Being American Makes You a Minority

Well, let me talk a little bit to the, again, to the diaspora. Not just the Muslim diaspora, but for the global South diaspora in the West. Because I'm gonna tell you something that happened that, no one on your television is gonna tell you. Burkina Faso Burkina Faso, which is a country of 24,000,000 people and they have an average income in that country of just $2,000 a year. Well, they just raised $422,000 from their own citizens to build their own roads.

$422,000, not from the World Bank, not from the IMF, not from USAID, not from any foreign NGO. You know all those foreign NGOs, they always attach an agenda to every dollar that they give you. No. It's not from any of those sources. It's not from The US.

It's not from France. It's not from the EU. It's not from the United Nations. It's from their own people, from the Burkinaabe people. And of course, the western press didn't cover it.

They didn't cover it because you're not supposed to be able to build anything without their help. You're not supposed to be able to build anything without their money. You're not supposed to be able to build anything without their institutions and without their, approval. So they're not gonna talk about it. They don't want you to know about it.

The initiative is called, Faso Mebo, which means in their language Burkina Faso is being built. Burkina Faso is being built, and it is being built. Being built by the people of Burkina Faso. It's not being built by the people who colonized Burkina Faso, not by the people who looted Burkina Faso, but by Burkina Faso itself, by the Burkinaabe people themselves. And I want you to think about that and think about who you are.

Who you are and think about where you are. Because if you are or if you if you if you think of yourself as a so called minority, then who you think you are is entirely determined by where you are. Because if you're in America or if you're anywhere else in the West, and they've got you thinking that you're a minority, then it's only because you are a member of the global majority living in the lands of the global minority. Do you understand me? You're an appendage of the global South.

You're an appendage of Africa. You're an appendage of Central America, South America. You're an appendage of Asia. You're an appendage of the Muslim ummah, the global Muslim ummah. You understand me?

You are an appendage of a body that is a giant compared to the population that you are living amongst over there in the West. Now I didn't mention Burkina Faso because I wanna talk to you about Burkina Faso. I mentioned Burkina Faso because Burkina Faso was talking to you. They're talking to you. Burkina Faso was trying to teach you something.

They're trying to teach you something. Or maybe more appropriately, should say Burkina Faso is asking you something. In the West, you've been told that you're a minority. And I'm telling you that that word is a weapon. They use that word as a weapon.

It's a psychological weapon. It tells you that you're small. It tells you that you're marginal. It tells you that you're surrounded. That you need the majority to include you.

You need the majority to protect you. You need the majority to fund you. You the majority to validate you. K? This is a word game.

This is a word game of relative definition. So let's talk about that. Muslim Americans and Muslims in America, they say it's roughly 3,500,000 people. That's according to their official numbers. We all know that the real numbers are higher.

I mean, it was it was 3,000,000 thirty something years ago when I embraced Islam. All the way back then, they said it was three something million people. And, of course, Islam is spreading faster in America than anywhere else in the world. So the real numbers are at least gonna be double what they're telling you. So it's actually gonna be at least five, six million people.

But anyway, average household income in the Muslim community is over $67,000. That's a community with over $200,000,000,000 in annual economic activity just in America, just in that one country. And if you talk about African Americans, that's 42,000,000 people, $2,000,000,000,000 in annual consumer spending. I've said it before, if the African American community was a country, and I'm telling you it is one, it would be the thirteenth largest economy on earth, larger than most of the nations that are currently sitting in the g 20. And then if you look at Hispanic and Latino Americans, so called, 65,000,000 people.

That's over $2,700,000,000,000 in purchasing power. It's the fastest growing economic demographic on the continent. Okay? Your communities represent major economic entities, but you are crippled by this minority framing. You're not small.

You've been trained to feel that you're small, but you're not small. You are the diaspora of the global majority, Just circumstantially located in a country that you need to recognize. You need to recognize that that country that you're in is in the process of consuming itself. You need to understand what's happening in America. You have to understand this and what that means for your communities.

Because America is fragmented. It's fragmented. Structurally fragmented. You understand? The federal government is being hollowed out.

State authority is fracturing against the federal authority. The middle class is being systematically stripped. Wage stagnation, house unaffordability, and so forth. Health care is nothing but a mechanism for debt slavery. Education is a contract for debt servitude.

