Seize The Time Sister!

seize the time, sister!

ANGELA DAVIS

Che made the very important point that the society you're going to build is already reflected in the nature of the struggle that you're carrying out. And one of the most important things in relationship to that is the building of a collective spirit, getting away from this individualistic orientation towards personal salvation, personal involvement. . .One of the most important things that has to be done in the process of carrying out a revolutionary struggle is to merge those two different levels, to merge the personal with the political where they're no longer separate.

What people have to start doing is to build that collective spirit. To overcome that notion of bourgeois individuality which separates one person from the next and which defines the individual as someone who can assert himself at the expense of his neighbor, at the expense of his brother by destroying his brother.

You have to make a lot of sacrifices. You can't even pose before yourself the alternative of what am I going to do. Am I going to stay home and get high and have a good time tonight, or am I going out to try and rap with the people, to try to organize?. . .You don't have that alternative anymore. It has to be only one course. . .the revolutionary course. . .

Bourgeois ideology says you have only one life to live. You know. . .eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. Don't give a damn about what your sister and brother are experiencing. Just do what you can do to get a little bit of pleasure out of life. What we are saying is that our lives are no different from the lives of our brothers and sisters who have been shot down by the pigs, from Huey Newton who is in jail and the Soledad Brothers who are being railroaded to the gas chamber for murder they had nothing to do with, from Bobby Seale who's being railroaded to the electric chair. We cannot separate ourselves from what is happening to them. . .

Of course, anybody who's talking about overthrowing capitalism, faces the possibility of losing his life. But. . .that doesn't paralyze you, because you don't see your life, your individual life, as being so important. . .I have given my life to the struggle. My life belongs to the struggle. If I have to lose my life in the struggle, well, then, that's the way it will have to be. A hell of a lot of brothers and sisters have already given their lives for the struggle.