On the Situation of Youth and BA Everywhere Fundraising:
"I received a phone call..."
June 30, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
I received a phone call this morning informing me that a 15-year-old, you guessed it, Black youth was killed by the Chicago police. I began watching news coverage of the shooting on TV and reading various accounts of what happened in the local media. According to them—and this has been corroborated by people living in the neighborhood—the police were called into the area after reports of gunfire. According to the police they saw a man running with a gun. They ordered the person to stop. Their spokesperson, Pat Camden, who's made this same statement hundreds of times, went on to say that the suspect turned and pointed a gun at officers. That's when these officers opened fire, hitting the suspect multiple times and killing him.
The killing of 15-year-old Michael Westley by these cops happened in the context of what has been described as a spike in violent crime in the city over the weekend—30 people wounded, 7 killed. Some community leaders and clergy people are on the airwaves saying that the police are doing all they can to curb the violence and that we need the community, the parents, the teachers and clergymen to step up. Blaming everyone for this madness but this system and its enforcers (the police).
Heading over to the area where this shooting took place, I began to think about a recent graduation I attended of several alternative schools. I was very moved and brought to tears after hearing student after student tell their stories and the struggles they went through just to be able to graduate. I remember one young woman telling the young men how proud she was of them and that she knows how hard it is for them to just survive and still they had made it there that day. One of the administrators echoed that sentiment later in the program by saying three students had been killed in the week leading up to graduation and several others over the course of the year. She also spoke about the young women who had kids while still in school, and while she didn't go through this herself she said she knew how hard it must have been to get up in the middle of the night to tend to their child and still make it to school the next day.
I was surprised to see that about 70 percent of the young women were accepted into junior colleges here in the city and other parts of the country and only about 3 to 5 percent of the young men. What was even more disturbing than the low percentage of the young men going to college was the large number of them who had already joined one or another branch of the armed forces. For many of these young men this is what they were going to do with their lives after finishing school. In both these incidents—the tragic death of a 15-year-old Black youth and what seemed to be a joyous graduation—I found myself reflecting on the message and call, "The Revolution We Need, The Leadership We Have."
"Look at what this system is doing to youth right here in the USA. For millions in the inner cities, if they are not killed at an early age, their likely future is prison (nearly 1 in 8 young Black men is incarcerated, the prisons are overflowing with Blacks and Latinos, and this country has the highest rate of incarceration of women in the world). This system has robbed so many youth of the chance for a decent life and has got far too many living, dying and killing for nothing—nothing good—nothing more than messing up people and murdering each other on the streets of the cities here...or joining the military, being trained to be murderers on a mass scale, massacring people in countries across the globe. A system which offers millions and millions of youth no greater purpose, no better fate, than crime and punishment, or to become a mindless killing machine for the system itself—that alone is reason enough to sweep this system from the face of the earth!"
And that's exactly what this movement for revolution is setting out to do. It is exactly what the BA Everywhere campaign is all about—sweeping this system (that causes so much hardship and misery not just here but all around the world) from the face of the earth.
I remember being told by my parents if I didn't straighten up and fly right I would be dead or in jail before I was 21, and there was some truth to what they were saying. You either conformed to the status quo or you pay the piper.
I, like so many other youth of that time, was very fortunate there was another alternative to all the negative shit youth were drawn to back then—not that much different than a lot of the shit the youth are caught up into today. All the mano a mano crap, making a quick buck at other people's expense and degrading women and self—the whole nine yards. All that bullshit we were caught up in was being challenged both by the civil rights movement and even more so by the emerging movement for revolution that developed during the '60s. Thousands of youth like myself from the ghettos to the barrios, from high schools to major colleges, became part of this revolutionary movement. For many of us there was/is nothing more liberating that we could do with our lives, and in the process of fighting back against this system we came to understand through a lot of struggle that there is something that is worth living for, worth dying for, worth struggling to bring into being. A communist world.
In BAsics 3:17 BA makes the following point:
People say: "You mean to tell me that these youth running around selling drugs and killing each other, and caught up in all kinds of other stuff, can be a backbone of this revolutionary state power in the future?" Yes—but not as they are now, and not without struggle. They weren't always selling drugs and killing each other and the rest of it—and they don't have to be into all that in the future. Ask yourself: how does it happen that you go from beautiful children to supposedly "irredeemable monsters" in a few years? It's because of the system, and what it does to people—not because of "unchanging and unchangeable human nature."
Compare these two futures for the youth: the one that this system offers, a life of misery and brutality, versus them becoming leaders of the revolution, transforming the world while transforming themselves. The leading edge of this movement for revolution is the BA Everywhere campaign—a fundraising campaign to raise big bucks to get Bob Avakian—BA—his voice and work way out there in society, far beyond what it is today. I want people who have donated, who are thinking about donating, and those who decided not to, to think about this: Imagine if the youth in the neighborhood where this 15-year-old youth was killed and thousands of others like it across the city and country were into BA's new synthesis of communism, reading BAsics and watching his DVD BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, wrangling over national oppression, women's oppression, the destruction of the environment, and endless wars—where these horrors stem from and what can be done about them. Imagine when these military recruiters come into our schools recruiting our kids to defend and expand its empire the youth in these schools greet them with BAsics 1:3: "The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism."
Imagine youth caught up in all this madness, imagine if they were imbued with the truth: This is not the best of all possible worlds and we don't have to live this way, and the youth and others were acting on that truth. Imagine that. We are setting out to change the world. In order to do this we need money. Your money is an important part of making this happen. Donate now.
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