“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”—Frantz Fanon
“ . . . I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”—Howard Zinn
You are Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow. You are female and male. Most of all however, are in your late teens, your twenties, or your thirties; and you yearn for a nation and a world that is based firmly upon a genuine and active respect for economic, political, and social fair-play and human rights throughout Mother Earth. And even though you face the arrogance, cynicism, stealth, wrath, and brutality of an entrenched and greedy self-legitimized corporate syndicate known as ‘the United States government,’ you know in your hearts and minds that if you do not act and stand firm, the peoples of this nation and of this entire precious planet will be doomed. You are our younger sisters and brothers of the 21st century—and you are strong, determined, and beautiful.
We, your older brothers and sisters, are proud of you, though we have not told you nearly often enough. You are the collective leaders of both today and tomorrow and you are already feeling the brunt of this hypocritical, avaricious, and brutal corporate/military system. Yet, if humankind is to survive (and it must), it will surely be due to your principled sacrifices and actions.
We, your older sisters and brothers in this urgent, ongoing, long and protracted everyday people’s struggle, know only too well how corrupt, diabolical and treacherous this corporate/military political system is. We watch in rage and horror as the elite greedy vultures of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Lockheed, the banksters, pharmaceutical and insurance corporations, and a further endless list that won’t be missed, wage and economic, political, and psychological war of terror against everyday ordinary people in the United States and throughout the world. We watch in rage and horror as your futures are hocked and stolen from you by these bloodsuckers of the corporate elite and their insidious symbiotically joined politicos of both the Democrat and Republican parties. We watch in rage and horror as you are repeatedly lied to by the corporate White House, the corporate Congress, and the corporate courts. You are made to pay on college and university student loans by a corporate-controlled political system that in fact should have provided you with 1) a free ‘education’ and 2) a system of universal single payer health care—both of which you have been denied. Then, of course, there is the de facto economic military draft which ensnares and entraps young people as the cannon fodder for the corporate military-industrial comple, which wages perpetual bloody wars and military conflicts throughout Mother Earth.
From the ‘Occupy’ Movement to the extremely important WikiLeaks revelations we, your older brothers and sisters, watch your bold and principled actions with trembling hearts and enormous pride. Despite the slimy efforts by the pathetic so-called mainstream (i.e., corporate-stream) U.S. “news” media to ignore, distort and/or denigrate your actions, we see your resourcefulness and creativity in forming your own everyday people’s media and we smile and applaud you.
It is obvious that you, our younger sisters and brothers, understand and are utilizing and spreading the words of the late Howard Zinn when he correctly said, “Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” Of course the “slavery” of today is economic and psychological and is being waged against everyday people of all colors by an insidious elite consisting of men and women of varying pigmentations. Today’s slavery has been tweaked by those who represent and/or control the machinery of this corrupt political system. We too must be creative in our resistance to this systemic slavery.
Rosa Luxemburg so aptly conveyed what this struggle today continues to be about when she said, “Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.” Be All You Can Be—Be A People’s Revolutionary!
Yes, my sisters and brothers of all ages (young and old alike). Destiny salutes you/us. Or as Frantz Fanon put it, “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.” There’s work to be done. Let’s do this thing collectively.
Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward then, my sisters and brothers. Onward!
Intrepid Report Associate Editor 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, Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Pinkney is a former university instructor of political science and international relations, and his writings have been published in various places, including The Boston Globe, the San Francisco BayView newspaper, the Black Commentator, Global Research (Canada), LINKE ZEITUNG (Germany), and Mayihlome News (Azania/South Africa). 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.)
Larry Pinkney, I must be an old disenchanted b*tch. The twenties, thirties, and near forty year olds that I know … have all swallowed the BushObama Kool Aide: TSA and airport searches okay by them. Terrorists are coming to get us and we must take care of “them” over there so they won’t come here to, “take care” of us.
To them, “Flags are sacred 0biects and not “bits of coloured cloth that governments use to first shrink our brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead,” as Arundathi Roy puts it.
