If we do not dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible by a slave is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.
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.
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!
When they tell you
I’m not a prisoner
don’t believe them.
When they tell you
they released me
don’t believe them.
they’ll have to admit
it’s a lie
some day.
-Ariel Dorfman, “Last Will and Testament”
Citizens of the U.S., we don’t hear you! We don’t fear you! We don’t have to listen to you!
And we will answer: No longer Empire of the world, do you hear us? Your application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented by us, the people, to the peoples’ court is denied!
Storm the Bastille!
Storm the Bastille!
***
Note: Thanks to journalist Amy Goodman, her producers, and assistants at Democracy Now!, the only media broadcast courageous enough to broadcast live from the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison on September 21, 2011.
Thanks to journalist and host, Robert Knight, (The Five O’Clock Shadow, WBAI) for his two-day coverage of Troy Davis’ murder, including his interview with a representative Maya Foa from Reprieve.org.uk.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.
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