SocietyWatch
Black Lives Matter defends Cuban Revolution
After Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s death on Nov. 25, 2016, Black Lives Matter published an editorial praising his legacy: “Lessons From Fidel: Black Lives Matter and the Transition of El Comandante.”
“Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante,” the group wrote. “And there are lessons that we must revisit and heed as we pick up the mantle in changing our world, as we aspire to build a world rooted in a vision of freedom and the peace that only comes with justice.”
Black Lives Matter picks up a mantle dropped by a dictator who locked up one out of every 18 Cubans as political prisoners in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, an incarceration rate higher than that of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Yet the authors insist that he offers lessons of “freedom” and “peace.”
“From Fidel, we know that revolution is sparked by an idea, by radical imaginings, which sometimes take root first among just a few dozen people coming together in the mountains,” the authors continued. “It can be a tattered group of meager resources, like in Sierra [Maestra] in 1956 or St. Elmo Village in 2013.”
The Sierra Maestra Mountains were where Fidel and Raúl Castro took refuge in 1956 after returning to Cuba from exile in Mexico. From this base, Castro and his followers launched the revolution that caused the Communist takeover of Cuba. This editorial links Castro’s “tattered group” to the 30 people who met in Los Angeles’s arts district to found Black Lives Matter.
The authors posthumously thanked Fidel Castro for harboring Assata Shakur (a former Black Panther who murdered a New Jersey state trooper), as well as other self-
described black revolutionaries like Michael Finney, Ralph Goodwin, Charles Hill and Huey P. Newton, who were charged with murder.
“With Fidel’s passing, there is one more lesson that stands paramount: When we are rooted in collective vision, when we bind ourselves together around quests for infinite freedom of the body and the soul, we will be victorious,” the authors concluded. “As Fidel ascends to the realm of the ancestors, we summon his guidance, strength and power as we recommit ourselves to the struggle for universal freedom. Fidel vive!”
Black Lives Matter masquerades as a human rights group concerned about African-Americans and police brutality. This editorial reveals its real goals, as does its 13 guiding principles listed on its website. The manifesto demands independent political power, direct democratic community control of all law enforcement, collectivism, socialism, and the destruction of “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”
The Movement for Black Lives, the name for the 50 organizations representing the ideology of the Black Lives Matter movement, released a policy statement in August 2015 that unabashedly called for collective ownership of resources, banks and businesses; a highly progressive income tax; a guaranteed minimum income; and other planks of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
Depression on steep rise among U.S. teens
Half a million more American teenagers experienced a major depressive episode in the past year compared to 2005, according to a national study on depression published in the November 2016 issue of Pediatrics.
In a follow-up article in the same journal, pediatricians Anne L. Glowinski and Giuseppe D’Amelio said the study sounded “an alarm” about a “disturbing development” in adolescent depression and anxiety.
The study evaluated more than 350,000 Americans from 2005 to 2014 and determined how many suffered from such episodes each year. Psychologists define a major depressive episode as “a depressed mood or a loss of interest or pleasure in daily activities consistently for at least a two-week period.” The prevalence of reported cases in teens rose from 8.7 percent in 2005 to 11.3 percent in 2014—a 37 percent increase.
These numbers suggest that roughly 2.8 million adolescents self-report having a major depressive episode each year. In 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services estimated this number to be up to 3 million. But as Time reported in its November 2016 cover story, “Teen Depression and Anxiety: Why the Kids Are Not Alright,” experts “suspect that these statistics are on the low end of what’s really happening,” since with issues like depression and anxiety, people are “deliberately secretive.”
