[ti:]
[ar:]
[al:]
[00:12.68]To think about the origins of Hip-Hop
[00:15.08]in this culture and also about Homeland Security is to see that there are,
[00:19.41]at the very least, two worlds in America:
[00:22.66]one of the well-to-do and another of the struggling.
[00:26.00]For if ever there was the absence of Homeland Security,
[00:29.03]it is one seen in the gritty roots of Hip-Hop.
[00:31.35]For the music arises from a generation that feels, with some justice,
[00:36.18]that they have been betrayed by those who came before them,
[00:39.48]that they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets,
[00:43.97]and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison.
[00:47.31]They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved,
[00:50.37]and this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger
[00:53.80]that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry.
[00:57.07]One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth
[01:01.31]to climb above the pit of poverty.
[01:03.90]In the broader society, the opposite is true,
[01:06.74]for here, more than any other place on earth,
[01:09.99]wealth is so wide spread and so bountiful
[01:12.92]that what passes for the middle class in America
[01:15.97]could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world.
[01:19.82]They're very opulence and relative wealth makes them insecure and homeland security
[01:25.26]is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic as crazy as saying military intelligence,
[01:31.89]or the U.S Department of Justice. They're just words,
[01:35.24]they have very little relationship to reality.
[01:38.83]Now do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon?
[01:43.41]Do you think duct tape and Kleenex and color codes
[01:47.77]will make you safer? From Death Row this is Mumia Abu-Jamal