Resistance as Exile in Prison

 by Norm Lowry

 February 24, 2015

 “The old yellow pus of American cowardice is once again throbbing in the veins of this sorry country. How does it appear? In chauvinism that struts safely in its own land, away from danger. It is easy to talk ‘dangerously' about knocking people down when you are on your own turf, behind an embattlement of thousands of nuclear missiles and an ocean.” - Jack Henry Abbott, with Norman Mailer

 Our ugly and tasteless culture cannot abide women and men with ideals, whose faith alone compels us to purposefully give up our lives of ease, for the betterment of mankind. We are not saints or heroes. We have simply grown sick and tired of the lies and can no longer stomach the fact that it is these lies that allow even we who are imprisoned to live better than two-thirds of all humans on earth. Our society’s chosen lies cover the obvious truths that we are the chief oppressors and terrorists of humanity, the fiscal pillagers of cultures and peoples we deem to be our lesser, the slumlords of humanity - all in the name of our country, our favored gods, and religions.

    Our society’s prisons are filled, not according to demographic substantiation of actual crime, but according to publicly-and-media-driven lies, racism, poverty, and political incorrectness or discomforts. All inmates in American prisons are there to be broken or silenced, no matter the perceived, necessary means or method. Anyone who believes that there is any justice involved in America’s justice or prison complexes is simply deluded.

      My gratitude goes out to all who are, or have been, imprisoned for the love of humanity, or who offer encouraging and inspirational uplift to those of us who are imprisoned. Truly, I could not do this alone, as prison is filled with death and human loneliness. My peers, both inmate and staff, constantly seek to bring me around to their chosen reality - that I cannot stop nuclear weaponry and warmaking, racism and bigotry, impoverishment and community violence, et. al, but they are deceived. In one, I am stopping all of them. If we can create adversity, surely we can disappear it.

 Blessings,
 Norm