You're talking about imposed, inflicted, and enforced domestic subjugation by the private sector, dependence in captivity. The sovereign wealth of that country, the productive capacity of that country, the infrastructure of that country, the institutions of that country are all being privatized, all being privatized and financialized. Converted from public goods to private assets, from things that actually serve people into things that extract from people. And this is doing nothing but accelerate and it's accelerating rapidly. Water systems, prisons, roads, hospitals, schools, everything is being auctioned off.

Everything is being auctioned off, and the people who are running that auction don't live in your neighborhood. They don't send their children to your schools, they don't drink from your water supply. And like I've said many many times, none of this is gonna reverse. The trajectory of American power, both domestically and globally is downward. That's their trajectory.

America hasn't had a serious domestic infrastructure investment in decades. The currency is under sustained pressure from all sides, from multiple directions simultaneously, and that's being run by the people, the elites in your own country. Your soft power, your cultural dominance, your so called moral authority is completely gone. Completely gone. The floor is dropping out.

You understand? And you, so called minority communities that have always been on the bottom floors, you're gonna feel it first. You always do. So the question is that Burkina Faso was asking you, are you gonna wait for a system that is collapsing to save you or you're gonna try to build something yourselves? You're gonna try to build something yourselves that saves you and saves your communities from collapsing alongside the system.

That's what Burkina Faso was asking you, by what they're doing, by this initiative. Because the lesson of Burkina Faso is not that $422,000. If you're focused on the amount of the money, then you've missed the point entirely. The lesson is the mechanism. Forget about the money, focus on the mechanism.

That's the important thing. Citizens and organizations of Burkina Faso decided that the infrastructure of their own community, their own country was their own responsibility. You understand? Not the World Bank's responsibility, not France's responsibility, their responsibility. And they started this initiative and they called it Faso Mebo.

Burkina Faso is being built, and that gave the people something to belong to, not just something to donate to. Look, Burkina Faso didn't put themselves in this situation. They didn't put themselves in the situation that they're in themselves. France did that. The West did that.

Colonization did that. But at the end of the day, it's their land. It is their land. And their country has been robbed. Their country has been oppressed.

Their country has been robbed. Their country has been abused and exploited and plundered. But it is their country. So they're not turning to the people who wronged them. They're not looking to to get help from the criminals who pillaged them in the first place.

They're standing up themselves and fixing what the colonizers broke. Just like if your house gets struck by a home invasion. If you have a home invasion at your house, robbers and hoodlums break down your door, beat you up, tie you up, and steal everything you have. Okay. It's still your house.

That's still your home. You understand me? Once they're gone, once those hoodlums and thugs are gone, that's still your house. And you have to stand up, you have to clean up, and you have to start building back what was broken and what was taken from you. You don't wait for the hoodlums and the thugs to come back to help you with the cleanup, to help you rebuild and renovate and get your house back in order.

No. You have to do that yourself. That's part of it being your house. Okay? That's not letting the criminals off the hook.

They did what they did, and there needs to be justice for what they did. But you don't have now have a relationship with them now because of what they did. You don't pretend that they have a stake now in your house. They don't have a stake in your house. They don't have a stake in your property, a stake in your life.

They never should have been there in the first place. And now that they're gone now that they're gone, you have to assert your ownership of what's yours by building it back. And everybody in the household chips in. Everyone in the family chips in. You fix the broken door, you replace the lock, your wife sweeps up the broken glass, your kids help with tidying up and so forth.

They hand you the tools that you need and what have you. Right? Everybody works together. Everybody works together to try to make your house right again. Okay?

Burkina Faso is being built. That's what they're doing. That's exactly what they're doing. They're recovering after a very long home invasion by the French. The name, Faisal Memo, the name of the initiative, that's not just marketing.

This is a mechanism of collective identity formation. You understand me? You're creating a purpose. You're creating a civic identity. You're not just asking people to give money.

You're asking people to become part of something. You're asking people to take on the identity as builders. Right? To become participants in the construction of their own community's future, their own country's future, their own nation's future. And I'm telling you, your community in America, that's your home.

Your community is your household. You need to think in terms of community ship, not citizenship. Because the country in which you have your citizenship, that country is crumbling to pieces and that country never treated you like a citizen in the first place. They want you to keep thinking of yourself as a citizen just so that you will also keep thinking of yourself as a minority. Yes.

