The Unequal Fight for Injustice: Beat Within vs. Mother Jones

Publications may come in many forms and purposes. Two published journals, The Beat Within and Mother Jones are not any different. On the surface, these published journals have striking similarities, but on the whole they have more differences than similarities. Aside from the outright difference in the age of their writers and the type of write-ups and contents, there is more to be said between these two publications.

The Beat Within is a San Francisco literary magazine that started in 1996 and is published by San Francisco’s Pacific News Service. It comes out weekly and includes essays, poems and art done by young people in prison. Readership of The Beat Within is primarily composed of the kids who produce them, and each issue would carry a page called “The Beat Without,” featuring an essay of a former juvenile hall detainee. The Beat Within started as a four-page newsletter when a mentor named Tupac died and the impact was so great, the children needed something to express their feelings on.

A reading of the stories would show a continuum of emotional standing from acceptance of fate and a more relaxed view of life with readiness to change, to an understanding of the past as some childish accident or inevitable part of growing up, to a resigned misgiving about a world and its thinking not yet properly understanding them. The last is expressed by Pure Dragon, a 7 year old boy who left China for America.

“When I think back on it, it all seems like a bad dream that has no future in it. But this ain’t no dream, this is my life. If I keep getting caught up in this system, I already know how my future would be, but I don’t want that future. I would like to go back to school, back to my family, to find me a job. I think the purpose of the hall is to change us one way or another. They have programs, counselors to talk to us, but they don’t know what we’re going through, so it is not helping us. Maybe if I stayed in China, a lot of things wouldn’t have happened to me.”

The stories are outrightly therapeutic for the children, allowing them release of the past. Their works are presented sometimes as slices of their lives in a paragraph or two These are embedded with articles from the staff or management generously supporting these bits of expressions, as for example this one from a boy left by his father to hang on a tree –

“I didn't cry out to my father, because he believed in punishing even more severely those who cry, so I just dangled in the wind trying to pull the unforgiving rope away from my neck as my father tied his end of the rope to the chicken coop, double-checked the knot, then walked back into the house.”

Meanwhile, Mother Jones may be said to be a journal of angst by activists, taking its name after a United States community organizer named Marry Harris Jones. Jones had remained a union organizer until she died. Founded in 1976, Mother Jones is published bimonthly out of San Francisco with a circulation of about 250,000. It is considered to be a left-of-center periodical whose investigations are used by people working for social justice. Mother Jones is run under the auspices of the Foundation for National Progress (FNP). The magazine is said to work directly with politicians, educators, advocates and social change organizations.

The background of these two publications may shed light into their personalities as crusading journals. The Beat Within was borne out of a need for some children in prison to express their grief for a dead friend. It is barely a decade old but speaks from an earlier beginning which is the environment a child comes upon. On the other hand, Mother Jones’ fight is with a quantitatively bigger world out there, institutions that have juridical personalities that can do their bigger version of injustice especially when organized.

Readership of Mother Jones is extensive, and can be said to be for the global village, having now its online version. Target readership is the B-C crowd or middle class groups who have much stake with the affairs of government. The contents are of investigative journalism and whose results are used by agencies, both government and private.

Meanwhile, the readership of The Beat Within are the wards themselves, although it has expanded to include immediate concerned groups. The contents are personal essays and artworks as expressions of their experiences. The circulation is local and non-commercial and the contents are experienced-based that have a lot to do with these people’s being incarcerated. They strongly express the workings of the mind of the wards who wrote them. One remarkable thing observed among the incarcerated children is their craving to be heard even by just one man.

Comparing the fight for injustice of these two, The Beat Within is still tougher than that of Mother Jones.

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