COMPTON (FinalCall.com) – Piercing, unnerving and invigorating. Heart-wrenching at times, passionately sobering throughout–if there ever was a message that could save and change lives it was the address that the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan delivered June 22 at the “Stop the Killing” rally at Compton College, which culminated a series of lectures–which are yet to be released nationwide.
Minister Farrakhan stated that Allah (God) had blessed him with “some of the most far reaching lectures that I have ever made” during his visit to California June 19-23.
He prayed that his message at the rally would comfort those who mourn the loss of their loved ones to senseless violence in our communities–but his focus centered on the pain of mothers.
He lamented over the lack of understanding of the value of human life and bodies.
“Life is so fragile and if we don’t understand that, life and death are like twin sisters. They walk side by side,” he taught. “Whenever we are careless with life, death comes in. Even if we are careful with life, at some point, we all must die.”
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us that the pain of birth is equal to the pain of death, the Muslim leader noted, explaining that, “when the body shuts all the way down and when a woman gives birth, she is dying for us. When a woman gives birth and that pain she is allowed to feel it is so horrible that she wants to die.
“But the moment it is over and she sees what pain has brought forth, she forgets the pain and there is joy at a new life.”
He asked gang members to imagine the pain that their mothers went through in bringing them forth into this world, and then nurtured them from their infancy, through childhood into their adulthood. Stressing the bond between a mother and her child, he then asked them to think about the mothers of those who they have killed.
“What a terrible thing to rob a mother of her child,” he said, evoking tears of reflective pain from many in the audience, who not only were listening to his words, but feeling his pain, if not their own. “If you went to a funeral of one of your homies and seeing his mother crying, how could you leave, feeling their pain, and go and kill another mother’s child? We have become so cold,” he observed.
He illustrated his point that the environment surrounding a child’s birth fashions the life that is forming in the womb, by taking the audience through the journey of his personal testimony of the circumstances of his birth and childhood.
“You have to be careful not to curse the circumstances that bring you here, because it may be the circumstances that bring you here that mark you for your assignment,” he said.
He contended that America was the chief gangbanger, for her pervasive history of killing for power, specifically noting America’s response to the Taliban refusing to comply with America’s desire to allow an oil pipeline to run through Afghanistan: “You either get a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs.” He also reminded the audience that, after the Berlin Wall fell, the CIA agents stationed in Europe were reassigned to the gangs throughout America, undoubtedly to stir tensions and set youth up for slaughter from law enforcement agencies supposedly called in to quell the violence.
Furthermore, he argued, the coldness in the streets is linked to the failure of religious communities, for out of their darkness, he said, came a people of hardness, like creatures of darkness. He exhorted Muslims to their duty to share the knowledge that transformed our lives with our people who are dying in the streets. Being a Muslim extends far beyond the dress, rituals and self-righteous concepts of self, he said, challenging Muslims to lift up their light.
He also implored Christians to follow the example of Jesus, who was found in the highways and byways–not mega-churches–healing the people. “Jesus met the woman at the well, not in the church. Jesus healed the leper, not in the church, but where he was. The work is not in the church; the work is in the street,” he pointed out.
“My role now is a bearer of good news and a warner. I beg you, from my love for you, to stop the killing”–his plea overflowed with such a vivid urgency, that one could see the blood flowing in the streets, as he recited the Biblical prophecy of blood rising in the streets up to the horse’s bridle.
For fifty years, Minister Farrakhan stressed, he has worked for the uplift of our communities and humanity. Fifty years. To those who believe in, and know, his divine assignment from the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, his pain was “I am tired of looking like some entertainer that you have come to hear, then take yourself back to doing what you have been doing. I am tired of grieving mothers taking their babies to cemeteries. I am tired. I am tired of seeing us bowing down in hypocrisy in prayers, while our people are dying,” he revealed. “I am willing to die for you, if my death would bring you up from where you are. I can’t bear the pain of these mothers and if I cannot do anything to change the realities that put these mothers where they are, then what is the sense of living?”
How he managed to elicit laughter after his firm reprimands was short of miraculous, because it was firmly evident that the night was not about entertainment.
“Our beef is with the snake that bit us all. As long as we are fighting each other, he can get away,” Minister Farrakhan insisted, “Let us become healers of our community and not destroyers of our community.”
