Mumia on The 30th Anniversary Of The Move Bombing

5/13/15

This essay was recorded on 4/26/2015 and was released on 5/13/2015 on the 30th anniversary of the MOVE bombing.

MAY 13TH AT 30

[col. writ. 4/26/15] © ’15 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Why should we care what happened on May 13th, 1985?

I mean, seriously, that was 30 years ago, a long time ago, way back when, know what I mean?

Most people won’t say that – but they think it.

I’ll tell you why – because what happened then is a harbinger of what’s happening now – all across America.

I don’t mean bombing people (not yet, that is).

I mean the visceral hatreds, and violent contempt once held for MOVE is now visited upon average people - not just for radicals and revolutionaries – like MOVE.

In May, 1985, officials justified the vicious attacks on MOVE children by saying they, too, were “combatants”. In Ferguson, Missouri, as police and National Guard confronted ‘citizens’ with weapons of warfare guess how cops described them in their own files?  “Enemies”.

‘Enemy combatants’, anyone?

Then look at 12- year old Tamir Rice, of Cleveland. A boy, treated as if he were a man.

Boys. Men. Girls. Women. It doesn’t matter.

When many people stood in silence, or worse, in bitter acquiescence to the bombing, shooting and carnage of May 13, 1985 upon MOVE, they opened the door to the ugliness of today’s police terrorism from coast –to- coast.

There is a direct line from then to now.

May 13, 1985 led to the eerie Robocop present.

If it had been justly and widely condemned then, there would be no now; no Ferguson, no South Carolina, no Los Angeles – no Baltimore.

The barbaric police bombing of May 13, 1985 and the whitewash of the murders of 11 MOVE men, women and children opened a door that still has not been closed.

We are today still living with those consequences.

-©’15maj

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