Because your minority status, your minority status only exists because of your citizenship status. You understand me? That's the only reason whatsoever. That's the only reason that you think of yourself as a minority because you think of yourself as an American. Well, America doesn't think of you as an American, so why should you?

No. You're not a citizen of that country. You are a member of a community inside that country, and that community is a diaspora community of the global South. That's your household. See Burkina Faso, this is why I say, they weren't just running an initiative to raise money.

You understand me? They are building Burkina Faso, and that means building what it means to be Burkinaabe. What it means to be that people, that nation. You understand? So the first question that you need to define the answer to is who are we?

And the answer to that question has to be settled before anything else can be built. And I'm telling you, you are a diaspora community of the global majority in the West. You are an outpost of the global South located inside an empire that is contracting, that is collapsing, that is falling apart. And you should not be waiting for that collapsing empire's institutions to save you. You should be building your own institutions.

Look, like I said, Burkina Faso is just 24,000,000 people at $2,000 per capita annual income, and they raised $422,000. Okay? That's 18¢ per person across the entire population. People who make in a year what many of you make in a month. Just pin that in your mind.

Okay? Muslim Americans, like I say, between three to 5,000,000 people, let's say, median household income is around $67,000. If 500,000 Muslim Americans contributed a $100, just $100, you would have $50,000,000. Okay? That's a base of capital.

That's not a big sale. You understand? That's a real estate acquisition fund. That's a community health clinic endowment. That's an Islamic school campus.

That's a solar micro grid for a whole Muslim neighborhood. And $100 against the $67,000 annual income is proportionately even a smaller sacrifice than what the citizens of Burkina Faso were making. Okay? And then African Americans, like I say, $2,000,000,000,000 in consumer spending. If you just had $10 per capita taken from a quarter of the population, a quarter of the community, that's a $105,000,000 annually.

That's not just a community fund, that's a sovereign wealth instrument that you could put together yourselves. And again, with the Muslim community, we give zakah every year. And in America, the Muslim American community puts together around $2,000,000,000 every year just in zakah. Most of that, of course, goes into charity, goes into emergency assistance, food bank donations and whatnot, individual grants and so forth. All of that's good, all of that's necessary, all of that's wonderful, but none of it is forming capital.

Obviously, I'm not saying that you should redirect zakat into something like this, but you and I know that you could easily match that amount. You could easily match the same amount that you give in zakat every year. You could match that for an initiative like this. See, that's the tragedy of it. You have the money.

You have the money. You just don't have the orientation. You don't have the intention. You don't have the will. The primary obstacle to community sovereignty is not legal.

It's not financial. It's psychological. Because you have been comprehensively trained through your schools, through your media, through your political culture, and so forth, through the whole system, throughout all infrastructure claims through the state. If you need a road fixed, you petition the city council. If you want a school to be built, you lobby the school board. You

If want an economic development project of some kind, you apply for a federal grant. Every reflex that you have points towards dependency on the state. Every instinct has been shaped to make self organized community infrastructure feel naive, feel insufficient, feel like a drop in the bucket, feel like you can't do it. All of which just makes you dependent on institutions that do not serve you. Institutions that not only not only don't do they not serve you, but very soon, they won't be able to serve you even if they wanted to because it's all falling apart.

They made you dependent on institutions that they are now gutting. You understand me? So the fossil meppo model is psychologically threatening to that training, to that conditioning, that psychological dependency. Because if Burkina Faso can build their own roads with just 18¢ per person, what's stopping you? What's stopping you?

And the answer is because they convinced you that you couldn't do it. They convinced you that the scale is too small, that the resources are too meager, that undertaking something like this is too complex, that the legal the legal process, the paperwork is too confusing. No. None of that is true. The legal vehicles already exist.

The capital already exists. The solidarity infrastructure, the infrastructure of solidarity is there. The mosque, the churches, the cultural centers, the community organizations and so forth. All of that already exists. But what's missing is the moment when your community says, we're not asking anymore, we're building.

We're just chalice, we're gonna build. Look, I see all the time online, I see all the time online, Americans talking about we're not angry enough. And what they mean by that, when they say they're not angry enough, is that they think if you were more angry, then you would be doing something about your situation. But when you say do something about your situation, what you mean is force the state to do something about your situation. That's like slaves getting angry about their conditions.

