From Jail

Someone, somewhere, needs to address the fact that (neither) the County Jail, nor House of Corrections, has absentee ballots for the eligible voters. I’m personally not eligible “but” (there’s hundreds here and there who are).

In days gone by radical words of wisdom would often be “screamed from the beast’s belly.” In this “new age” (although the information age) you hardly hear a whisper from the downtrodden and misfortunate.

Why? For one they’re without a voice, muzzled by either illiteracy, ignorance, or the media who refuses to echo their concerns, resonate their cries, or magnify their oppressions to the masses so that those whose sons, daughters, sisters, and brothers who happen within these dismal crypts will know their situations.

What is the situation? For one when you walk into the Milwaukee County Jail the first thing you’ll notice is that the majority of the inmates are people of color… blacks and Hispanics. Is it because they commit more crime? Or because more police focus is upon them?

Is it well noted that Milwaukee is a majority so-called Minority City. But that still doesn’t justify the numbers and if in fact the problem is an economical factor then the burden falls to the powers that be to correct it. “Job creation,” education, housing, clothing – let’s not forget we’re in America, the greatest nation on the Earth. We spend billions upon billions to destroy other nations and then billions more to rebuild them while here at home social project spending is being slashed.

If our own jails, prisons, funeral homes, and diseases are receiving disproportionate black people activity and it’s not being properly addressed as a national emergency requiring the brightest minds and billions, then this is a form of institutional, systematic, oppression. There’s no getting around that “fact.” And so although we’ve marched, we’ve boycotted, we’ve rioted, we’ve voted, we’ve died, still we’ve not overcome, we have been overcame. It looks as if we’re going to have to reactivate our activism. But now our struggle is more “economical and moral,” financial and spiritual, money and discipline.

Signing off from Milwaukee’s downtown dismal crypts,
Shaikh Rahman AKA Rodney Hopkins