Revolution #237, June 26, 2011
$30,000 in 30 Days + 100 New Sustainers to Revolution
“$100 is a lot of money for me
but that is what I am donating...”
From an immigrant:
I never met a person like Bob Avakian: someone who is not afraid of controversy and in fact welcomes it; someone who fights for the truth; someone who is sincere and it comes from the heart; someone who is not in this revolution for personal or monetary gain.
He impressed me as soon as he started his historic talk eight years ago Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About. I remember it like it was yesterday, partly because I’ve gone back to it many times including showing it to my co-workers. He started it off discussing the history of Black people being hung … lynched … and for me as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who has been kept from this history it was quite an eye-opener. In fact I couldn’t close my eyes for the next 10 hours of this talk. Ask yourself this: Do you know of any politician out there who is not only concerned with people in this country but of people all over the world. I can’t even think of any politician who is concerned with people period. Bob Avakian is not just concerned … he is leading a movement for revolution whose goal is the emancipation of humanity.
In the book BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian, which I’ve read through over and over, one of the quotes that got me thinking a lot—#22 in Chapter 1 goes:
“In a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequality, to talk about ‘democracy’—without talking about the class nature of that democracy and which class it serves—is meaningless, and worse. So long as society is divided into classes, there can be no ‘democracy for all’: one class or another will rule, and it will uphold and promote that kind of democracy which serves its interests and goals. The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve the continuation, or the eventual abolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.”
There it is for me: continuation or abolition? This is what we have to choose. I’ve made my choice. About BAsics more generally, it’s amazing when you read about all this shit that goes on and why it goes on and you’re so weighed down and involved in your daily lives and personal lives that you don’t think about what’s really going on and why things are so fucked up. When I heard about this fund drive to raise $30,000 in 30 days as well as 100 sustainers for Revolution newspaper, I immediately thought of the youth and what difference it would make if thousands and millions got to know Bob Avakian through this book. Knowing that $7,000 needs to be raised and earmarked to publicize it on hip-hop stations with a quote like the following, I knew this is where my money is best put:
“No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that.”
Besides condemning this system for the hellhole it is for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, I get from Avakian hope for the future, and the actual way the world can be in striking detail, as well as how to get there. It’s there in BAsics. I can’t say that for anyone else on the scene today.
$100 is a lot of money for me but that is what I’m donating, and I’ll be talking to others too, as I’m talking to you right now.
To the youth … you need to know this revolutionary leader and after you do I would like to read about it in this very newspaper how and what you’re learning from him and go down to a Revolution Books store and enlist yourself in this movement for revolution that Bob Avakian is leading. And I call on all others who care about “what future for our youth?” to really dig deep and financially support this effort.
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