They're getting they get so angry about their conditions that they go and march on the plantation mansion to demand getting beaten with a riding crop instead of getting beaten with a whip. No. I'm sure you're angry. One could ever accuse Americans of not being angry, certainly not of being not angry enough, but you're confused. You're confused and you don't know what to do with your anger.

You think you're not going out and protesting in the streets, You think you're not going out and trying to overthrow the government or something like that, start a revolution or what have you. You think that the only reason you're not doing that is because you're not angry enough. And you think people should get more stirred up, more riled up. No. You've tried all of that.

You've tried all of that and you've seen how futile it is. No. You're definitely angry enough. You just don't know what to do with your anger. And that makes you even more angry.

And then when you get even more angry, that makes you turn on each other. And when you turn on each other, then you truly destroy any real chance that you have of doing something significant or doing something worthwhile to change your situation. They want you to only ever think about protests. They want you to only ever think about marches and so forth and making demands of the government. See, they teach you this narrative that this is how social change can be affected, how political change can be affected.

Either you march nonviolently, you hold rallies and whatnot, or else, you know, the more radical of them say that you're supposed to rise up in rebellion, armed rebellion, or what have you. This is the narrative that they sold you. And I'm telling you that they're just they're they're selling you two strategies of futility. Because they're not gonna teach you ways that work. That's not something that they would ever do.

You need to stop thinking that you have a relationship with your government or anyway stop thinking that you have a mutual reciprocal relationship with your government. You do not. You do not. You can protest. You can make demands and you won't get anything.

You won't get anything except either ignored or suppressed or you can take up arms and shoot your shot at a revolution and get mowed down in the streets or get hauled off to prison. And increasingly, the truth of the matter is it doesn't even matter whether you choose option a or option b. If you choose the nonviolent or the violent, approach, they're gonna just increasingly deal with you aggressively and violently either way. And on some level you know this. I think on some level you all know this.

And you think that that means you're stuck. You think that means that there's nothing you can do. But that's because you still think of yourself as a citizen of that country. And as long as you think of yourself as a citizen of that country, you think that that's supposed to mean that you have some kind of a relationship with the government. And you think that that means that you're supposed to take your complaints about the government to the government to resolve them.

And as long as you think like that, you're not gonna get anywhere. I'm telling you, you're not gonna get anywhere. You're treating the so called social contract like a marriage contract, and you're trying to get uncle Sam to come to couples therapy with you to try to see if you can work out your issues and save your marriage. Meanwhile, uncle Sam is already seeing somebody else. Uncle Sam has already seen somebody else and he's like that Chris Watts, and he has completely different plans on how to extricate himself from that marriage.

You understand me? No. The thrill is gone. The relationship is over. Your government has abandoned you and it's not coming back.

Uncle Sam went to go get cigarettes and he's not coming back. No. The real revolution is to build like Burkina Faso. I'm telling you, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to demand from a government, and it doesn't make any sense either to revolt against a government that is already in the process anyway of structurally dissolving itself. Doesn't make any sense at all.

You need to come to terms with the reality of your situation. So if you're gonna be staying in that country, right, if you're not gonna try to make your way back to the global South to where your ancestors come from, and you're gonna try to stay on over there or if you're stuck over there because you can't get out for one reason or another, well then I'm telling you, you need to start building what your life is gonna look like. You need to recalibrate your expectations and adjust your survival strategies. See, if you're not gonna go back over to the global South, if you're not gonna come back to the global South to where your ancestors are or where your ancestors came from, at least you can learn something from the global South and adapt some of the things that they're doing over here for your situation over there. So look, in America, there are many instruments, legal instruments that can help you with community sovereignty.

You've got something called a CLT, which is a community land trust. Okay? That's a nonprofit that can acquire and hold land permanently in community ownership. The land is completely removed from the speculative market permanently. It can never be sold to any developers.

It can never be gentrified away. It exists in perpetuity for the community that owns it. You understand me? There are already over 200 active community land trusts across The United States Of America, so this isn't theoretical. The framework, the legal framework already exists.

