If I just say what’s on my mind, I know that people of a certain generation, shall we say under 40, will not get the reference that I’m about to make. But, if you’re 50 and over, you will. And maybe it’ll give you a chuckle, but it’s not meant to give you a chuckle. It’s meant to make you reflect, to make you think, and, hopefully, to make you shudder a little bit.
Imagine Archie Bunker becoming President of the United States. I’m not talking about Carroll O’Connor. I’m talking about the character Archie Bunker; the same sensibilities. Let’s say that he won a lottery and won millions of dollars and ran, and got elected President of the U.S. Twice even. That would give you some sense of what we’re looking at in this mad mad world of today.
You know, Archie Bunker was, in his own way, a character with a certain cuteness about him. But imagine that under that cuteness was a kind of dread and a love of cruelty, and a kind of terror at the world changing and becoming something else. That’s what we’re looking at every day, every morning, every headline. We’re looking at the rule of incompetence.
Archie Bunker was many things, but he wasn’t a smart dude. He also feared others who he thought were different. What makes us less different, what makes us parts of community, is our humanity. And that means that all of us are part of the same motion of human. We’re all human. And believe it or not, we’re all related. So we’re all family. We’re part of the human family. There’s very little to fear on that. But fear still rules the day and, unfortunately, the night. That’s the world we’re living in, Archie Bunker without the chuckles. With love, not fear, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
