Celebrating celebrating? Soon TV screens, newspaper pages, and radio stations will replay, reprint, and rebroadcast dark, grainy black and white film, photos and gritty audiotape of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech, his “I Have a Dream” speech, in a hypocritical celebration of the 50 years since that fateful day in 1963 in Washington.I’m always troubled at such occasions, for it is on days such as these when it becomes clear as crystal how things have gone so badly for far too many. We celebrate a speech, but not the man. We celebrate an event, while ignoring and disappearing our horrendous present, one of such vast inequality that it stuns the imagination.
The prison system is a shame of global proportions, and we need not even address our secret prisons, black sites, of torture and death. Our state and federal prison systems, and the immense array of solitary confinement units are bad enough. The school system is crumbling quicker than icebergs in Antarctica. Teachers are demonized, disrespected, and driven out of schools to make room for private charter schools and private profit. School systems are but training grounds for prisons and places children go to where their brains die.
And housing? The corporate thieves and crooks of national banks and Wall Street financiers stole more wealth by their illegal manipulations of mortgages than any criminal enterprise in history. King was an ardent foe of materialism, militarism, global imperial war, and racism. Those forces are wreaking havoc on his people and the poor of the nation, for we have spent 50 years going in the wrong direction. From in prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
