Tookie Williams was remorseful regarding his co-founding of the Crips, but he was always clear about the responsibility of public officials and public policies for creating the conditions of hopelessness that foster gang violence. In his penitence, he never sucked up to authority, but always spoke truth to power.

In the end, that is what Schwarzenegger didn't like about Tookie. Tookie decried gang violence because it was part of the oppression of communities of color, not because it broke the laws created by the system that controlled the other side of that oppression: prisons, poverty and police violence.

Schwarzenegger's statement tries to cast doubt upon Tookie's widely acknowledged achievement in curbing gang violence by pointing out that Tookie's one-man campaign from behind bars did not completely solve a problem that Schwarzenegger himself has been using the highest power in the state, the governor's office, to accelerate through cuts to education and social services, while maintaining tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

The hypocrisy of this pronouncement has few peers.

Arnold's murder of Tookie Williams makes it clear that he is not truly remorseful for his cuts to education and services, despite verbally claiming to have recognized the error of his ways when he was caught and reprimanded by the voters during the past special election for trying to grab the power needed to do even more of the same. If he truly wanted to repair the damage his policies have wrought upon our communities, he would not have executed someone who is working tirelessly to reverse the blight of gang violence that his past policies have helped to create.

All of the governor's blather about Tookie's conviction on charges and whether he is truly remorseful has no bearing whatever on the positive effect that Tookie's activities are having today. It is very simple; does the governor care enough about communities to simply allow someone to live who is working selflessly to rebuild them?

By killing Tookie, Schwarzenegger seriously sets back the campaign to end gang violence, and convinces troubled young people that any attempts to reform themselves will not change the hostility with which they have been greeted since they came into this world. By letting him live, he could have furthered the healing of communities, could have shown that government recognized redemption, but he chose not to do so because, he said, Tookie needed to be punished for what he did in the past, when he was a completely different person.

By taking that position, Schwarzenegger shows that he does not care enough about the welfare of the people of this state to continue to represent us as governor. His petty focus upon revenge has cost us a strong contributor to the community. We will remove this anti-social and destructive person from power in the next election.

Schwarzenegger is a nobody, a nothing, compared to Tookie Williams. Schwarzenegger has never done anything even remotely approaching the positive or selfless acts of Tookie Williams during his last eleven years in prison. The fact that such a pitiful person could hold the power of life or death over one of our valued leaders shows how far we have to go as a society, as a people, as a community.

But that is where we are, and we have to start somewhere. And so we will grieve, and then we will try to redress these wrongs. We will continue to create the legacy that Tookie has left behind by building upon the revelation of this system's injustice that he has exposed by his courageous actions, and that the system has exposed by cutting him down even as he was working on our behalf.