U.S. citizens renamed Wall Street Plaza,
Liberty Plaza. They came; it was spontaneous at
first. Then a chorus of Yes! We’ve have seen
enough. Whose government is this, anyway!
The
heavy-hand presence of the NYC law enforcement is a challenge:
maze, isolation of a citizen protester from others, arrests.
But the numbers of citizens continues to swell.
Fourteen
days and counting…
***
Radical
when he arrives at the state mental institution in Oregon
in 1963? No. But that changes. The confident trickster,
Randle Patrick McMurphy, to use the words of Marxist philosopher,
Georg Lukacs, is awakened and discovers he is “lost to
himself” (History
and Class Consciousness).
So who
is Nurse Ratched really, but one more lost to the ideology
and mechanics of confining others who’s Freedom is
forfeited in the belief that the “authorities” know what
is best; who’s sense of “belonging” derives from the knowledge
that the other, too, is subjected to fear of the
same “authority?” For Ratched and McMurphy’s fellow patients,
Freedom is danger, uncertainty. Designated spaces
offer order and ultimately comfort for those who voluntarily
submit to the will of the institution, the State.
The
marble fountain is impossible to move. The other patients
tell him so. McMurphy stands before the fountain. Lift
it; carry it to the window, and aim it, and freedom.
But
you can’t do it, those patients tell him. You can’t.
McMurphy
readies himself. He struggles and struggles, pushes and
pushes until he is forced to give up.
We
told you.
“But
I tried, didn’t I goddamnit, at least I did that” (One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).
A
lobotomy for McMurphy! Professor John Henrik Clarke used
to say, if the leader falls, turn the page and move on!
What is the threat from the Chief who echoed the “powers”
and has been assisting in implementing the death sentence
on his spirit to resist. But now he, long alienated from
even an image of his own power, remembers! Chief remembers.
He
“frees” McMurphy before he lifts the marble fountain and
“awakens” the other patients to the possibilities for
living free...
Someone show the people that the impossible is possible!
At
11:08 p.m. on September 21, 2011, the U.S. justice system
executed Troy Anthony Davis whom a half million people,
including Arch-bishop Tutu, Former President Jimmy Carter,
and Former FBI Director William Sessions believed was
innocent of the murder of police officer Mark Mac Phial.
Thousands around the world signed petitions and protested
on behalf of Davis.
His family dedicated the last 22 years to appealing to
local and federal authorities, to the Supreme Court, to
the White House, to anyone who would listen.
But
did anyone listen?
That
is it, isn’t it? This U.S.
government no longer listens to its citizens, to the people
of the world. The plutocrats, the heads of corporations,
the 1 percent wealthy and “powerful” merchants of death
have lifted the veil. No more illusions, our dear people!
And
now we know what Douglass, Wells, Goodman, Debs, Fanon,
Newton, Malcolm,
and King knew.
Justice!
Ask
the thousands of dead children and adults buried in Iraq,
in Afghanistan,
in Pakistan. Ask the survivors
of U.S.
aggression living in Korea
and Vietnam.
Ask them in Chile
and Argentina, in Guatemala about the CIA-backed personnel that
assisted and trained native police and soldiers to imprison,
torture, and kill innocent men, women, and children.
Justice!
Ask
the thousands, many of whom gave their lives for decent
working environments and wages, for civil and human rights,
for the right of mother Earth.
Justice!
Slain
leaders of the people…
Corporate
take over of the basic resources for survival…
Fifty
percent of the U.S. budget is consecrated
money for the propagation of war…
Berate
the uninsured and the unemployed while praising the executives
for receiving “well-deserved” bonuses…
Justice!
There
is only the Empire’s “just war” led by the current Emperor,
and he has yet to respond to the will of the people.
A
mile from the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison
entrance and some distance from protesters, independent
journalist, Amy Goodman, producer, camera person, assistants,
standing hours within a police-designated space, without
food, ordered to remain or lose the right to return and
communicate to the public, the world. Witness here!
Protest here! Another area is designated for the
family, close friends, civic and political leaders. Mourn
and speak here!
Let
us entertain you! Ride our rollercoaster: Here comes a
Stay. No here comes an execution. A Stay? No! The camera
pans to area behind the journalist and zooms in on protesters
in the dark. Sirens sound and a stream of blue lights.
More troopers and local police!
“The
application for stay of execution of sentence of death
presented to Justice Thomas and by him referred to the
court is denied.”
We
have given him a physical and we are giving him a little
cocktail now: sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide,
and potassium chloride.
And remember: We have the maze, the tasers, and the
bullets - the keys to the prison!
Are
we not the people of the United States or are we on Death Row too - sentenced
to harassment, torture and death if we dare think, question,
witness and protest? Look world! Look at what democracy
means in the United States! Look at Fascism
in the United
States! Look at what happens, as
Angela Davis notes, when a “political event is reduced
to a criminal event in order to affirm the absolute invulnerability
of the existing order!” (If
They Come in the Morning).
Storm the Bastille!
“Thanks
to the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the
expanded powers Congress granted to the NSA, and the new
constellations of law enforcement, our First Amendment
rights and Fourth Amendment rights have taken a big hit,”
writes Matthew
Rothschild, The Progressive, September 10,
2011). The “warrantless spying” of the NSA under Bush
II, “has now become legal by an act of Congress. The Foreign
Intelligence Court is even more of a rubberstamp than
ever before.” The Joint Terrorism Task Forces “have turned
campus police, city cops, and sheriffs essentially into
FBI agents,” and Fusion Centers “combine the most local
law enforcement with the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA into
what the ACLU calls ‘the total surveillance society.’”
We
killed not only Troy Anthony Davis, with each installment
of repressive measures, we are each receiving our sentencing:
the Death Penalty! Some of us are on Death Row! The wonton
disregard for the health of citizens has sentenced many
to death by cancer-inducing chemicals that contaminate
our water and air or from the lack of employment, housing,
food, the Empire’s trade in drugs and weapons, and its
enlistment of our young to fight in its arenas of war.
And
yet, we have protested and witnessed the atrocities of
the Iron Heel in designated spaces while it has dared
us to move!
Storm the Bastille!
Imagine
if in the dark, on the grounds of that Georgia
prison, U.S.
citizens straightened up and moved collectively forward
- in the dark, U.S. citizens approaching the prison doors. Hundreds
of thousands of angry workers before us, hundreds of thousand
civil rights marchers before us, joined with millions
around the world.
Storm the Bastille!
If
we had the courage to move beyond the barricades, if we
had the courage to defy the plutocracy and its legions
of armed thugs, if we had the courage to defy the senseless
rage of the Empire, we would say no more petitions and
pleading to the deaf. We are organizing with our brothers
and sisters in Germany,
in Spain,
Portugal, Greece,
Iceland,
France, England,
Chile,
and Guatemala.
There
we are, among the world’s millions! There we are strong
in numbers! We are organizing, organizing, organizing
to create a government that serves the people! We are
organizing, organizing, organizing until one day, to echo
Sergio Vieira, “colonialism and imperialism/are only words
which are found/in a dictionary of archaic terms” (“Four
Parts for A Poem on Education”).
And not any one of us dies in vain on our watch!
