Published in Intrepid Report on July 5, 2012
By Larry Pinkney
“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”—Frantz Fanon
“ . . . I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”—Howard Zinn
You are Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow. You are female and male. Most of all however, are in your late teens, your twenties, or your thirties; and you yearn for a nation and a world that is based firmly upon a genuine and active respect for economic, political, and social fair-play and human rights throughout Mother Earth. And even though you face the arrogance, cynicism, stealth, wrath, and brutality of an entrenched and greedy self-legitimized corporate syndicate known as ‘the United States government,’ you know in your hearts and minds that if you do not act and stand firm, the peoples of this nation and of this entire precious planet will be doomed. You are our younger sisters and brothers of the 21st century—and you are strong, determined, and beautiful.
We, your older brothers and sisters, are proud of you, though we have not told you nearly often enough. You are the collective leaders of both today and tomorrow and you are already feeling the brunt of this hypocritical, avaricious, and brutal corporate/military system. Yet, if humankind is to survive (and it must), it will surely be due to your principled sacrifices and actions.
We, your older sisters and brothers in this urgent, ongoing, long and protracted everyday people’s struggle, know only too well how corrupt, diabolical and treacherous this corporate/military political system is. We watch in rage and horror as the elite greedy vultures of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Lockheed, the banksters, pharmaceutical and insurance corporations, and a further endless list that won’t be missed, wage an economic, political, and psychological war of terror against everyday ordinary people in the United States and throughout the world. We watch in rage and horror as your futures are hocked and stolen from you by these bloodsuckers of the corporate elite and their insidious symbiotically joined politicos of both the Democrat and Republican parties. We watch in rage and horror as you are repeatedly lied to by the corporate White House, the corporate Congress, and the corporate courts. You are made to pay on college and university student loans by a corporate-controlled political system that in fact should have provided you with 1) a free ‘education’ and 2) a system of universal single payer health care—both of which you have been denied. Then, of course, there is the de facto economic military draft which ensnares and entraps young people as the cannon fodder for the corporate military-industrial comple, which wages perpetual bloody wars and military conflicts throughout Mother Earth.
From the ‘Occupy’ Movement to the extremely important WikiLeaks revelations we, your older brothers and sisters, watch your bold and principled actions with trembling hearts and enormous pride. Despite the slimy efforts by the pathetic so-called mainstream (i.e., corporate-stream) U.S. “news” media to ignore, distort and/or denigrate your actions, we see your resourcefulness and creativity in forming your own everyday people’s media and we smile and applaud you.
It is obvious that you, our younger sisters and brothers, understand and are utilizing and spreading the words of the late Howard Zinn when he correctly said, “Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” Of course the “slavery” of today is economic and psychological and is being waged against everyday people of all colors by an insidious elite consisting of men and women of varying pigmentations. Today’s slavery has been tweaked by those who represent and/or control the machinery of this corrupt political system. We too must be creative in our resistance to this systemic slavery.
Rosa Luxemburg so aptly conveyed what this struggle today continues to be about when she said, “Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.” Be All You Can Be—Be A People’s Revolutionary!
Yes, my sisters and brothers of all ages (young and old alike). Destiny salutes you/us. Or as Frantz Fanon put it, “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.” There’s work to be done. Let’s do this thing collectively.
Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward then, my sisters and brothers. Onward!
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. In connection with his political organizing activities, Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Pinkney is a former university instructor of political science and international relations, and his writings have been published in various places, including The Boston Globe, San Francisco BayView newspaper, Black Commentator, Intrepid Report, Global Research (Canada), LINKE ZEITUNG (Germany), 107Cowgate (Ireland and Scotland), and Mayihlome News (Azania/South Africa). 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.)
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