The precedents exist. A community that builds a community land trust is doing something very similar to what Ibrahim Chawray is doing, creating irreversible community owned infrastructure that cannot be extracted by outside capital. And I've also told you before about the system in Islam, the system. This is by far the most powerful and the most criminally underutilized instrument that Muslims in America have have access to. As I've explained before, a Waqf Waqf, w a q f, is an Islamic endowment.

That means that you're talking about assets that are held permanently, held in trust for community benefit. And it generates income that you can use to fund services for the community. So this is a structurally superior model to the normal nonprofit charity model. A charity spends their capital. A waqf generates capital.

They generate income from the capital that they put in, and it it never runs out. The whole Ottoman Empire ran their hospitals, their schools, their water systems, their road networks, and so forth, all through or or by means of waqfs. Not through government budgets, through community endowments. So Muslim community that converts their masjid into walk held property, that acquires commercial real estate through the walk structure, that pulls donations into a capital endowment. Okay?

That community, if they do that, they're doing something that the Ottoman Empire did. They're building institutions that will outlast any single individual. They will even outlast the government. They'll even outlast empires because some of those walks from the Ottoman and the Ottoman days are still running. Okay.

So these are some of the options that you have. And then you've also got the cooperative cooperation model. This is worker owned, community owned cooperatives. Right? This can generate returns.

This can generate income that can stay within the community, and it will never flow to external shareholders. I'm talking about grocery cooperatives, for example, credit unions, for example, housing cooperatives, for example, worker owned construction companies or any other type of company. Okay? These are legal, these are operational, and these already exist across America already. So you have a number of options.

You have a number of options here. You have real workable options that you can utilize. You literally don't need anything at all except each other. Except each other and the will and the intention and the commitment to do it. Okay.

So that's the the capital generation aspect of it. Then once you've got the capital, then you have to think about what sort of a project, what sort of infrastructure you wanna invest in. And in my opinion, the first obvious project for any community should be land. Not a not a not a program, not a service. Land.

You need land. Like I say, you can organize a collective fund structured either as a community land trust or as a that begins acquiring commercial real estate, residential real estate within the the your community's geographic area, wherever most of you are. Start with just one property. Start with one property. Start with one building.

Run that building. Run that property. Generate income, and then acquire the next. SubhanAllah, within ten years, potentially within ten years, any community that starts with just one building and the disciplines itself to acquire more rather than consume will have an asset base that fundamentally changes their whole relationship, their community's relationship with the local economy. In the first year, you could target $500,000 capitalization from community contributions.

$500,000. If you're talking about a Muslim American, a concentrated Muslim American community and say Dearborn, Jersey City, Houston or what have you, that's just 5,000 households. 5,000 households contributing a $100 each. That's not that ambitious. I don't see why it's not doable.

I don't see why it's not doable. And then build from there. Think about what are the pillars of sufficiency, self sufficiency, for a sufficiency zone, for collective community sovereignty. Energy independence, for example. That's a main pillar for any any sort of a sufficiency zone or community sovereignty.

So put together a community solar cooperative, that either purchases or leases the the the capacity for solar generation, either on the rooftop, you can put it on the roof of the masjid, you can put it on the roof of the mosque, you can put it on the roof of the school, or any of the community buildings, insha'Allah, that you can own, or even if you can possibly have a dedicated solar installation. And now you can help the people in your community save money on energy. This is not utopian. There's over 1,500 community solar projects operating right now across The United States. The legal framework exists.

In most states, the legal framework exists. You could have a mosque that puts solar panels on their roof through a cooperative, and then they can distribute credits to 100 to 200 maybe households in the in the Muslim community. Okay? That mosque would have just created community energy service. They just built infrastructure.

Collective community sovereignty infrastructure. So then you have land, you have energy, and then food. You need food. The halal food supply chain in The United States is almost entirely controlled by corporations. Corporations that have no relationship and no obligation whatsoever towards Muslim communities that they supposedly serve, that they sell to.

You understand? So start a community food cooperative. You can do that. Bulk purchases of staple goods and so on, you can start with that and then you can move to to to establishing direct sourcing agreements with global South producers. Eventually, could establish a commercial kitchen.

A commercial kitchen with your own distribution infrastructure, your own distribution system. You're breaking dependency. You're breaking your dependency on corporations. It's not that complicated. It starts with a group chat.

