Walter Mosley by Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

FOREWORD
    This book is an exploration into the ways in which we are oppressed (along with the possibilities of overthrowing that tyranny) in our everyday lives. It is about conceiving of and implementing an intellectual revolution in this country, this land—a real revolution where power is wrenched from the hands of the ruling classes and taken into the embrace of the People as a whole.
    My approach is simple. What I intend to do is explore the ways in which the systems and institutions of this nation place heavy loads and hidden addictions on our bodies and minds at the earliest possible age and then expect us to labor under these weights from childhood until the day we die. This minor treatise will also deal with the ways in which we are robbed of our
wealth and then exploited by the ensuing wealthy classes with the very products of our labor and our genius. The revolution I am recommending does not call for bloodshed or physical violence of any kind. But it will require steely resolve and for us to question beliefs as powerful as the old-time certainty that the world is flat.
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    It is possible even today for one to prove that the world we live upon is flat. All you have to do is take a child out onto a parking lot and place a carpenter’s level on the asphalt showing that the little bubble aligns perfectly—proving that the earth we walk upon is a continual plane. What argument can the child make against this claim? Even if she gazes at the sky and wonders, the proof of an imperfect sphere hurtling through space is theoretical at best and most people believe it not because of their understanding of astronomical evidence but simply because they were told.
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    We are told many things; some of them are true, many are not.
    I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United
States of America, and to the Republic for which

it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
    With hand over heart I recited that thinly disguised prayer every morning in my elementary school and, later, in my junior high. I never questioned it—not once. I never doubted pledging loyalty to a flag raised too often in the name of imperialism; to a country that swears itself to the double standard of wealth and poverty; to a God that our own revolution says is up to the individual not the government; to an indivisibility that is black and white, brown and red, male and female, young and old, rich and poor, legal and illegal; to liberty in a nation founded upon slavery and genocide; and to justice where even the most conservative patriot knows that the best legal defense is a fat bank account.
    We are not encouraged to question the basic lies grilled into us by rote in school. The world is round and everything else we are taught is true unless otherwise indicated.
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    I am an alcoholic.
    For years in my late teens and early twenties I’d drink very close to a quart of whisky (or its equivalent)
almost every night. I’d imbibe until I was a stumbling, mumbling drunkard—a danger to myself and to others. Twice, I almost died from accidents I had while inebriated. And then one night, at the bottom of a deep ravine and lucky to be alive, I realized that I had to stop drinking.
    There was no heartfelt drama or deep psychological cause for my addiction(s). I didn’t lose my mother at an early age; nor was I thrown into prison for a crime I didn’t commit. I didn’t live in poverty so dire that I had to escape into alcoholism just to face the day.
    No. I drank because there was a dull but consistent pain in my heart. I wanted to shut off the feeling of hopelessness that dogged me. My television and my teachers, newspapers, and employers informed me in ways both subtle and brazen that I was never going to climb out of the rabbit-warren of my life. I was told, and I believed, that I was always going to be an underachiever navigating the slow lane, never getting much beyond the starting