March 15th, 2022 | Edmund Washington
How often is the government making great promises for future change just to collect our votes? I guess the better question is how are we still buying into the same narrative? The reason this needs to be addressed is because we allow politicians, legislators, and the judicial system entirely too much power. False promises of lowered taxes, reformative change, and justice are force-fed to the masses in warped messages until the masses regurgitate this same narrative with the belief of safety, security, and control. What safety? What security? The masses have found comfort in a system they don't understand and cling to it with a fear of change.
We have been given a cookie cutter vision of what life is supposed to be, yet, if we challenge it, we are considered a threat. Look at the Black Panther Party and their food program. A couple people thought to feed the youth in poverty-stricken neighborhoods only to be co-opted, stripped of farmland, made to be a threat, and killed. But by who? The power apparatus that we allow to be in place only leads to the death of our youth today whether it be by gun fire from blue suits or the prison systems across the United States.
Too many of us would rather tread the line with our head down stuck in this repressed state of living without thinking fully of the lives lost to get us to this point in the first place (Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Huey Newton, Assata Shakur, etc.). The narrative was flipped to make victims of racism that chose to hold their head high against the government into menaces. And this is the government the masses are content with. Stuck in the land of the fee and the home of the slave yet most can't see what the hidden hand is doing. And here we are battling daily with the shadow of an ideology that had no place for us at the table but all the room in the world for us in the backyard. If the oppressed don't recognize that the crumbs we've been feasting on aren’t enough to sustain the whole, we'll find ourselves in a similar situation to the Africans under Portuguese colonial rule, specifically Cape Verde. To tell you the truth we're headed in that direction by allowing those in power to use the sin of spin to avoid and deflect for their right to be of the one percent. We must recognize that being content in our situation is the cousin of stagnation and our resistance against the government and its hostile acts of genocide and gross negligence are kin to our growth as a collective.
Too many trusted people that look like us are given a seat to create the microcosmic apparatus of neocolonialism. Stooges merely put in place to appease those they are supposed to represent, but instead hold their fellow peoples head below water for the government that cares very little for them as well. (Pause, if you're offended at that last comment, I'm talking about you, not to you). The people sit and wait for those stooges to act on the inconsistencies and unjust acts only to be met with a docile domesticated speech. If we don't know our history, we are doomed to repeat it. Until we (the People) are ready to do what it takes to remove not only the power apparatus but also the leeches it feeds to pacify us and have a viable plan for the community, we will remain in a downward spiral. There's a difference between the bourgeoisie, the masses, reformists, and abolitionists. Which are you?