Keeping it Real
By Larry Pinkney
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully from nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government... I cannot be silent."- Martin Luther King, Jr. [From the speech entitled, Beyond Vietnam - A Time To Break Silence]"Mumia [Abu-Jamal] may be in solitary, but he is not alone. The PA [Pennsylvania] Department of Corrections holds approximately 2,500 people in solitary confinement on any given day, many of them for years at a time."
- Human Rights Coalition [January, 2012]
Even as everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation are mercilessly stomped on by Barack Obama (and his Democrat and Republican party cohort's) 2012 New Year's trojan horse law - of unmitigated repression, in the form of the so-called National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) - which law legalizes the right of the U.S. military to carry out secret kidnappings, indefinitely detain, interrogate, torture, and murder U.S. citizens without even the right to jury, trial, legal representation, or the requirement that the government produce evidence against the accused - we ordinary people struggle simply to survive as dignified human beings. [Reference The Black Commentator, January 5, 2012, 'Beyond Vietnan' Into Afghanistan and Indefinite Detention of U.S. Citizens.
Yet, there's more.
The United States of America has officially, for many decades, lived in denial of the fact that there are thousands of political prisoners and/or prisoners of conscience confined in its brutal and barbaric prison gulag system nationally. Many citizens have chosen to pretend that we in this nation are protected by the U.S. Constitution. Thanks to COINTELPRO (the infamousand ongoing U.S. government's Counter Intelligence Program), the so-called 'Patriot Act,' and the heinous and hideous National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), no critically-thinking and conscious person can honestly subscribe to the notion that this nation does not engage in institutionalized torture or that the United States is a people's democracy. In this 21st century, even the U.S. Constitution itself (which in any case was often ignored) has met the ignoble fate of being blatantly destroyed and trashed by the opportunistic, corporate politicians of this nation.
The physical and/or psychological torture and deprivation of prisoners (political and otherwise) in the United States of America is standard operating procedure. It is routine - considered as no big deal. Nonetheless, many persons in this nation continue, like euphemistic ostriches, to hide behind the decaying mythology of a very dead U.S. Constitution and non-existent democracy. The daily horrors and deprivations endured by the many wrongfully imprisoned blatant U.S. political prisoners, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Lynne Stewart and so many others is but the tip of a blood curdling, burgeoning ice berg.
For the poor and dispossessed of this this nation, irrespective of their color, justice is a sick joke. Be clear about this: If you do not act NOW, YOU can and will be next! The disgusting debacle of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners is but a reflection of what occurs on a daily basis with prisoners inside the United States itself.
So you think you have human and political rights in this nation?! Stop fooling yourselves, you don't, WE don't! This political and judicial system is all about serving the rich and the powerful, not the everyday people of this nation or world.
We must understand that we are ALL Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and Lynne Stewart! We are ALL prisoners of this self-serving, viciously hypocritcal system of physical and mental confinement! But we are not helpless! There is much we can and must do! Time to break the bondages as we wage this protracted and collective people's struggle!
The time is upon us to bring about an absolute end to this corrupt political system. We must have real systemic change. Not reform, but real systemic change!
For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for us - ALL of us! No more damn wars abroad or the glorification of them! No more corporate domination, replete with its privatized U.S. prisons and hegemony of the daily lives of WE, THE PEOPLE, inside this nation and around the world!
Remember Mumia! Remember Leonard! Remember Lynne! For we are all of them and so many others. Mother Earth calls and we must answer! Onward, then, my sisters and brothers! Onward...!
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.