That's how it starts. A group chat, a bulk order of rice, a bulk order of oil and so forth, and it ends with a supply chain that your own community controls and that connects your community to the global ummah. When you're sourcing halal food directly from suppliers in Pakistan, in Indonesia, in Senegal, in Somalia, in Turkey or what have you, you are building an economic relationship with the global South that bypasses American corporate middlemen. Now you're building an an alternative economic network for yourself, just like the rest of the global South is doing, just like bricks is doing. So now you have land, you have energy, you have food, then you need to work on health care.

Because health care in America is nothing but a debt trap. Just a debt trap. It's completely designed to extract wealth from people when they are at their absolute weakest point. When they're sick, when they're injured, when they're in pain, when they're dying. So you can start a community health endowment.

Fund it through what you've already built. Fund it through what you've already built. Open a community health clinic. Not free. It doesn't have to be free, but affordable.

You can even work out your own payment system, your own payment methods between yourselves. So, okay, you've got land, you've got energy, you've got food, you've got health care. These are all things that any community in America can secure for themselves and should be trying to. Then you wanna look at education. So you can start a community school or you can have some sort of a support network for homeschooling programs in your community.

Listen, I'm telling you, you need to contextualize your lives. You need to contextualize your lives, your lives over there in America. You need to see yourselves and understand yourselves within the broader context, the broader context of the global South, the broader context of the global Muslim world, the Muslim ummah, the global ummah. Stop thinking about yourselves within the narrow and crumbling context of The United States Of America. I mean, look around you.

Look around you. Can't you smell the entropy, the decay? It's over. The global South is where the dynamism is in the world today. That's where the growth is.

That's where the development is. That's where the initiatives are. That's where the energy is, the vision is, the innovation is. That's where the future is. The future is in the global South.

Now, I'm not telling you that you need to move from America. I'm not telling you you need to move. Everyone has their own circumstances. Everyone has to evaluate their own situation themselves and determine for themselves what is or is not viable for them, what their real options are. But what I am trying to do is tell you how you can try to make it in that collapsing country and not go down with the ship, but let the ship go down around you while you stay afloat.

And that's gonna be again, that's gonna be by identifying yourself with where your ancestors came from. By identifying yourself as a diaspora of the global South, not as minorities in that country, but as an outpost of the global majority and do over there what your people and our people are doing over here in the global South. And if you don't know what we're doing in the global South, let me update you. I told you about Burkina Faso. Well, Burkina Faso is part of the Sahel, part of the Sahel alliance.

Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea. Right? They expelled the French military forces. They told France you're done here. Countries that could not have even imagined saying that fifteen years ago said it.

They said it and they meant it and they enforced it. Okay? BRICS plus has expanded to include now Saudi Arabia, The UAE, Ethiopia, Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, and it's still growing. Malaysia is gonna be a part of it. Turkey too.

Thailand, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Bolivia, Uzbekistan. They're all partnering with BRICS in the BRICS plus partnership system, as well as obviously the original founding members, Russia, India, China, South Africa. They are steering the direction of the global economy. They're steering the direction of global politics and international relations. They are setting the agenda.

This is the reality. They are setting the agenda. They are building the institutional counter architecture to Western financial domination. And it's gonna be the world order of the second half of this century. Turkey is building trade relationships that are denominated now in local currencies.

The Gulf states are already negotiating oil sales in Yuan. The swift system, the financial architecture that gave America the ability to sanction countries and and and isolate them from the global economy, that's being systematically bypassed now. It's almost meaningless. SubhanAllah, the global South is moving. The global South is building.

The global South is connecting. And here's what you need to understand. You are a part of that movement. You can be a part of that movement, not just as observers, but as participants. The diaspora communities of the global South who are located inside those Western countries, who are located inside America or Europe or what have you, they are potentially the most strategically strategically positioned outposts for the global South, for that emerging alternative world order.

You are not a minority in a Western country. You are members of the global majority who happen to be living there. And listen to me, you don't have the time you think you have. You don't have the time you think you have. It is more urgent than you think.

The fragmentation of American institutional economic life is absolutely accelerating very rapidly. The programs, the grants, the government services, the legal protections that you used to depend upon or you used to think were always gonna be there, they're being stripped. They're being completely stripped, not gradually, rapidly. Doge, the Doge project. This is a structural hollowing of the federal government.

