From the Archives
(June 2005) Jezusf*ckingHChrist what an unexpected lunch break! Started out irritated because I had to dash over to the credit onion to change some paperwork that they really should have had available online. Signed in and was reading an e-mail from a friend about a neighbor's teen who killed his parents with a single-load shotgun.
Single load. Multiple shots. That’s a lot of pent-up rage in a boy.
Got called to a carrel and was trying to shake the news off as I glanced at the woman in the next chair. She looked pretty distraught and I thought, huh, must have bounced some checks or had her credit stolen, poor thing.
The bank clerk and I were chit-chatting about the heat and how we both need a vacation and whatnot, making small talk, but then we couldn’t help but overhear the distaught woman at the next carral say, between newly sprouted hiccupping sobs, that her husband had kissed her goodbye at 7:30 this morning, told her he loved her, drove their daughter to school, then drove a few blocks and shot himself in the head, causing his car to swerve into oncoming traffic and kill two other people. And she just CAN'T understand why he didn’t TALK to her about whatever was going on because that was one of the reasons she married him in the first place—because they had ALWAYS been able to talk to each other about anything. Always. And he had a good job. Had just gotten a big promotion. And was so happy about it. And he was a happy guy in general. Really. And a good father. And her best friend. And now her daughter wants to know what she said that made her father kill himself.
Jezuskreeist I kept thinking This is not happening This is not happening This is not happening as I listened to the poor woman struggle to get her story out.
At this point I wasn’t even pretending to write on my form anymore and the bank clerk and I were instead just staring at each other, frozen. Then this huge tear rolled down her face. And then I couldn't help myself and one rolled down mine too and we just sat there, staring at each other and listening to the poor woman explain that she needed to figure out how to access her dead husband’s bank accounts because they had bills due that she needed to pay.
Finally, another clerk walked up and put her hand on the women's arm and escorted her to some place down the back hallway “where you’ll be more comfortable" and the bank clerk and I just sat there staring at each other until I finally signed my completely insignificant paperwork and got the heck out of there.
Didn’t even say anything about what happened either because all I wanted to do was keep my sh*t together till I got out to my car. The clerk did say “Take care” as I left though.
There was no way I could return to campus after that and all the little things that seemed so important this morning seemed so digustingly insignificant then anyway, so I drove out of town to find some country roads instead and just looked at grass and breathed for a few hours.
Gawd.
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Friday, October 5, 2007
Saturday, September 22, 2007
33. A VIOLENT WOMAN IN A VIOLENT DAY
From the Archives
(March 2005) I just spent the most wonderful hour doing karate catas this morning while looking out the window at the rain that is supposed to turn to snow as the day progresses. This does not bode well for the thirty or so flowers that are blooming in my yard.
Had two glasses of red wine while I worked on the Great American Novel last night. Haven’t had much to drink of late—a couple of beers watching basketball with pals maybe.
Either I didn’t drink enough water before bed or my body didn’t like the sulphites last night, because my head’s all stuffy today. Good reminder that drinking is, really, just putting poison into my body.
I’m better off sticking to water, but not sure I will.
So here’s a poem for this rainy day in a warring time:
(March 2005) I just spent the most wonderful hour doing karate catas this morning while looking out the window at the rain that is supposed to turn to snow as the day progresses. This does not bode well for the thirty or so flowers that are blooming in my yard.
Had two glasses of red wine while I worked on the Great American Novel last night. Haven’t had much to drink of late—a couple of beers watching basketball with pals maybe.
Either I didn’t drink enough water before bed or my body didn’t like the sulphites last night, because my head’s all stuffy today. Good reminder that drinking is, really, just putting poison into my body.
I’m better off sticking to water, but not sure I will.
So here’s a poem for this rainy day in a warring time:
THIS MORNING
by Muriel Rukeyser
Waking this morning,
a violent woman in the violent day
laughing.
Past the line of memory
along the long body of your life
in which move childhood, youth, your lifetime of touch,
eyes, lips, chest, belly, sex, legs, to the waves of the sheet.
