To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.

-Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Did you receive your letter?

In Maryland, 53 people have been classified as terrorists! Are you seeing 53 people in some basement, leaning over tables covered with explosives in preparation to obliterate a mall near you? Or do you imagine 53 people in cells of small groups throughout the country, clearing their coordinates to destroy a federal building in your town?

Well, these 53 people are, according to Lisa Rein, a Washington Post reporter, non-violent activists! They actively oppose the Death Penalty and the Iraq War.

To these “terrorists” comes a letter: Come review your file!

By the way - this is in America - Maryland.

On Saturday, the Maryland State Police sent notification letters out to these activists informing them that - oh, they have been purged from the list of terrorists. The letter, obtained by the Washington Post, does not apologize but admits that the state police have “no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime” by those classified as terrorists.

The 53 activists were under surveillance. Police Superintendent Terrance B. Sheridan, “at a legislative hearing” revealed this surveillance operation. “The names don’t belong in there,” he told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. The surveillance operation “took place over 14 months in 2005 and 2006 when former governor Robert L Ehrlich, Jr. (R) was in office. There’s no comment from the former governor, but Former State Police Superintendent, Thomas E. Hutchins, who conducted the surveillance on activists, has something to say: Hutchins told the committee it was not accurate to describe the surveillance program as spying. “I doubt anyone who has used that term has ever met a spy,” he told the committee. Instead, his good ole’ boys sought a “situational awareness of the potential for disruption as death penalty opponents prepared to protest the executions of two men on death row.”

The surveillance “program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists ‘fringe people’.” Fringe people!

Opposition to the Iraq War or any war, for that matter, is no the business of “fringe people.”

Who authorized Hutchins and who funded this operation? It was not the former governor Ehrlich, according to Hutchins. If you said Homeland Security and Intelligence, you are correct!

You-have-been-classified-as-a-terrorist-letter is supposed to be the first step in purging these bogus files against these 53 citizens. But who believes that!

When will the working class, the poor, the unemployed recognize they are the exploited; they are the exploited just like the “exploited” around the global? When will they come to see they are not exceptional, except their incredible refusal to recognize a reality in which they are cannon fodder for wars, workhorses for the super wealthy, and ignoble masses of unenlightened creatures who whine too much if they whine at all. It seems that those who do - the fringe people - are the exception!

Why hasn’t there been at least 53 million or more notification letters sent to Americans by Homeland Security and Intelligence? What is so fringe about fighting a government that spends taxpayers’ money on war and then profits on that money to assure that a few have the luxury of housing, health care, education?

“The ills afflicting our political system,” writes Andrew Bacevich, “including a deeply irresponsible Congress, broken national security institutions, and above all an imperial commander in chief not up to the job… [is] all but impossible to ignore.”

Why not more letters?

A key element of Pax Americana’s War on Terror is to “root out insurgents…” [and to provide] “population security and control,” writes Bacevich. He predicts that “the future will be one of small wars expected to be frequent, protracted perhaps perpetual…” around the global, conducted by whomever sits in the White House - and that includes the “savior” Obama. It’s the American Way. The “integration of military action with political purpose” is the American Way! The integration of Homeland Security’s actions with political purpose (that always benefits corporations) is the American fascist way!

The exploited people of the Earth - not just Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Iranians, Syrians, Koreans, Russians, and Venezuelans - the people of the Earth are suspects against the Empire - that includes American citizens, “fringe people” who oppose any war, the Death Penalty, unjust incarcerations and renditions, torture, racists tactics that deny human rights to people of color, widening gaps between the haves and have-nots, and bailouts for the politician’s corporate cronies.

There are no jobs in which to have money to consume and play at being a white ruling class member. There are no more homes to buy in the suburbs. The bank is closing if it is not closed already. The school is crumbling and teachers don’t care about your child who they see as having potential as a criminal and ultimately laboring at creating license plates at your local state prison. There are no more Lexuses that will not be repossessed. There isn’t any more cheap gas or any cheap food even at Aldi’s or Sav-A Lot. At Wal-Mart, prices are rising!

Listen to the cacophony of the well trained: I would be a terrorist, a criminal like them! I would miss my chance at the big lotto! And there is always that one more awesome song to download and plug in the Ipod or blast from the car radio.

What is it that the exploited in America see if they think opposition?

While the politicians read from the script: America’s “wholesomeness” and “goodness” is, after all, a beacon for the world, and the exploited in America, the masses, trained once again to hear coded messages, see the terrorist in their neighbors, in the other’s racial difference, in themselves, even if they join hands with the poor, working class, and people of color.

If change for you means compromising with the strategies and tactics of Washington politics, then you haven’t received your letter.

If compromise means that human rights take a back seat to the business of capitalism, then you haven’t received your letter.

If change means joining the capitalists who subject you to intimidation, surveillance, incarceration, then you haven’t received your letter. You receive a letter of eviction, a letter of expulsion, a letter of discontinued employment - and you weep!

To compromise is to come out with the short end of the stick: We resign our right to be angry and then must go along to get along with the disaster that is capitalism.

So did you receive your letter?

Fringe people, be damned! There should be thousands, millions of these “love” letters flowing from Washington to American citizens who recognize they are under attack. These letters shouldn’t be reserved for “activists” with time to attend marches and protest rallies. There should be so many letters flowing from Washington to your mailbox that even King George and Darth from his basement hide out have to volunteer to lick the envelopes. Washington should be kept busy cranking out these hysterical “love” letters until it becomes the business of Washington and the old business comes to a halt!

You should receive your letter for speaking out spontaneously and engaging in acts of civil disobedience.

So where’s your letter?

Bet Sheriff Tom Dart will receive his letter soon. The Cook County Sheriff said No! No more evictions of citizens trapped in the foreclosure scam while the corporations receive trillions to keep their lavish lifestyles. Sheriff Dart refuses to carry out evictions “on behalf of the multi-billion dollar banks and mortgage industries.”

That stops today. We won’t be doing the banks’ work for them anymore. I may be held in contempt of court over this…Until the banking industry steps up and does the right thing, I won’t continue to risk violating the law and open taxpayers to further liability.

That’s more than marching and protesting at rallies and then returning home to your comfort zone. That’s taking a risk! That’s saying no to wrong and yes to right!

That’s receiving the notification that you are a terrorist but you know you are human enough to see that Washington’s brand of politics is truly fascist!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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