Mumia
Abu-Jamal's Radio Broadcasts
You
Call This a Debate?
[Col. Recorded
10/15/04]
To think about
the third 'debate' at Arizona State U., is a painful, quite unpleasant
process.
My most vivid
sensation was a stunning feeling of deja vu — the vivid perception
that I've seen this before.
No. I'm serious.
For the better part of 2 or 3 minutes, I stood in the midst of my
cell, arms akimbo, looking and listening, and wondering ... damn!
Is this live ...? Or is this a tape of the second debate?'
The same lines
... virtually word for word .. from before.
It was almost
dizzying. And then, I noticed that the corporate media moderator
was different.
It was live
— but just barely.
No matter who
wins the regency of the Empire, there will undoubtedly be millions
— tens of millions — multiples of millions of people who
will have sat out this election.
While it is almost certain that increased voter registration will
swell the electorate, there will be millions of eligibles who have
not bothered to cast their ballots.
Why are there
millions of people who won't vote? Well, if they listened to those
debates, could you blame them?
For millions
of working people, for people who can be called 'the working poor',
for single mothers (and their children badly deteriorating in public
schools), for them,
be they Black, Latino, poor whites, you name it, once was far more
than enough — for there was nothing for you in the mouths of
the President, George W. Bush, or Sen. John F. Kerry.
Forgotten people,
why should they be remembered at some corny debate, when they're
forgotten every other day of the year?
They were not
speaking to those people; nor were they speaking of those people.
It's safe to guess they have nothing to tell them; and yet, those
very people, the
working poor, will undoubtedly be expected to vote for one of the
two major political party's offerings.
Essentially,
they are expected to shut up and vote, in the blind hope that things
will improve. That the economy will improve. That good-paying jobs
will return. That the neighborhood public school will improve. That
racist cops will curb racial profiling.
This, despite
the fact that this has never happened before. Our revered ancestor,
Frederick Douglass, informed us, over a century ago:
The whole history
of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions, yet
made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The
conflict has been exciting, agitating, all absorbing, and for the
time being putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this
or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation,
are men who want
crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder
and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical
one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.
*Power concedes nothing without demand.*
Looking at
these tepid, paltry debates, contrasted with the very real problems,
both at home and abroad, that face the nation, one can only wonder:
where is the demand?
Sen. Kerry
may almost coast to victory on the fuel of an anti-Bush vote. He,
in truth, promises little more than a pledge to not be as stupid
as his opponent in the waging
of the fraudulent 'war on terror.'
It may take
years; it may take decades, but, eventually, people will turn away
from the corporate parties. These parties are but anachronisms,
hoary, dusty relics of another era. The time must come when they
will go the way of the Whigs, and the
Know-nothing parties. It is inevitable.
May that time
not be too long in coming.
For if Kerry
wins, and does little more than continue Bush's nationalistic and
narrow-minded policies, who will have won?
Copyright
2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Submitted by:
Sis. Marpessa
Text
© copyright 2003 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
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