The challenges we face to empower ourselves

[Editor’s Note: The following contains excerpts from the message, Policies for Empowerment: The Struggle for a New Economic Order” delivered by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan delivered March 10, 2006, at the National Black People’s Unity Convention.]

The Education Challenge:  The methodology and psychology of this archaic educational system is unfit and ill-prepared to deal with the new minds that an information society is producing. 

When you send your child to school, and he’s very “rambunctious,” educators will tell you, “Mother, you must come up to the school because your child is presenting us with a problem.  We think he needs some Ritalin…” 

According to published reports, scientists did a chemical analysis of Ritalin, and said it has the same effect on your system as cocaine.  So because the teacher can’t cope with the new mind, you dumb it down so you can “deal” with it.  This is a system that must be thrown in the garbage pail.

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But you do have the courage.  See, don’t talk about “Farrakhan’s courage”—that’s there!  I’m talking about your courage, now.  Do we have the courage to sit down in a room and craft an educational system that can suffice the intellectual needs of our children and other children?

Photo: MGN Online

If they say, “Well, you can’t do that in our school building!”—when did it become “yours” and not mine, since my tax dollars help to support it?  Don’t tell me that we can’t take over the schools!  Don’t tell me we can’t put a system in that truly educates!  And if they fight us, then that’s worth fighting for because there comes a point in life where you have to draw the line! 

You’re going to die anyway. The only way we can escape death is to escape having been born; so since you didn’t escape birth, at some point in time all of us have a “rendezvous with death” as a destiny.  So the question is:  How are you going to live the life that God gave you, and what will we pass on to a generation that comes after us, that is at our foot?

Parents, grandparents:  You see what’s happening to our children and our grandchildren!  Must we continue like this?  Or, should we take a stand and do something better, do something different?  That’s one of the challenges we face.

The Job Challenge:  If you live in a society that outsources jobs to cheap labor markets overseas, and everything that we wear now—which 35 or 40 years ago was “Made in America”; but now is made in China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, somewhere else, not America—well, what happens to the “functional illiterates” who graduated from high school last year? 

What happens to the people who are dropping out of high school?  What kind of job can they get? Do you think you can stand around here waiting for the U.S. government to create more jobs for you? 

What kind of job will they create for your children?  The price of gas is going up; the price of heating fuel is going up—the cost of living is going up, but wages are going down, or remaining the same.

The Economic Challenge:  Thousands upon thousands of jobs for the working man, the middle class, are being wiped out.  What chance do our young people have in an economy that’s dying right in front of our face?  So the challenge is do we sit around and wait for somebody else to provide a job for an ever-shrinking job market?

The stock market has a limited lifespan, too!  So all your pension funds put into what you think are “safe markets”:  If the bubble bursts, like it did with Enron and the corruption at the top, then what happens to your pension fund?  And now you can’t get medical attention, you can’t get medical insurance because they have to cut that back.  If you want a job at any given company, you have to take “cut backs.” 

Well, what do we do with these huge pension funds that American workers have put aside that they loaned to companies to take their jobs out of America and take them overseas? 

Here, I present some of “the challenges,” but also a suggestion.  See, we’re not really “poor,” we’re just poorly guided.  Suppose we recognize that we have millions of people that eat, but they are dying from poison food? 

Most of us are very toxic and don’t even know it because the food in agribusiness is more “for profit” than for the health and well-being of the American people.  And, of course, there was a time when we had 21 million acres of land as Black people; now we’re down to less than three million.

In order to feed our people, make clothing for our people, we need about 51 million acres of land.  So if you don’t have land, then you don’t have the basis of building sound economic empowerment. 

Now, you say “The Lord’s Prayer,” right? “Give us this day, our daily bread.”  Who do you think is going to supply our daily bread?  And if we eat three meals a day, with one slice of bread per meal—and we are 30 million people—that’s 90,000,000 slices of bread per day; 630,000,000 slices of bread per week; 32,760,000,000 slices of bread per year.  So how much land must we have under wheat cultivation to begin producing our daily bread? 

Somebody else is producing that for us.  And by the time they get finished with the dough, taking the real nutrients out it, then you get denatured food—and then they send you to the health food store so that you can buy supplements that they’ve taken out of the food and put in a pill!

Everything is a “pill.”  But food is what produced this body; the Earth and its chemicals are what produced this body, and it’s the Earth and its chemicals that sustain and heal the body.  But as long as your mouth is in somebody else’s kitchen, then you are at the mercy of the food merchants who are now Merchants of Death. 

We have to see that this whole paradigm is destructive to us and poor people, and we might as well get ready to do something for ourselves.  So our challenge is to create opportunity for our children as other intelligent people are doing for theirs. 

And when we do that, the world will respect us and honor us as we honor every people that do something economically to feed, clothe and shelter themselves.  They make products to serve their own and sell the surplus.  This is what we have to do.

Let’s produce something in our lifetime, something that forges a new direction, so that our children and our grandchildren will praise the fact that they belong to us.  And as we stood on the shoulders of others, that they will stand on ours and do that which will glorify God and bring joy, peace and justice to our people and to all who are oppressed.