To Fellow Travelers Who Have Considered Suicide When Resistance is Enough

The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village. Provided that he can be mayor, or humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or add to the savings in his strongbox, he considers the universal order good, unaware of those giants with seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, or of the strife in the heavens between comets that go through the air asleep, gulping down worlds. What remains the village in

At some point, you have to say “enough is enough. – You will not bury me in it so that I become a zombie among the walking dead.”

Your spirit of resistance is in danger! Hollowness becomes fashionable. The dead see to infect or drain you of that spirit.

Misery loves company.

But it is futile to seek freedom in battle with the dead. Strategies to gain freedom must have as a central goal the removal of human-made systems of oppression – no matter how many corpses surrounding you say otherwise in an attempt to distract you.

It is in this knowledge of resistance that we join others anywhere on Earth in the pursuit of freedom. It is in this spirit of resistance that we maintain our humanity: we maybe victimized but never surrender to victimhood. It is in this spirit of resistance that we can say to the clever aid-ers and abetters alike, “we know you, too and we see in your appeasement glorified road blocks with labels: Democratic Party, Tea Party, the American Way.” In Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics, Joy James writes that the system as well as Black aid-ers and abetters contributed to the “closure of Black rebellion”: “once a person disembarks at the Promised Land, the final destination of the ‘North’ as geopolitical terrain or chair of the Democratic National Committee as prime political landscape, insurrection becomes ‘folly.’”

Ours is the road less taken and increasingly so in these times when government capitulation to corporate pressure signals the capitalists’ fear of losing control. Austerity measures, privatization, de-regulation and police states shift fear to the people who, in turn, are urged to recognize in our voices and see in us the “folly” of insurrection.

It has increasingly become a chaotic and cruel world. We are urged to die – and quickly! It is no wonder the corporate media, while mocking our anger and passion, misinforms our youth with slick advertisement proclaiming racism, sexism, imperialism dead, and uses a man as dead as a doorknob and as Black as snow to lie to a nation, to the world (change is here; freedom is now!) and who, in the course of his ascendance, has lured the masses of youth and Black Americans to Zombieland, where they roam to this day, wandering and foundering in a state of confusion.

The corporate world did what was best to sustain the system of capitalism and to enrich and further empower its class. It concocted its best trick ever when it selected the best representative from among the dead to represent its interests and goals.

It is a matter of survival!

The true meaning of freedom must survive too if the Earth and its people have a future as inhabiters of this planet. By its own definition, capitalism cannot sustain life on this planet. “Freedom, to be viable, has to be sincere and complete. If a republic refuses to open its arms to all, and move ahead with all, it dies,” (Jose Marti, “Our America”).

Any of us committed, however, to serious and fundamental change – radical disruption of systems of race, gender and economic divisions – any of us activists, writers, journalists, educators, thinkers – intellectuals because we refuse to live as dead and reject shallow offerings from the road blocks – need to remember, as Edward Said urged us to remember that “an intellectual does not represent a statue-like icon, but an individual vocation, an energy, a stubborn force engaging as a committed and recognizable voice in language and in society with a whole slew of issues, all of them having to do in the end with a combination of enlightenment and emancipation or freedom” (Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures).

We are armed for battle: we have knowledge of the spirit of resistance. In this spirit, we are strong. When we meet, we will recognize one another by the work we do, that is, by the “barricades of ideas” we help form in the battle to preserve life on this planet.