It is only recently that I have begun to reflect on the small band of determined friends and relatives of Officer Daniel Faulkner, with their terrible, stupid-looking flyers -- people who would most likely never live in Marin County, send their children to the nation's top-rated public schools, or rub shoulders with Sean Penn; people who would wear black socks with brown shoes and sport Farrah Fawcett hairdos years before the newly married Duchess of Cornwall would make them fashionable again.
I remember the future Ben-and-Chloes (or Kyle-and-Jens!) of Northern California wildly cheering Mumia's speech, just before they left university forever, and went on to graduate school at Berkeley or UCLA, or to their stock options, their professional partnerships, their plain wooden frame-houses in Marin which will probably fetch far more than $1.5 million apiece by the time they are able to afford them. I think of them, and what the friends and relatives of Officer Daniel Faulkner must have felt when they heard those cheers, and I blush, embarassed, warm-of-face, remembering how I was afraid to be seen reading those awful, amateurish flyers describing how Mumia had murdered their loved one, one Officer Daniel Faulkner, a working class man who gave his life to clean up some of the mess left behind in a Philadelphia urban ghetto by Ben- and-Chloe (or Kyle-and-Jen!)
This reminded me of something I saw on the news a few years back, (I think) just after the Good Friday Agreement, where Gerry Adams and Bill Clinton were meeting together with a lot of concerned 'human rights' celebrities - Bianca Jagger was there - can't remember if it was in Ulster or Washington, though I think Washington.
There was one forlorn figure with a placard outside the security cordon, protesting against Adams red carpet treatment. As the beautiful people entered, some, assuming him to be a Loyalist, shouted things like 'Give up ! You lost !' at him. He was a father whose child had been killed by an IRA bomb.
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