There seems to be no room in the brains of these twenty, thirty, and forty year olds to realize that the “Independence” they “celebrated”yesterday, also means independence from the corporate grab which keeps them (and the rest of the “homeland”) poor, without the hope of any really worthwhile, honest, and fair earnings in any kind of professional, and what used to be known as “white collar” job, to sustain themselves and/or their families with. If they ever wonder why they are working slave hours, earning slave salaries on jobs that take them no where, they never come up with the real answer. If they wonder what they are slaving for, or who they are slaving for, the answer is usually, a varied form of, “doing it for the homeland.”
They are still living in the myth of what the United States used to be, not so long aog to most Americans. They have not yet awaken to the full reality of the brutal United States (both here and abroad) that we have become. To them the real unpatriotic traitors are you, and I, and anyone else who tries to open their eyes about the reality of who the traitors really are in the United States are; while their minds get further dumbed down by the kool aid propaganda they swallow every day.
As the effects of FCat learnings and dumbed down education take effect, even their children’s minds are not even given the chance to expand, or be nurtured into that of thinking, creative, and sensitive, sensible human beings who can repudiate the effects of FCats, or question why Higher Education is now something only for the privileged and their children, and why quality healthcare can only be accessed by those who can afford the Cadillac Health plans that feed the insurance players …
There are still many out there pushing the Bush-O-bama banner of corporations, military industrial complex, and big tax give away for the very rich …
If you dare point out to those who are pushing the said kool aid on the young that they are wrong, then they call you crazy, deluded, and whatever else they can think of that will take the light away from the truth …
I have been called all of that many times by a well known blogger whose idealization of Obama infiltrates the “internets” in support of all the very policies she criticized Bush for.
………….
I vote for funding for the National Endowment of the Arts, I vote for a liberal/humanities approach to education from the very first step a kid takes inside any kind of educational institution (pre-k on up to higher education), I vote for Universal healthcare for all … I vote for returning the “homeland” to just this “nation,” or, “country,” I vote for taking all of the emotionalism out of politics, the media and the courts, I vote for all of that, but where is just such the person running on such a banner.
Fearless, feisty and independent but… up to a point.
Not a whisper about the huge elephant in the room: the Jewish Lobby. Not a whisper about the billions of dollars that are BORROWED in the name of our grandchildren to send to Israel — the 4th nuclear power and not a state in financial straights — as “aid” while our infrastracture is crumbling and the number of Americans living under the official poverty line is growing, not a whisper about the wars in Iraq, the devastation of Libya, the current arming of mercenaries and the upcoming intervention in Syria, all in Israel’s interests.
Not a word from veteran of the Black Panther Party about what Obama did to be gratefully called “the First Jewish President” and what he did not do to recognized as the first back president, which indeed he is not, judging by both his non-activities at home and his activities in Africa with his favorite toys: the drones. So the feistiness and independence of this article can be seen exactly where?
I am sorry you have this impression of young people. Although I know it is true of some young people, and I dare not say what percentage we are talking about, I do know several young people personally who are exemplary people and who think far more progressively than I did at their age, and in many aspects more than I do now. Did not young people to a large degree lead the Arab Spring? Do they not also participate in large numbers in the Occupy movement? Some young people are looking for encouragement and leadership from those of us older than them. Larry Pinkney is giving that in this article. Many of us as parents have tried to give this to our young, and many of us have succeeded, even beyond our hopes and expectations (due to fertile and gifted ground!). Back to “percentages”, is the percentage of educated young different than the percentage of educated middle-aged or old people? I have to admit, working at a nursing home, that I have been impressed with several very old people, and it has struck me that some of them are more progressive and open-minded than many in my own age-group (mid 50s). Perhaps getting hung up on age is a diversion, because I have really found all kinds among all sorts. Perhaps generalizing is not helpful. And yet, young people deserve our encouragement and support, and they may gain strength from it, to add to their own inherent strength. I only see us all benefiting from this.