“You Gotta Think About How We’re Going To Get Free Of All This”
November 6, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader
I want to recount a recent experience I had with a friend of mine because I think it has some important lessons as we enter into this last week of building for the historic Dialogue between Cornel West and Bob Avakian on Religion and Revolution: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion.
Tricia [not her real name] and I have worked together and gotten to know each other over the last period of time, especially during the Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. Tricia is someone who has had a very hard life, someone has been catching hell from the system for decades. She’s experienced the violence of women’s oppression and has sons—so she knows the horror of having your children become the victims of police brutality and prison.
Tricia is really on fire about fighting the system around mass incarceration, always talking about the horrors of the U.S. prison system and thinking about how we can fight to put a stop to the way this system is putting so may young people behind bars.
A couple of days ago I called Tricia up because I wanted to invite her to a revolutionary event that I thought she would really enjoy and get a lot out of. It was something I thought could deepen her understanding of why we need revolution, nothing less and give her insight into the real human potential that is both crushed and wasted by this system—but also can be unleashed by the fight to emancipate humanity.
When I told her about the event she immediately started telling me about all the different things she had to do, including some political protests she was preparing for. But in particular there was a real time conflict with her being able to go to the revolutionary event because that was the same day she needed to deal with a very painful situation where one of her relatives is really being brutally fucked with by the “criminal injustice system.”
Tricia basically told me that she couldn’t come but I wanted to tell her more about why I thought she should come—and I also wanted to try and see if there was perhaps a way we might work it out so that she could be able to attend to the situation with her relative but then also be able to go to the revolutionary event. Tricia got pretty stubborn about this and actually a little mad at me. She started telling me how she really has to focus on these different struggles she is involved in and dealing with her personal situation and kind of implied “I didn’t understand” what she was up against.
I said to her at this point, “Hold up, just step back for a moment. I’m not saying that all the things that you are fighting around are not important and that you shouldn’t be doing them. They are important and you should be fighting around all these different things. Yes, we got to be doing that, for sure. And the situation with your relative is just another example of how fucked up this system is and why we got to keep fighting.
“BUT,” I said to her, “you gotta step back and think about how we’re going to really put an end to all this fucked up shit. How are we going to really get free of all this? We don’t want to just keep fighting this shit for years and years and years. We need to get to a situation where we won’t even have things like what is happening to your relative. We need to get to a whole different world and this is what the revolution is all about. That’s why I’m trying to get you to come to this event.”
Well, to say the least, this didn’t really go over that well in that moment. It only got Tricia more upset. I think because she still thought I was saying the other things she’s doing are unimportant, or that I was being insensitive to the situation with her relative—even though I was explicitly saying this was not the case. Anyway, things got to a point where she was kind of yelling at me and not willing to let me say anything. So I very calmly said to her, “I don’t think that this conversation is really very helpful right now. I don’t feel like you’re really listening or considering what I’m saying. So I’m going to hang up now and we can talk about this later.”
Well, the next day I went to the revolutionary event. At one point after it started, I turned around and looked to the back of the room and saw Tricia. Afterwards we talked briefly, she told me that she really enjoyed the program. The next day she texted me, apologizing for yelling at me. She told me that she doesn’t want to put anyone down because it destroys the human spirit—that she fights this all the time.
So I was really glad that Tricia came to the program. But whether she had come or not I think there is something to learn from this. I really wanted to fight it through with her because what we were arguing about did concentrate something about how people have to really lift their heads above the daily shit this system puts you through. Sometimes that means getting above the every day bullshit you have to go through just to pay the rent and put food on the table. But it can also mean rising above just the struggles against all the shit this system does to the people—which we really do have to fight—and seeing how this must be part of the bigger movement for revolution to get rid of all this oppression for real, once and for all—all over the world. We are all in this together and we do have to help people figure out and resolve difficult personal contradictions and situations. But there has to be a deeper struggle for people to take responsibility for becoming emancipators of humanity—to bring about a whole new world WITHOUT all this oppressive shit that comes down on the people.
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.