What cause or principle are you willing to die for?

What would you be willing to risk getting injured or arrested for?

What are you willing to risk getting fired or evicted over?

Well then, for what would you risks being socially ostracized, having people talk about you bad or folks giving you dirty looks?

Is there any level of personal sacrifice you would endure for the cause of freedom or justice?

Why? Because risk and sacrifice are exactly the price you must be willing to pay to halt and reverse the trend of absolute totalitarianism that this nation and world system are on today.

Revolution is the easy intellectual answer to what we are facing today. However the mechanics of overcoming a system of repression that controls people through fear, distraction and outright deception are fairly complex.

Liberty/freedom buffs are waiting for the masses to wake up and get pissed-off enough to take to the streets and revolt, but there are people all over the world right now taking to the streets and, in most cases, fundamental change continues to elude them.

So what can you do to back this system off “til the revolution come” as we used to say? Plenty!

But you have to be prepared both to fight and to build if you are serious about winning, and personally that’s my primary focus, winning.

Part of the fighting involves research. Sun Tzu said you should know your enemy and know yourself. The easy, safe work involves finding out who is promoting all of these stupid laws. Find the corporations who are paying politicians to make bad policy. Expose them, boycott them, press criminal charges against them for deliberately harming people for profit. Sue them.

Find out where their top executives live, work and play. Then put people there to let them know their time is up. One or two people quietly picketing a home will draw a reaction.

Identify the voting records of politicians who are promoting harmful laws. Find them and give them the same treatment. I would even picket the churches they attend to alert their spiritual leaders that this person needs special prayer and repentance.

On a larger scale, a national strike could certainly alter the power relationship and shake things up. Remember the power comes from the people!

Probably the most significant thing we as Black people can do is to re-direct our power – our labor and our money. Right now most Black people spend most of our labor working for a system that works against us. Then we take the money we earn from that labor and give it right back to the same system…and you wonder why we’re losing? Our own endeavors only get the crumbs off our own tables.

If we can get large numbers of our people to commit two hours per day or even 10 labor hours per week in active work toward liberation we can move our situation forward. I’m talking educational and consciousness raising endeavors, business ventures, health/healing activities, organizing, disas­ter/de­fense preparation and other practical needs.

If we start taking our money/wealth out of this system and putting it into our own we can build our own infrastructure. Every time you spend money with a Black-owned business you are re-directing that power to some small degree…and every degree counts. Every time you grow peppers, or greens, or cabbage instead of buying them at the store you are diverting resources from their system to ours. You are also developing essential survival/na-tion building skills. Imagine if we can re-direct 1% of our food spending from this system to our own community just growing and bartering food! What if we repeat the process, making our own clothing, jewelry and other things we need and like?

Yes, we need to plan and organize to use those resources to our best advantage, but that’s another column.

Every act of self-sufficiency counts. Every hour that you are able to spend interacting with the real world instead of the virtual/media world helps improve your perspective and decreases your tech dependency. Innovation is a good thing, but technology should serve us and not vice versa.

I do not believe that we are going to be able to avoid engaging this system on some level. They are putting the squeeze on everyone, so you know what that means for “we people who are darker than blue.” We can win only if we are collectively awake and prepared. The alternative, at best, will be to accept living in unacceptable conditions and to hand that legacy down to our children.”

It would be more honorable to say that we perished taking a stand…and That’s the Hard Truth!

This article originally published in the October 29, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.