Free Your Mind!
Taylor Branch’s 2nd part of the “King Trilogy” - Pillar of Fire - got off to a disappointing start so I put it down for now and picked up a collection of Steve Biko’s essays entitled I Write What I Like. Of course, I would like that book right? The book is amazing. I beg you - even if you don’t have time to read the whole book - to pick it up and read chapter 6 called “We Blacks”. Biko was bad. Like many of my other heroes, he was harassed, arrested, and eventually killed by the police. He was the face and spirit of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement.
Hopefully, some of you will pick this book up. Perhaps even some young people out there will dare to put down William Shakespeare, Of Mice & Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird and pick up this powerful book that does more to stimulate the mind to consciousness and the body to action.
I also hope that all of you are enjoying the videos that I post on the side. I find them to be very educational and inspirational. We really do have to fight to feed our minds and spirits that which will encourage growth. Corporate media, state sanctioned education (read conditioning) and government sponsored religion serves to repress the greatest abilities of the mind all the while lulling the masses to sleep. Our children are shaped and molded to be cogs in the wheel of their own destruction. If they do question their surroundings, many of them lack the strength to challenge cowardly adults who answer, “That’s just the way it is”. This may be the way it is, but this doesn’t have to be the way it will always be. For the past century, it has been the youth who have lead the way or infused revolutionary movements around the world. I have little confidence in adults and their system. The White Power Structure (notice I didn’t say White People) is a vicious animal that will only be defeated by the organized power and directed energy of a passionate legion of true citizens. For I believe to be a full “citizen” one must devote time, energy, and resources toward the improvement of society.
Black Panther and Political Prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, speaks about the youth and the society that rejects them in this week’s featured video. Take a look and let me know what you think in the comments section below.