I look past this little planet
on the city windowsill
to the tall towers’ bookshapes, crushed together in greed,
the river flashing flowing corroded,
the intricate harbor and the sea, the wars, the moon the planets
all who people space
in the sun visible invisible.
African violets in the light
breathing, in a breathing universe. I want strong peace, and delight,
the wild good.
I want to make my touch poems:
to find my morning, to find you entire
alive moving among the anti-touch people.
I say across the waves of the air to you:
today once more
I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking this world away
in this violent day
Friday, September 21, 2007
2. SITUATIONAL ETHICS
From the Archives
(March 2005) My friend Petra got mugged leaving work Wednesday night. A man rushed her as she walked to her car, grabbed her purse, and began punching her in the head.
Petra is a small woman with scant upper-body strength. She’s also an actor who knows how to project, and so she screamed ... and tried to run away ... and pushed him off of her ... and pounded on her office door ... and screamed some more ... and finally managed to break free and run.
She eventually made it back inside her office, but her jaw is broken, one eye is swollen shut, her forehead has goose-eggs all over it, and a shoulder is scraped and badly bruised.
Her husband Lee, a lawyer, said he can hardly bear the thought of one of his colleagues defending his wife’s attacker. He wants to ask that the man’s lawyer be appointed from another district.
If they find her attacker, that is.
Petra counsels addicts and is fairly certain that her attacker is a client in her building.
On Thursday, a bunch of us creative types met Lee and Petra at a pub where theater types hang out. We shared some vino, celebrated her escape, and offered support as best we could to someone who is trying to adjust to living in a different world.
Petra said she went into counseling because she wanted to make a difference in the world but, these days, she just feels jaded. Most of her clients never escape their addictions and their children grow up just as damaged as they are, to mostly repeat their parents’ lives.
She works grueling hours on a state employee’s salary and cares enough to stay late—which, frankly, she said, just leaves her vulnerable to attack.
She has resigned herself to the fact that she will probably not make a difference in most of her clients’ lives.
Dennis, who works with Petra, once opposed the death penalty in all cases. But then he met a boy who pounded a claw hammer into an eighty-year-old woman’s skull just so he could show off her Cadillac to his pals.
He's met too many people just like that boy—children with pop someone for a joyride or fifty cents—and so has come to doubt some people’s humanity (although he does recognize that their world may not provide the possibility of their humanity).
Now, if the evidence is overwhelming and the murderer is found guilty by a true jury of his or her peers, then Dennis believes that we ought to just go ahead and give the foreperson a gun and get it over with—save us and the criminal from himself.
(Wonder what he’ll do with the fact that, yesterday, the US Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for minors?)
•
I realized some time ago that I am the only one among my immediate circle of friends who cannot say with absolute conviction that I am always opposed to the death penalty.
I struggle with this issue. Sure, I understand that our justice system is blatantly racist, that innocent people sit on death row and that some of them will be executed not because they’re guilty but because they were born poor and could not afford decent representation.
I know that guilty people who can afford good representation can get away with murder because the hoards of people working on their cases are able to devote the energy required to find the inevitable technicality that spells freedom.
And I know that plenty of people are in jail because they grew up angry at a world they have every right to be angry at and then, not surprisingly, became the embodiment of that Audre Lorde poem about the disaffected teenager who becomes the ticking time bomb that will come due.
I know that, in the twenty-first century, there is money to be made from privatizing prisons and locking up whole segments of the population, and that this despicable form of social control is allowed to happen because, as a society, we have decided that some among us are expendable.
I know that plenty of businesspeople are happy to perpetuate this system because it allows them to rake in those privatization dollars. And everyone knows our rehab programs are a joke.
But here’s my problem with being 100 percent opposed to the death penalty: I have listened to cassette tapes of women being tortured to death and have stared into the eyes of the man who tortured them—a man who was, incidentally, wearing a Mork and Mindy T-shirt; someone who, in another circumstance, might be the guy behind you or me at the isolated all-night gas station. I also observed one of his victims' autopsies.
This man had already served a seven-year sentence for cutting a woman’s nipples off with a butcher knife when he kidnapped the woman whose autopsy I observed.