So the communities that build their own infrastructure, that build their own infrastructure, before that floor drops out, they'll survive the drop. But the communities that are still waiting for external rescue, when the floor drops, well, they're going they're gonna fall right down with it. They're gonna drop right down through the floor. You know, they always say that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, where you're living in that twenty years ago right now. It's always twenty years ago if you have foresight.

It's always twenty years ago. If you have vision, if you care about your future and you care about your children's future, right now is there twenty years ago. It's your children's twenty years ago. It's the twenty years ago of your future self. I don't want you to come away from this feeling depressed about the situation.

I don't even want you to come away feeling inspired. You don't have to have anxiety about the future. You don't have to have hope about the future. You don't have to have motivation, and you don't have to have despair about the future. What you have to have is a plan.

That's what you have to have. So go find you 10 households. Go find you 10 households. 10 families in your geographic community, your geographic area who know what's going on. And if they don't know what's going on, you let them know.

You let them know what's going on. I said 10, just 10. Not 50, not a 110 people. The kind of people who you know are gonna show up for a meeting. The kind of people who you know are gonna are are gonna be reliable to do research and to make the calls that need to be made.

You understand? 10 people who have decided that they are tired of waiting. 10 people who are tired of being angry with nothing to do with that anger. 10 people who are actually ready to take control of their own futures for themselves and for their children and for their families. And then over the course of the next thirty days, just the next thirty days, try to establish your legal vehicle, a CLT, a structured trust of some of some kind, a cooperative corporation of some kind.

Get you a lawyer if you need one. Get you a lawyer who understands these structures if you need it. You can probably find all the information you need to online. The legal cost, the actual legal cost for establishing a nonprofit or establishing a cooperative are not that prohibitive. It's just a few thousand dollars.

You can pool your resources. And then after that first thirty days, the next ninety days after that, try to identify your first asset. Not your dream asset, not some, you know, pie in the sky, just a commercial property in your community that's undervalued, a building in your community that currently rents out that that that you can purchase, A vacant lot maybe even that could become a community garden if you build it up. Become a food cooperative, become a community space, something physical, some land, some property. Then over the following six months, you launch your initiative.

Give it a name like Fossil Mebo. Give it a civic identity, something people can feel that they belong to, that they can work on. Publish it within your community, not in the in the mainstream press, you don't need the mainstream press, just for your own community. Because your community is your constituency, not the mainstream press, not the broader society. And then within twelve months, within the first twelve months after you launch your initiative, try to make your first acquisition.

Plant the flag. Sign the documents. Sign the contract. Sign the deed. Own something.

Because ownership is the beginning of the of of sovereignty. It's the beginning of sovereignty. Owning property is not the end of the work. You're not your work isn't done, that's just the beginning. And then simultaneously try to connect outward, like I said, try to find global South partners.

Try to find Indonesian food producers. Try to find Turkish manufacturers. Senegalese agricultural cooperatives, Malaysian tech companies. Right? Build the relationships that you will need at some point before you need them.

Because relationships like this, that's infrastructure. That's infrastructure. And infrastructure takes time to build. Don't wait for perfect conditions. The perfect conditions are not coming.

The conditions that you have right now is that you have a contracting empire, a crumbling, collapsing empire, but you also have an expanding alternative order, and you have a community that has more resources than it has ever deployed strategically, and you have a window of time that is open right now, but it's closing. Look, Ibrahim, may Allah help him. He's a young man, and he's running a country of 24,000,000 people with a GDP that is smaller than the annual consumer spending of the Muslim American community. Just the Muslim American community. That man is under military threat.

He's under assassination threat. He's under economic pressure. He expelled both the foreign military forces and foreign aid simultaneously. And he launched a citizen funded road building campaign and called it Burkina Faso is being built. In the face of all that, not Burkina Faso is waiting to be built, not Burkina Faso is applying for funds to be built, not Burkina Faso is asking France to build.

No. Burkina Faso is building. That man is building that country, working together with his people. And you have more resources than he has. You have more, legal protection than he has.

You have more security than he has. You have the solidarity infrastructure. Like I say, you have the mosques, you have the churches, you have the cultural institutions, you have community networks, you have everything that you need. The only question, the only question is whether or not you have the will.