From Savagery to Civility

From Savagery to Civility

Unity, Criticism, Unity! We must be able to criticize each other constructively, to engage in debate and dialogue. This is how civilize people conduct their affairs. Now savages want to kill, no debate, no dialogue, no comment. Man, I wanna smoke dat nigguh!
--from Soulful Musings on Unity, Marvin X
12/10/10

It is imbecilic to think a nation steeped in the blood of global violence and permanent war can attain civility at home, for as Baldwin noted, "The murder of my child will not make your child safe."

It is indeed ironic and most tragic that the nine year old girl born on 9/11 was the model of civil engagement and gave her life to the process. As she tried to exercise civility, her sick brother reflected the blow back from the deranged mentality that lurks in the deep structure of most American minds, rooted in the mythology of white supremacy that insures domination by use of the gun.

How can America be the number one arms merchant of the world yet pretend civility? No, you are a savage who must be corralled and disarmed as must happen to the citizens in the cowboys-gone-wild state of Arizona and throughout the American states where guns are the number one past time, the cultural residue of kidnappers, rapers, robbers, land grabbers and moral hypocrites.

The call to civility shall ring hollow for the sick savages in America shall only sink deeper into the chasm of mental darkness. The alleged mass killer in Tucson, Arizona symbolizes the general pathological state of Americans who imagine they can expend an annual trillion dollar military budget to kill, yet maintain peace at home. What goes around comes around, they say in the hood. Yes, the chickens come home to roost.

Just as there is little mental health treatment for the soldiers returning from savagery in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, there is obviously little mental health treatment for the mass killer in Tucson who wandered the streets of the city with severe mental health issues that were obvious to all.

We can listen to Right and Left wing radio and decipher the same pathology that the mass killer actualized. The Left is simply spineless while the Right is heartless, but we can do nothing when lacking heart or spine!

Where is the voice on the Left calling for an end to permanent wars? Where are the protests, demonstrations, mass marches? The Left hardly said a peep as the military budget was passed for the coming killing season. The American Left and Right are simply different sides of the same coin of white supremacy.

And the silent Blacks and other ethnic groups suffer Type II White Supremacy as Dr. Nathan Hare teaches us. Their over identification with white supremacy has addicted them to singing Silent Night and Onward Christian Soldiers. They are like those monkeys who know nothing, see nothing and do nothing.

The only hope is the children, like nine year old Christine, who indeed represented the generation that may achieve the civility of political engagement and clean up the mess of the elders. Christine was in league with my grandson, now three, who told me at two years old: "Grandpa, you can't save the world, but I can!"
--Marvin X
1/13/11

Marvin X facilitates Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland. His Academy of da Corner Reader's Theatre will perform poetry from the Journal of Pan African Studies, Poetry Issue, Saturday, February 19, 3-6pm, at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 14th and Franklin, Oakland.