He raped and tortured and abused this woman over the course of several hours, then left her body in a field for wild dogs to eat.
This animal was fascinated with pain—which I suppose explains why he chose to tape-record her pleas and screams and sobs and gasps as he cut off her digits one knuckle at a time before skinning her alive. That was apparently not enough pain for him though, so he proceeded to pour salt onto her newly exposed skin and recorded her response as she lay there gasping and howling and bleeding to death in the dirt.
Later, he replayed those tapes, remembering.
I recognized his eyes the moment they caught my own. They’re the same eyes I saw when I visited my mother in the violent wards of mental hospitals. Goat eyes. One-dimensional eyes. Gone flat.
Those eyes scare the living shit out of me—especially when I see them on people walking freely down the street.
Some people on the violent wards are obsessed with their excrement—hurl it against the walls or fingerpaint with it. They bang their heads into the iron bars until they’re put into straitjackets, then bark and howl and reach through the bars for you as you walk by.
And, sadly, in some cases, whatever it is that makes most of us compassionate empathetic human beings is just permanently gone.
Maybe their violence is an outward projection of their own self-hatred or the hate their parents or the world projected onto them. Maybe they inherited the worst of both parents. Maybe they saw too much violence. Or maybe people were just too mean to them. Or maybe (to paraphrase a country song) they were just born bad.
And maybe medicine is never going to help.
Whatever the cause, some of us will always lack connection and will, instead, embody an unquenchable will to violence. And, if someone is unfortunate enough to encounter this person at an inopportune time, then she or he will become this person’s next victim.
•
The first thing colonists did when they settled a new place was build a church and a jail. They recognized how fragile communities are, the necessity of creating institutions that sustain and protect our fragile human connections. They recognized that some actions are so threatening to our connections that the people who commit these acts must be separated from others in order to protect the whole.
I read seventeenth-century English literature because I believe that we are at a similar cultural juncture. And I'm a poet who is prone to think in symbols and microcosms.
I imagine our country as a microcosm, a single colony of disparate but interconnected individuals existing in a fragile and destructible world where the violent results of unquenchable rage can damage and eventually un-tune the whole friggin’ spheres.
That's the Holocaust. That's Revelations.
My objection to the total elimination of the death penalty has nothing to do with revenge or the cost-to-profit ratio of the appeals process versus permanent incarceration, or the quest to understand what brain or hormonal or emotional abnormality destroys the human component of the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world.
Instead, I worry about the potential Machiavelli or Hitler in the rest of us. I worry that the risk a torturer’s potential escape poses to our society, the potential havoc he can wreak on our fragile connections, on our faith, is too great a threat for us to allow for that possibility.
(March 2005) My friend Petra got mugged leaving work Wednesday night. A man rushed her as she walked to her car, grabbed her purse, and began punching her in the head.
Petra is a small woman with scant upper-body strength. She’s also an actor who knows how to project, and so she screamed ... and tried to run away ... and pushed him off of her ... and pounded on her office door ... and screamed some more ... and finally managed to break free and run.
She eventually made it back inside her office, but her jaw is broken, one eye is swollen shut, her forehead has goose-eggs all over it, and a shoulder is scraped and badly bruised.
Her husband Lee, a lawyer, said he can hardly bear the thought of one of his colleagues defending his wife’s attacker. He wants to ask that the man’s lawyer be appointed from another district.
If they find her attacker, that is.
Petra counsels addicts and is fairly certain that her attacker is a client in her building.
On Thursday, a bunch of us creative types met Lee and Petra at a pub where theater types hang out. We shared some vino, celebrated her escape, and offered support as best we could to someone who is trying to adjust to living in a different world.
Petra said she went into counseling because she wanted to make a difference in the world but, these days, she just feels jaded. Most of her clients never escape their addictions and their children grow up just as damaged as they are, to mostly repeat their parents’ lives.
She works grueling hours on a state employee’s salary and cares enough to stay late—which, frankly, she said, just leaves her vulnerable to attack.
