A Right to a New Voice

Friends, that picture above is me, in 1981.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has recorded a commencement speech to be played at Goddard College’s graduation this weekend. I don’t know what happened in that incident in Philadelphia three decades ago. I wasn’t there. I’d venture that nobody reading this was.

Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the police officer shot and killed in that incident, is still very sad. Nothing that anyone can say or do (or not say or not do) will change that. Her husband, who she loved when she was a very young woman, is dead. The life they imagined for themselves never came to be. Grief is a solitary conversation. I know a little bit about it, I know that it has no expiration date, there’s a part of you that stays in the moment you lost someone you thought you’d have forever.

I also know that three decades is a long time. Plenty of time to change the course of your life, plenty of time to learn new things, to write books, to contribute to your community, to discover truths that no one else has discovered.

My work, my life–my belief system–hinges on the capacity of a human being to grow and transform. That the entire conversation about a man who has lived an extraordinary life, who has accomplished an extraordinary amount under some of the very worst circumstances any American citizen is forced to live in, is about none of that, but rather about something that he denies doing three decades ago, is terrifying. Do we want to live in a society where we cannot accept the human capacity for transformation? Where voices are silenced?

I witness people changing daily. Sometimes they tell me things that break my heart. Sometimes they tell me the worst things they have done and wait for me to flinch, to turn away from them. They wait for me to confirm their worst suspicion: that they cannot be forgiven. That they have done things that are so awful they have nothing good to give. 22 veterans commit suicide everyday, many of them believing just that. But we have the most to learn from people who have been to the edge of the human experience. People who have suffered and have witnessed suffering, who have overcome violence that originates in themselves and violence from outside of themselves. We have things to learn from Mumia.

Lots has happened since 1981. Let’s talk about some of that.

Congratulations, 2014 Goddard College Graduates. You’ve come a long way too.

Edited to add the link to his address.