“…we will not surrender our humanity!”
July 17, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Pelican Bay
7/11/13
Revolutionary Greetings!
Today is the 4th day of the hunger/work strike and our strength is as strong as ever! There is no end in sight to our efforts here to obtain human rights.
The Revolution newspaper and its coverage of the peaceful protest is what keeps us going knowing we are not forgotten and that the world is watching! So far as of today we have not been weighed nor have we seen a nurse or DR. CDCR and Pelican Bay are not following protocol, instead they make up their own protocol for their own ends. This is now an indefinite strike which will only stop if the five demands are met.
Today the prison began playing a propaganda film on the prison T.V. channel which "warned" of what happens to the body if you don't eat. We laughed, if they were so concerned they would meet our five demands. We have learned from the brave men in Guantánamo Bay that people can last 100+ days on hunger strike so we will continue with our strike!
We are tortured and have been held in inhumane conditions for too long, one way or the other this torture will stop! These control units took enough of our youth, enough of our minds, enough of our lives and it will not continue.
I am firmly moving forward, physically I feel a little lightheaded but the hunger pains are no longer as sharp, I have begun to keep my mind on other things and focus on the goal of ending this torture. I think of the many people who have travelled this path before and who were in a situation like us where the idea of "struggle" takes on a new form, a raw mode of existence which only has two options or two poles which are life or death. No longer are we grappling with abstract concepts, rather our lives are literally hanging in the balance, this is the ultimate struggle where no other options are on the table. This is the complete repression that we are facing from the state and we will not surrender our humanity!
As a prisoner who has experienced close to a decade in solitary confinement not for a crime or infraction but for the state's reliance on an informants false allegations, for thought crimes and ultimately for prison activism, I fully understand this rotten system and its program of national oppression that is unleashed on the mostly Brown or Black peoples.
Although in reality our current prison strikes are essentially working for reforms to change our living conditions and we will obtain some change, our real change will never come about under a Capitalist system. New forms of oppression will continue to rise in different ways and we will only truly obtain a real transformation in prisons when a Socialist society is created, only then will we truly end repression in prisons.
En La Lucha!
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