Alex Yi

The blessed month of Ramadan has arrived yet again. It has arrived not with resistance, but with surrender. This blessed month is a quiet collective revolution of souls traveling along side a world that worships bombast, individualism, warmongering, and arrogance. For thirty days, billions of Muslims refuse the lie that we are only what we consume, choosing hunger over excess, stillness over noise, and remembrance over distraction. There is no other event in human kind like the month of Ramadan. There is no book in the history of humankind that has been memorialized like the Quran. Muslim or not, as a human being you should be aware of the beauty of the month of Ramadan. Ramadan Mubarak to all of my people.

“One man of popularity can let the world know the problem. He might lose a few dollars himself telling the truth, might lose his life, but he's helping millions. But if I kept my mouth shut because I can make millions–this ain't doing nothing. I just love freedom and flesh and blood of my people more than I do the money.”–Muhammad Ali (1971)

As of 2024, prescription drugs are more widely abused in the United States than cocaine. Approximately 16.3 million Americans reported misusing prescription drugs in 2024, compared to 5 million who reported using cocaine.  The pharmaceutical “Narcoterrorist” making the most money from prescription drug sales in the United States as of 2024 was Johnson & Johnson, with over $55 billion in annual pharmaceutical sales revenue. Johnson & Johnson has produced the most opioids in the United States and is a major supplier of raw materials (including opium poppies). “Johnson & Johnson’s supply chain began in Tasmania, an island 150 miles south of mainland Australia, where scientists in the mid-1990s altered the genetics of thousands of plants to engineer a ‘super poppy’ that was particularly rich in opiates.” The poppies were then exported to the United States where another Johnson & Johnson subsidiary refined them into oxycodone and hydrocodone, and the narcotics were shipped as white crystalline powders to the nation’s pillmakers. These pharmaceutical companies are the corporatized-cartels. They’re movin’ weight globally. They’re supported by both the Republicans and the Democrats, because they’re putting money in both of their pockets through PAC’s.

My 9-year-old asked me who I was voting for. I told him that before I answered his question that he should know about propositions. My example was Proposition 6. Proposition 6 asks California voters to amend the state Constitution to ban involuntary servitude, which would end forced labor in state prisons. About 40,000 of the state’s 90,000 inmates work in a variety of jobs including construction, laundry, firefighting and cooking. Most of them earn as little as 74 cents an hour. I then ran down the 13th Amendment to him and its allowance of slavery for “criminal punishment.” I broke down every word in the proposition, and who it most affects (racially and class wise). His take away was that we need to vote to end slavery in the prison system, and that people should be talking about this, because it’s not right. This was my way of getting him to understand, early that elections are not just about casting a POPULARITY vote for a presidential candidate (and yes I gave him an elementary breakdown of the electoral college). That there are state and local politics that need your attention. This may seem like a lot to talk about with a 9-year-old, but it’s not. They’re more intelligent than a lot of adults think, and if you don’t think your children are being politically programmed already you don’t understand how political propaganda works. Don’t just tell your children that “your ancestors died for the right to vote,” because that oversimplifies what their intentions were. When you say that, "our ancestors died for our right to vote," I hear you, AND they also died for our right to READ, our right to be EDUCATED, our right to FIGHT, and our right to be LIBERATED from allowing others to pressure us into making decisions detrimental to ourselves (individually and collectively). In honor of the many sacrifices that our ancestors had made to secure rights that should have been naturally afforded to them/us as human beings, one of the things that I view as imperative to paying said homage to their suffering, is too NEVER vote for any candidate that has proven to have political investments in the suffering of their people. Honor your ancestors by teaching the next generation to be critically thinking voters.