From Ben Cable

Cable Muse Network LLC

Mike in his own words:

How do we make America what it should be? First, here’s some advice from a friend in prison.  28 years ago he was sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit and was saved from the electric chair 12 years later by a campaign in which I was involved.  He remains in prison today despite our efforts on his behalf because of an institutional imperative whereby states refuse to admit their mistakes - they deny reality for fear of losing authority – or money, which today is too often the same thing; better to lie and hope to get away with it than admit fault and face the consequences.

Seven years ago my friend wrote, “As I reflect I come to recognize that we human beings possess something which is at once more terrible and wonderful than all else: the ability to make ourselves and our world better or worse. I sense that humanity as a whole may not have progressed, nor will it meaningfully advance, if not for human beings who resolutely and passionately champion a cause they believe in.  So many I’ve been fortunate enough to encounter during the course of my odyssey epitomize for me the fundamental fact that only by communicating one’s realization with passion can the truth, one way or another, break through the fog of complacency that lays thick upon our consciousness as a species.  I suppose that is one of our chief duties - to speak out to the best of our ability – maybe quietly and gently, maybe with angry wisdom, maybe with slow and careful analysis, maybe by unshakable public example; but speak out we must if humanity is to remain alive and awake.  To abstain in stoical or ironical detachment or to stay dithered in the middle ground is to atrophy.”  The words of Joe Giarratano, an innocent man still behind bars today in Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap, VA.

Imagine what this land could mean to hopeful human beings.

But then imagine this shining star shunted onto a siding, vision fogging, hope diminishing, dreams dying because of the rot of smugness, arrogance, greed, weakness, because of an absence of empowering spirit.  Imagine the cancer of leaders without inspiration, of power-mad, self-satisfied, possibility denying rulers who, lost in the excrement of their own frustrations, lack the power of curiosity and the courage of love, choosing instead to bludgeon hope with the mace of fear.

Imagine the sense of loss, the frustration, the pit of despair that would encompass those who had once known possibility.  Imagine the hopelessness that would appear – the cynicism that would follow – and the negligence that would result.

I ask you to imagine this because its worm’s-eye view, held by some who don’t enjoy the security in their lives that so many of us have come to take for granted.  And it seems to me they represent the bottom line, where a principled life separates itself from a constipated, fear-driven world view; it’s the line one steps across when choosing to expose the lie that says some human beings are immaterial, inconsequential, invisible.

There’s a great truth told quite simply in a novel I read.  The primary character, a cop, says, “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”  Everybody counts or nobody counts…

Another writer observed: “In cynical times right and wrong can be hard to sort out.  Goodness and truth can seem beyond our reach.  But we have the option, the obligation, to put cynicism aside and exercise the public virtues: to find truth, oppose wrong, protect innocence, promote good and do right.”

Farrell at Writing for Change - SF

In support of that obligation, let me pull together a few thoughts.
 
Four black men in Illinois, the “Ford Heights Four,” spent 18 years in prison for a rape and murder they did not commit.  After his release, one testified in Washington, about ways “to help restore justice to our criminal justice system.” Asked what was at the root of systemic injustice, he observed, “I think its fear.  There’s fear of crime, fear of different skin color, fear of admitting mistakes.  You got people here in the government who’re so scared, that they build more and more prisons while doing away with the safeguards that prevent them from being filled with innocent people.  We can’t go on being so scared of each other.”

He said, “I’ve been afraid, and I guess you could say I used to be a racist, too.   But it was mostly white folks who stepped up to help us.  So there’s one thing I learned for sure in eighteen years: If we can conquer our fears, there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Those are the words of Dennis Williams - one of the Ford Heights Four – freed and completely exonerated in 1996 after 18 years on death row in Illinois only to drop dead of heart failure four years later, still a young man.

Now compare Dennis’ thought, “...there’s one thing I learned for sure in 18 years: If we can conquer our fears, there’s nothing we can’t do,” to this one - “I have learned many things in prison, but the most important thing is that for a human being, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome.  You just have to rely on yourself and you can get through anything.”  Those are the words of Wei Jingsheng, the Chinese Pro-Democracy dissident who was finally released due to pressure from the human rights community after spending almost 18 years in a Chinese prison.

In spite of their bitter experience, these two men, from very different lives, came to the same conclusion: that by facing and conquering our fears and learning to rely on our strengths, we can do anything.    
                        
I was once at an event for a group of attorneys in LA who represent people living in misery in the inner city.  A quote from one of the children they had helped was emblazoned on a banner across the back of the room.  “Mommy,” it said, “does this mean we don’t have to live in the rat house anymore?”  That’s a fairly simple message.  No one - least of all a child - should have to live among rats.  But I asked them to consider another child, as well.  Not this one who tugs at our hearts, but a child from the same set of circumstances who feels the need for what he perceives as justice and says, instead, “Mommy, I’m going to find the people who made you live like this and make them sorry.”

What happens to that child?  Maybe one leaves her rat-infested home and finds her way to a place of hope.  But the other, if he’s already in a place that promises hope but has been robbed of it, maybe he steps across the line and becomes an outlaw, striking out at those in society who, in his mind, have done him – and his mother - harm.

There is plenty of evidence around us – the unresolved devastation from Katrina one bleeding example - to demonstrate that we are failing many in our society by deeming them invisible.  We compound the failure by forcing them into a system – a school system, a legal system, a medical system, a welfare system, a criminal justice system, where invisible people suffer invisibly and then, if they misbehave, we destroy them.  Unless someone cares enough to pierce the shield of invisibility, the children from rat-infested places, the invisible people whose hearts yearn for justice, explode and do harm – or implode and do harm in another way.  And when decent, principled, sometimes angry people speak out against injustice and do their best to make our society what it should be, make the reality match the rhetoric, they are too often derided as bleeding hearts or bomb-throwers rather than honored for the courage they demonstrate and the principles they articulate.