be the message. That can’t be the reality of what we can salvage from the wreckage of Michael Vick’s rise and fall.

The message needs to change radically. The negative images that are embraced by too many young (black) men in our society needs to be changed to make them understand that intelligence is right and ignorance is wrong. We need to alter the perception so that it’s cool to be smart and the thug and gangster lifestyle is wrong. When your friends can’t understand that, they aren’t your true friends.

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Michael Vick needs to tell us that loud and clear. He wasn’t participating in some righteous form of civil disobedience against a law he believed was out of touch with a civil society. He and all his friends were lurking in the shadows operating a sinister business that involved electrocuting, drowning and clubbing dogs to death. They participated in a business that is outlawed in 48 states. They participated in a savage blood sport whose objective is the killing and maiming of the weakest animal in the ring.

And here’s another lesson we can learn:

For the toadies who want to minimize Vick’s actions by saying it’s part of a “subculture” some of us wouldn’t understand, or that “they’re only dogs,” it really doesn’t matter if you think the law doesn’t make sense. If you wake up tomorrow and they outlaw playing bingo in gym shorts, but you like playing bingo in gym shorts, you know what I suggest you do?

Buy long pants.