The Revolutionary mind is both hazard and safe haven. Its functions are both obsolete and absolutely necessary. It yields the power of destruction and creation. Its life course is both chaos and supreme order. It is this paradox which I have found myself for the last 18 months of my life swimming, gasping for breaths of life’s fresh air between the long dives down into the depths of what we call our human condition. To occupy the revolutionary mind is to do no more or less than to drown in the current of our reality, to accept all for what it is, and at the same time reject everything we’ve become. The revolutionary mind is a wind-up toy. It knows not what it is in the beginning stages and the vessel which contains it is equally oblivious as to the fate it will be subjected to as a result of this mind it carries. It starts as a sponge, a young, beautiful, vibrant sponge soaking up the seemingly infinite amount of data the world around it contains. It finds itself lost in the pages of books, mesmerized by the innateness of nature and most of all, obsessed with those things in life that don’t seem quite right. Over time, the latent function of the mind begins to reveal itself – not only to understand this symbolic code we call meaning and the ways in which we create it, but ultimately its job is to put straight those aspects of human life which no longer make sense. The first time something didn’t make sense to me I was 5 years old. My mother, high yellow skinned, bearing her obnoxious 90s style box glasses, belly poking out 9 months pregnant with my second little sister, sat in the living room with me staring silently at our tube television as two towers spat and billowed black smoke from them. The tv anchor said someone had flown a plane into the side of each tower. I told her I was scared and didn’t want to go to school (apparently I couldn’t stop looking out the window for planes in the following days and weeks). Then one of the towers fell. My mother fell into hysterics. My sister was born three days later. In the weeks after that event that everybody was calling “9/11” we sat in front of the tv as every night news anchors and special journalists reported on every aspect of what I was now being called “terrorism”. I must have had some genius capacity to understand things at such a young age. I knew these men came from a land called the Middle East. We watched every night as they informed us as to just how these men were to be tracked down and killed. I vividly recall at the time that the U.S. Government was using a system based on playing cards to rank the most wanted perpetrators of the plot as well as those who were “aiding and abetting” them. On each card would be the face of some brown skinned man, usually bearing a grimace and long black/black and white beard. They called these people radical islamists, jihadists, al-qaeda. The cards started from the deuce and went all the way up to the Ace, a man named Bin-Laden. That name would hang over the first decade or so of my cognitive development. His henchman, who apparently was harboring Bin-Laden and other “Al-Qaeda opperatives” was a man named Sadam Hussein. We watched night in and night out on the t.v. as war ensued. This was my introduction to how the world works – fairy tales and long days spent examining nature included – I learned that weapons of mass destruction were being hidden somewhere (LOL). I asked my mother what weapons of mass destruction were. Bless her heart, she told me that they were bombs that could destroy very big areas of land, whole countries even. I asked her if they were going to drop one on us, she told me no, that our army would protect us and find the man who was hiding these bombs. Again, bless her heart. We watched as more people, brown skinned like me and my sisters, were killed on a nightly basis, some by our own military, many others by a constant barrage of domestic terrorist attacks. Clips of soldiers running around corners, ducking and taking cover, returning fire with menacing looking rifles and more clips of bombs bombs and more bombs flooded the t.v. not only in the coming weeks and months, but years. Global war is the context of my generation’s upbringing. I remember learning about a man named Martin Luther King. We had a poster of him in my house with a long speech written on it, my mom called it the “I Have a Dream” speech. I memorized the last part of the speech and gave it to my 2nd grade class as part of show and tell one day. I wasn’t sure what it was about the words but they seemed to put a part of me to peace. It wasn’t much later that I learned Martin Luther King had to give a speech about his dream because white people in the world don’t treat black people – like us – fairly and that Martin Luther King was sent by God to do right by us. I cried when I learned he was shot in the head. He was my first hero. It wasn’t until middle school though, that I began to form an appetite for revolution. I learned of a man named Kunta Kinte from watching the t.v. with my parents. The VERY FIRST scene of Roots I watched Kunta was jumping into the back of a hay wagon, when I asked my parents where he was running from my father told me he was a slave and was running from his plantation where they forced him to work. When the white men caught him they tied him to a tree and cut off his foot. My dad told me that’s what all of our people went through. I was watching my own history. Upon further watching the series with my parents I insisted on reading the book. My mom told me she had the book in the basement, a thick beige hard cover with brown binding reading plainly “Roots, by Alex Haley” was placed in my hands and I blew the dust off of it (I had always dreamed of doing that). As I read late into the night I found out that Kunta Kinte came from an African tribe called Mandingo and worshipped a God named Allah. Their way of life was fascinating; almost like something of the fairy tales I had used to read. They built cities in the midst of the jungle, they had no police or stores or guns or schools or any of the things that made me anxious about going into the everyday (yes I still to this day can’t stand most stores) and lived happy lives filled with music and dance and the biggest decisions were made by everybody’s grandpas and grandmas who they called “the elders”. I was heartbroken when Kunta was captured in the middle of his manhood rite of passage; I almost gagged when the