Oakland--the Death and Resurrection of A City
 
Marvin X
 
A city dies a natural death when it becomes morally bankrupt, politically
effete, economically depraved and spiritually caught in the morass of the cross
and lynching tree. Signs of moral bankruptcy are clear when the righteous are
defamed and  the guilty heralded in spite of clear evidence to the contrary. A
city called Jerusalem was defamed when its citizens cried, 
"Give us the thieves and away with the righteous man." 
 
In such a city the voice of truth is crushed under foot and lies are raised to
the level of facts and intelligence. For many years Oakland lived under the lies
emanating from a businessman. Even though many people knew the truth of his
business or rather the dark side of his business, he was raised high as the
example of morality and community stability. Even though one of the abused women
cried for years like the Eloquent Peasant of Egyptian literature, her cries went
unheard, but finally she was vindicated. 
 
But today Oakland is beset with problems of truth in the media, apathy and lack
of taking authority in the Mayor's office. The Mayor was recently shamed
before the nation when the family of slain OPD officers commanded he not speak
at their funeral. The question is who runs the city, the OPD or the Mayor? We
know the OPD is a gang of brute beasts in blue uniforms, and like any gang they
rule through terror and intimidation. The Mayor submitted to them even though he
is the one who represents the City of Oakland, not the OPD. And so he is guilty
of lacking moral leadership as well as political stewardship, and so power flows
down, lack of power as well.
In the media we see people projected as heroes who are pseudo revolutionaries
that have been exposed as agent provocateurs, yet the people are in denial just
as they were in denial about the businessman. The person is being defended even
when evidence is presented to the contrary. The people are like starry eyed
idealists believing in a balloon even though it has burst before their eyes and
all the air dissipated.
 
What can save such people? Surely we know things go from bad to worse. In the
hood things are at such a desperate level every man is armed and ready to kill
at the drop of a hat. There is no conflict resolution, there is no healing for
the traumatized families who must suffer their pain of loss in silence. 
 
The church is on every corner, but it is like the liquor store adjacent to it,
providing an opiate to tranquilize the people into more apathy and degeneracy,
with church whores running amok and mothers paying tithes with money from dope
dealing sons and daughters, and of course the preacher happily accepts the ill
gotten gain to extend his lifestyle of conspicuous consumption while preaching a
world of make believe and pie in the sky after you die. 
 
The school system is a total sham and scam. They have become merely holding
cells for the neo-slavery department of corrections, or simply a place where no
learning takes place because half the children drop out and the other half are
maintained on drugs to keep them from their attention deficit disorder caused
not by any mental problem but by a totally boring white supremacy curriculum,
making them unprepared to deal in the global economy with millions of jobs
outsourced to India and China, yet the educators are not preparing them for the
new economic era because they are not prepared themselves. 
 
There are those conscious people who clamor for a more Afrocentric education
but do not prepare their own people to become teachers, and when conscious
teachers express any degree of Afrocentricity, they are immediately booted out
and join the unemployment lines. In short, there are few black teachers today,
not only in Oakland but throughout the state and nation. Thus the irrelevant
classroom is turning girls to prostitution as young as twelve, thirteen and
fourteen. On the streets they receive an education more exciting and glamorous
than studying math and English. They can be seen nightly on Oakland's
International Blvd. where they join the sex trade and become further abused and
marginalized from society.
 
The so-called conscious community is so fractious that the very thought of
unity is avoided because of ideological narrow-mindedness, whether from the
pseudo conscious hip hop sector or the older ideologues steeped in ideological
purity from the 60s, still dreaming of some Marxist heaven or Pan African
paradise in Africa. Thus the conscious events are seldom events where the common
people can gather for conscious knowledge and wisdom, political education that
transcends the sect and cult.
 
And so things go from bad to worse as Murphy told us. More killings, more drugs
to medicate the wounded souls trying to exist in a once valiant city with a
revolutionary tradition that shook up the world, but now a wounded elephant shot
with a tranquilizer gun into nothingness and dread.
 
No real radical solutions are presented because it would require radical action
and the status quo must be maintained to allow the blood suckers of the
poor to get their checks and continue their conspicuous consumption in their
pitiful world of make believe.
 
We have suggested repeatedly offering micro loans to brothers and sisters in
poverty so they can come up as millions of poor are doing around the world. To
decrease the violence we have suggested the model used in Iraq to stem violence
by allowing brothers and sisters to secure their own neighborhoods by paying
them to do so. But no, the blood sucking businessmen want to hire armed guards
to patrol the streets, and of course they want to increase the OPD with more
foreign, alien officers full of racism and white supremacy notions of how the
natives must be subdued, pacified, profiled and occupied. Then when the people
react to the foreign army in their midst, they are criticized for their
"obscene pride" as Dr. Fritz Pointer called the peoples reaction to
the actions of Louvelle Mixon who chose death as freedom rather than return to
the neo-slavery of the prison system and dire lack of employment opportunities,
especially for a growing number of
 ex-felons, most convicted of the petty crimes and would not be incarcerated
if they'd had proper legal representation. 
 
The resurrection of Oakland can only begin by thinking out of the box of
yesterday's worn-out ideas that have failed repeatedly although some have
benefited and thus their resistance, such as those bureaucrats in city
government who are resisting the Mayor's attempt to hire ex-felons by not
putting their criminal past on the employment application. 
 
The schools must be totally and radically revamped for education in the global
economy. The present curriculum must be destroyed for the relic of a gone era
that it is, and perhaps many teachers will be disposed of in the process of
cleaning the educational house. 
 
We call for peer teachers from among the bright students who can obviously
explain lessons in the language of their peers. Even many of the socalled out of
control students are in reality leaders who are simply bored and refuse to
remain silent, thus they can be trained as peer teachers as well.
 
The spiritual community must simply preach a new way with a new message and
 mission of spiritual liberation and consciousness to become synchronized with
the Information Age that will not permit dogmatism, sectarianism and religiosity
to continue unchecked to the point of religious and culture wars across the
planet. The religious community must be shaken out of its comfort zone, whether
Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Rasta, Yoruba or Atheist.
 
Oakland cannot die except by continued self deception and denial that anything
is radically wrong and anything less than a radical solution will resuscitate
the dying body politic.   When the media pundits from the right and the left
are no longer  guilty of perpetuating the world of make believe, the mighty
Lazarus called Oakland will rise again to astound the world.