What Did I Get Out Being With MOVE

(I haven't posted in a while, but somebody recently asked me what I got out of being in MOVE and I really thought about it for a while and thought I would share my response on here in the hopes that it may help somebody out there)

That is really a good question and one that deserves a thorough answer. I am glad you asked it because it really caused me to sit down and think about it.

What I came up with was that what I got out of MOVE was different at varying points of my involvement.

When I first became involved in MOVE I think it gave me a kind of purpose in life. I believe that it allowed me to make sense of a world that did not make sense. Although I would come to find out that this MOVE-inspired conception of the world was horribly skewed, it did give me a kind of relief to think that I understood the way that the world worked.

Later on, as my time in MOVE progressed, I came to the belief, again mistaken, that MOVE was my family. One cannot underestimate the power that this belief brings with it. The kind of hold that this can have on people. It is this sense of identity that can allow for people to think that committing murder and other atrocities is ok. The reality of course was that my MOVE "family" was only my "family" as long as I adhered to their belief system, their ideology, their dictates. The moment it became clear that I would no longer live under their tenets, my "family" turned into my nightmare and my biggest enemies.

Ultimately though what I got out of MOVE was the idea that it was ok to give up on thinking or living my own life. What I mean by that is instead of walking through life and learning I committed to MOVE which was the same as committing intellectual suicide. There was no need anymore for existential questions or critical thinking because that was all done for me. The problems I had in marriage and in life did not need to be worked out...MOVE would figure them out for me. I did not need to push myself to get a good job or a good education. Those things were looked down upon in MOVE. Basically, the group makes it ok to be a loser.

I don't mean a loser in the sense of someone who tries and is beat down by circumstances and who owns what happens in their life. I mean loser in the sense of always looking for someone or something to blame. For MOVE, that someone or something was and is "the system". It is the complete abdication of responsibility for the things that happened in my life. That is how the MOVE members can be in jail for 30+ years and still cannot take one iota of responsibility for the situation that they are in. They blame the cops, the lawyers, the "system", anything at all to deflect the responsibility from themselves.

Review of Tigre's Mumia Film

(from Philly.com)

By Michael Smerconish - Inquirer

Inquirer Currents Columnist

Mention "Black Panthers" to a young person today and if the words have any resonance at all, they might bring to mind the two knuckleheads who made a scene outside a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008.
But there was a time when a powerful revolutionary movement of the same name - with infinitely more damaging consequences - actually did infiltrate urban America.

Tigre Hill's new movie, The Barrel of a Gun, which premieres Tuesday at the Merriam Theater, is a grim reminder of that era. The movie is a full-screen documentary about the murder of Daniel Faulkner by Mumia Abu-Jamal on Dec. 9, 1981.

What is left to explore about arguably the highest-profile death-penalty case in the world?

Context.

At a time when the only thing some may wish to hear about Abu-Jamal is news of his passing, Hill does a public service in Barrel by placing his actions in historical context and providing a compelling answer as to why Abu-Jamal pulled the trigger.

The movie chronicles the rise of the Black Panthers and the peak of their power in the late 1960s. The FBI defined the Panthers as a "black extremist organization" that "advocates the use of guns and guerrilla tactics to bring about the overthrow of the United States government." J. Edgar Hoover called them "the greatest danger to the internal security of the country."

The Panthers preached black militancy and the use of violence not only to achieve revolution, but also to enliven the consciousness of those behind it. In short, they wanted to overthrow the establishment, so they targeted its most visible representatives: police officers.

For the blueprint of this revolution, the film notes, Panthers cofounder Huey Newton looked past figures such as Karl Marx or the Soviet Union. Instead, Newton's Panthers drew inspiration from Mao Tse-tung. The Panthers' kinship with Chairman Mao was so pronounced that Newton and his foot soldiers handed out copies of the Little Red Book - essentially Mao's manifesto.

Abu-Jamal, still a teenager when he helped found the Panthers' Philadelphia chapter, was one of those distributing the book.

He was proselytizing for an organization whose rallying cry at the time was "Off the pigs." And indeed, in 1968, Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after an altercation in which an Oakland police officer was killed. He was released two years later on a technicality - the appellate court concluded that the trial judge had given the jury improper deliberation instructions.

Of Newton, Abu-Jamal wrote in 2004: "It is beyond dispute that Huey P. Newton was a man of signal brilliance and truly remarkable courage. . . . He was a model that all Panthers aspired to." Of police officers, he wrote in 1970: "I for one feel like putting down my pen. Let's write epitaphs for pigs."

When the Panthers' influence waned in the 1970s, Abu-Jamal became infatuated with MOVE, itself a supposedly revolutionary "back-to-nature" organization with local origins.

By this time, Hill's film notes, Abu-Jamal was working as a radio journalist. And as MOVE's infamy in Philadelphia boiled over with the murder of Officer James Ramp in 1978 and the subsequent conviction of the MOVE 9, Abu-Jamal traded his objectivity for advocacy.

In interviews with Hill, observers and colleagues describe an increasingly confrontational Abu-Jamal injecting MOVE's agenda into every story he filed. They recall a man whose political leanings were so radicalized that peers felt uncomfortable engaging him. "A number of people had said he's going to snap," one observer says in the film. Eventually, Abu-Jamal had to become a taxi driver because the news organizations for which he worked no longer wanted to run his stories.

All of which makes a mockery of the way in which the murderer's supporters often describe him - as a "brilliant" or "award-winning" journalist taken down by a corrupt system. Far from it. When he ran across the street to execute Officer Faulkner, Mumia Abu-Jamal was nothing more than a cabby with a history of radicalism so pronounced that the FBI maintained a file on him.

Therein lies the real value of The Barrel of a Gun. The film's most notable accomplishment is placing Officer Faulkner's murder in historical context, while also reminding us of an era fraught with extremist domestic groups whose central focus was to perpetrate violence against the state.

Today, the term radical is trotted out - with little accuracy and even less reservation - to describe a political opponent. Or the president of the United States. And the most infamous deed of the New Black Panthers, who make a brief appearance in Barrel, consists of standing outside the old Richard Allen Homes with a billy-club on Election Day.

It all pales in comparison to the reality that men like Officers Faulkner and Ramp or Sgt. Frank Von Colln - executed in 1970 amid a fit of anti-police violence - encountered throughout their careers.

Hill's film succeeds because it reminds us, often in painstaking detail, of a not-too-distant period when nobody could mistake the real radicals. It's a case study of a movement fueled by violence - and how Danny Faulkner became a victim of it.



Read more: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20100919