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Journey into Jonesboro by Mumia Abu-Jamal GREENE COUNTY PRISON, PA. (29 March 1998)-- Once more, the American south land explodes in an orgy of carnage, as babies blast other babies into eternity, with an ease and efficiency that is as shocking as it is chilling. Jonesboro, Arkansas, becomes violent shorthand for the latest calamity to arise from a land that is rich in its history of violence. Jonesboro is but an echo of Paducah, Kentucky, which is an echo of Pearl, Mississippi, which are all echoes of America at the end of the 20th Century. Pundits and talking heads lament the bloody massacre, and ask a flurry of rhetorical questions that may all be summed up in, "how?"; or, "why?", as if the boys being adjudicated for the human hunting spree are somehow aliens, beings of a distinctly separate order. These boys, clad in the warrior mufti of camouflage, armed for an ancient hunt, are not Martians in search of an extraterrestrial thrill. They are boys, born into the stuff and style of America. They are boys raised as millions of other boys are. They are Americans. And as such they bear a discrete relationship with us all, those of us who live in, dream in, and die in the nation. If we were truthful in our responses to the Jonesboro massacre, the questions would not be "how?" or "why?", but "why not?" -- or, "how could it not be thus?" America is an entity that has maddening violence in her very DNA. Its cradle is genocide and slaughter of uncounted millions of so-called Indians. Its infancy was spent drinking the bloody mother's milk of millions of African slaves. For example, if one were to ask the average American to name the single bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War, or WW #2 might be named. Few indeed would know, and fewer still would name, King Philip's war, the savage, brutal and destructive conflict between the Wampanoags and English colonists in 1676. Save for a few wizened, hoary scholars, few Americans know and perhaps fewer care about the white-red war that proportionately inflicted greater casualties than any other war in American history. Half of all English communities in New England were destroyed, and thousands of Indians were killed by war, starvation and disease. Thousands more were captured and shipped to the West Indies as slaves. Even "loyal" Indians, were shipped to barren island prisons, where many died of cold and hunger demonic repayment for their loyalty. What, one wonders, could such distant history have to do with us, her, in this age, in the shadow of Jonesboro? We are formed as children, as adults, and as a nation, not only by what we are told, but by what we aren't told. Millions of African-Americans grew up in homes where slavery was never mentioned, much less discussed. Yet it is that very, vast silence that communicates oceans of horror. To be American is to be an heir to a legion of unspoken horrors, of a history of silence, of a land where the ancient inhabitants are merely "gone", with no real reflection on where they went, or how. To disappear millions, to not speak of the genocide that is at the core of the national self, freezes the spirit into deadness, and makes mass murders, not only doable, but inevitable. It breeds babies who kill with cool efficiency in the heart of America.
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important action alerts. Mumia Abu-Jamal is the author of three books: Live from Death
Row, Death Blossoms, and All Things Censored.
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