Recently, Wallace Nixon, a Black political activist, writer, and friend jogged my memory about the straight ahead, no nonsense, unsurpassed jazz album Swiss Movement by Les McCann and Eddie Harris, and its enormous political relevance in today’s 21st Century America.

In June of 1969, when Les McCann and Eddie Harris recorded the cut, ‘Compared To What,’ America was bogged down in a bloody Vietnam war that was raging out of control. The U.S. military draft was in full swing with the economically poor and disenfranchised of this nation as its primary inductees - cannon fodder in the bloody paddies, fields and jungles of Southeast Asia. Black, Brown, and Red, people and even some Whites in America were demanding not only an end to the Vietnam war but to racial discrimination, racial profiling, and numerous social, political and economic injustices inside of America itself. The Black Panther Party (founded in October of 1966) was in only its third year of existence. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been brutally assassinated a year earlier in April of 1968. Brother Malcolm X had already been dead for four years, also the victim of a cowardly assassin’s bullets in February of 1965.

By the year 1969, Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow high school, college, and university students were, often at enormous personal costs, insisting that white administrators hire faculty of color in addition to waging the hard fought struggle for the establishment of ethnic studies programs; more often than not facing expulsions, and the batons and bullets of mean spirited, angry riot police acting as the brutal enforcers of the de facto academic apartheid at campuses throughout the United States.

It was understood that the only way that even a modicum of social, economic, and political change could be brought about would have to be through the actions of every day common people coupled with the willingness to sacrifice. It was understood that we ourselves had to try to make it real. It was understood by many that the government and the corporate system were not to be trusted and that the social, political, and economic interests of the majority of people were absolutely not those of the power elite that controlled then, and continue to control now, the government and corporate system.

So here we are in the present, the 21st Century, still determined to make it real; but compared to what?

War is now raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the cannon fodder feeding it is yet again the economically poor and disenfranchised of this nation. The disproportionate weight of a failing national U.S. economy is once more being primarily borne on the backs of the poor, economically disenfranchised, and a dwindling middle class. The U.S. corporate, military, prison industrial complex is, like an insatiable blood-sucking vampire, devouring the hopes and dreams of an increasing majority of people in this nation and around the world. Social, political, and economic injustices abound inside of America itself, while Democratic and Republican party politicians of differing skin pigmentations and of both genders offer the utterly cynical and callously misleading and superficial rhetoric of “change” to the masses. Time to reject the continuing insanity being feed to us.

It is time to return to the basics of understanding and organizing for real people power versus buying into the proven stale system of perpetual war and exploitation offered by the Democrat and Republican parties in the name of superficial and misleading rhetoric. It is time to make it real. Compared to what? Compared to our dreams of and for social, economic, and political justice and parity that only we the people can collectively make a reality once we begin to believe in ourselves and our abilities, and act accordingly. Yes, once we regain our humanity which is continually being sucked from us by the corporate minions and their symbiotic partners of the Democrat and Republican parties [i.e. the Republicrats].

Time to get in gear and make and keep it real for us the people. The struggle continues…

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. 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.

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