Sept 27th 2002

That date seems so impossibly long ago, but there it is. Do the math and 17 years have come and gone. It hardly seems real. John's murder remains "unsolved" and it is easy to believe that it will remain that way... As for me, I can talk about MOVE now with more nuance and less anger. Less hatred. I can admit just how much those people meant to me. I can recognize how much of what I experienced still reverberates through me. Life should be our priority. Life should be what we concern ourselves with. The defense of life has taken on a brutal urgency in the midst of concentration camps and the rapid onset of climate change..."MOVE IS LIFE" is what we said. But I can't forget that MOVE was also death for some. John Gilbride most recently. I can't talk about the good experiences I had with MOVE without eventually finding my mind returning to those dark places. The places of dread and fear and pain. It is where the ghosts cast their shadows and try to tell us things. To hear them we have to slow down. We have to try and listen and we have to give voice to those unavenged apparitions. Thru this blog I told my story. I told what I saw and I told the truth. I made it clear that in my efforts to combat MOVE that I wouldn't lie about MOVE. I hope I did a good enough job. What I came to realize after so many words and posts and so much effort is that it wasn't enough. You can't just expect the world to bend towards what you see as justice and think that it will happen. Things just don't work that way. What I also came to realize is that my anger towards MOVE had a blinding effect. It made me miss things. Important things. The kinds of things that might be in front of you, but you that you might not be able to see. The fact is that it just wasn't MOVE who benefited from John's death. It was also the City of Philadelphia. John being assassinated prevented another confrontation with MOVE from occurring. This matters. Who stands to gain from someone's death matters a great deal. Shutting John up marked a convergence of material interests. The interests of both MOVE and the city of Philadelphia. The investigation of John's murder was a joke. It has always been a joke. The extent that the investigation went anywhere was to the extent that the family of John Gilbride managed to push the Burlington County investigators. This was a crime unto itself. The story of John's murder is no longer a story about what MOVE did or did not do. The story of John's murder is now about the cops, investigators, prosecutors, who did not do their job and why is it that they didn't do their job. There are people out there who know the answer to that question and it is past time for them to come out of the shadows and tell what they know. We cannot ever find out what the truth is until we find out why the people whose job it is to find out the truth abdicated that responsibility.