conditions of the middle passage were described. In fact, I had to stop reading. Not much later than that a Hurricane called Katrina hit New Orleans and I particularly remember how distraught my father, originally from the Mississippi Delta, was about the fact that black people were being left to die without food and water. One morning we watched as a helicopter camera flew over New Orleans, bodies were floating in the water and old people were left to die of thirst, disease, and starvation on their front porches. I remember the same military which had invaded Iraq and later Afghanistan marching into New Orleans. My mother screamed at the t.v. the next night when they called these people “refugees” and stopped them from crossing a bridge into safety with a line of men brandishing more rifles. Around this time the world stopped making sense to me. The revolutionary mind though, does not come into its full fledgeness until it decides for itself that all of these things about the world cannot be right, and – this is the key – that something MUST be done to stop whatever it is that makes humans fly planes into buildings, bomb people’s homes, fill streets with soldiers. However, one thing I’ve noticed about most others throughout history who have had minds others deemed “revolutionary” is that they don’t quite get the point of action until this madness the world has been plunged into rips something from their very own lives. One day after my middle school had gave all of the 6th grade boys “the talk” I came home to my father looking as if he had news that somebody in the family had died. He sat me down and explained to me that he was not my biological father. My world crashed. I’ve actually blocked out most of the memory from my mind to this day. After hearing the words the most I can remember is sobbing over a plate of pancakes, eggs and sausage (my parents were smart to comfort me with breakfast for dinner) while mindlessly watching Spongebob on our mini t.v. I later learned that he was from the Southside of Chicago, his name was Donald Douglas, my mother had no picture of him, he only called once when I was a toddler and though he was a brilliant legal mind in Chicago and eventually working for a man named Don Nickerson who would go on to be on the Iowa Supreme Court, ultimately the conditions of the ghetto from which he had come had infected him with the disease of addiction and depression. To this day I have not seen his face, not even a photograph. That was the source of my true pain, that loss, knowing that the madness of the world had stolen from me what was supposed to be a sacred part of my life’s story. Stolen from me – and him – simply because we are Black. As I grew older and started to deliberate as to what I wanted to do with my life I found that this mind of mine was well suited to do a great number of amazing things. I could do geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. I could write stories, long and short, fiction and non-fiction, as well as poetry. As well as I could write I could read and understand the vast complexities of the worlds of authors such as Rowling, Konigsburg, Hemmingway, Bacon, Baldwin, Silko, Shakespeare and Voltaire. I could observe, analyze, and successfully experiment on the infinite repetition of the physical sciences – drinking in biology, chemistry and physics as if they were gospel. All of these things made me a prime candidate for scholarships to virtually any school in the world. My mind had created for me the opportunity to prosper to the fullest of my heart’s desires in the world, the only limitation being my own imagination. Originally I wanted to go to the University of Iowa to study journalism and report on the destruction that was and still is occurring in the Middle East and now North and West Africa. I was told I wanted a death sentence. So I chose Political Science, much to the pleasure of my glowing family. When it became clear in my first month or so of Poli Sci classes that the area of study is ultimately framed in a way that attempts to make sense out of the utter chaos that our political system rather than condemning it for what it is, I switched to Sociology, a study which would at least allow me to examine the decay of society. Even within Sociology though I found that for every academic studying and arguing that there is social decay, this school of thought also harbored those thinkers who engineered and continue to engineer the destruction of my people and other innocent people’s worldwide. This was not a school I could in good conscious form my identity around: I refuse to make a home with those who perpetuate oppression. In my search for purpose my mind became infected with doubt, with sorrow, with pain, with anger, with despair. My first venture into the world of love, while being in the short term an exhilarating ride, ended in utter failure and heartbreak. All these things forced me further and further into the cave of my own depression. When I couldn’t afford to be depressed, I became anxious. I began to doubt my own cause for justice. My faith in myself and any sort of higher purpose waivered. I withdrew myself from the commitments I had made towards liberation – my fraternity, the literary magazine I had been an editor of, even my studies, which I had once cherished, all went to the wayside. All in all I had a complete shutdown. A revolutionary hiatus. Ultimately I have come to the conclusion that until I re align this mind of mine with the higher power – the one that carries us towards love, peace and unity – and align my energies to those things which will destroy the forces of destruction, I will not in myself find peace, unity, and love. This is my return to the world, stronger, smarter, and more indignant than ever. The world tried to extinguish my flame. No longer a flame, which consumes that which it burns, billows disgusting black smoke as a byproduct and ultimately burns itself out, I am now pure light. I come from the cosmos, I am a byproduct of existence itself, and there is no darkness that can put me out. This week is about reclaiming my voice, speaking truth to power, and setting the course of justice and righteousness, the marathon that we call the fight for liberation. I leave you with the words of that great freedom fighter Assata Shakur, “It is our duty to fight. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
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