She has resigned herself to the fact that she will probably not make a difference in most of her clients’ lives.
Dennis, who works with Petra, once opposed the death penalty in all cases. But then he met a boy who pounded a claw hammer into an eighty-year-old woman’s skull just so he could show off her Cadillac to his pals.
He's met too many people just like that boy—children with pop someone for a joyride or fifty cents—and so has come to doubt some people’s humanity (although he does recognize that their world may not provide the possibility of their humanity).
Now, if the evidence is overwhelming and the murderer is found guilty by a true jury of his or her peers, then Dennis believes that we ought to just go ahead and give the foreperson a gun and get it over with—save us and the criminal from himself.
(Wonder what he’ll do with the fact that, yesterday, the US Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for minors?)
•
I realized some time ago that I am the only one among my immediate circle of friends who cannot say with absolute conviction that I am always opposed to the death penalty.
I struggle with this issue. Sure, I understand that our justice system is blatantly racist, that innocent people sit on death row and that some of them will be executed not because they’re guilty but because they were born poor and could not afford decent representation.
I know that guilty people who can afford good representation can get away with murder because the hoards of people working on their cases are able to devote the energy required to find the inevitable technicality that spells freedom.
And I know that plenty of people are in jail because they grew up angry at a world they have every right to be angry at and then, not surprisingly, became the embodiment of that Audre Lorde poem about the disaffected teenager who becomes the ticking time bomb that will come due.
I know that, in the twenty-first century, there is money to be made from privatizing prisons and locking up whole segments of the population, and that this despicable form of social control is allowed to happen because, as a society, we have decided that some among us are expendable.
I know that plenty of businesspeople are happy to perpetuate this system because it allows them to rake in those privatization dollars. And everyone knows our rehab programs are a joke.
But here’s my problem with being 100 percent opposed to the death penalty: I have listened to cassette tapes of women being tortured to death and have stared into the eyes of the man who tortured them—a man who was, incidentally, wearing a Mork and Mindy T-shirt; someone who, in another circumstance, might be the guy behind you or me at the isolated all-night gas station. I also observed one of his victims' autopsies.
This man had already served a seven-year sentence for cutting a woman’s nipples off with a butcher knife when he kidnapped the woman whose autopsy I observed.
He raped and tortured and abused this woman over the course of several hours, then left her body in a field for wild dogs to eat.
This animal was fascinated with pain—which I suppose explains why he chose to tape-record her pleas and screams and sobs and gasps as he cut off her digits one knuckle at a time before skinning her alive. That was apparently not enough pain for him though, so he proceeded to pour salt onto her newly exposed skin and recorded her response as she lay there gasping and howling and bleeding to death in the dirt.
Later, he replayed those tapes, remembering.
I recognized his eyes the moment they caught my own. They’re the same eyes I saw when I visited my mother in the violent wards of mental hospitals. Goat eyes. One-dimensional eyes. Gone flat.
Those eyes scare the living shit out of me—especially when I see them on people walking freely down the street.
Some people on the violent wards are obsessed with their excrement—hurl it against the walls or fingerpaint with it. They bang their heads into the iron bars until they’re put into straitjackets, then bark and howl and reach through the bars for you as you walk by.
And, sadly, in some cases, whatever it is that makes most of us compassionate empathetic human beings is just permanently gone.
Maybe their violence is an outward projection of their own self-hatred or the hate their parents or the world projected onto them. Maybe they inherited the worst of both parents. Maybe they saw too much violence. Or maybe people were just too mean to them. Or maybe (to paraphrase a country song) they were just born bad.
And maybe medicine is never going to help.
Whatever the cause, some of us will always lack connection and will, instead, embody an unquenchable will to violence. And, if someone is unfortunate enough to encounter this person at an inopportune time, then she or he will become this person’s next victim.
•
The first thing colonists did when they settled a new place was build a church and a jail. They recognized how fragile communities are, the necessity of creating institutions that sustain and protect our fragile human connections. They recognized that some actions are so threatening to our connections that the people who commit these acts must be separated from others in order to protect the whole.
I read seventeenth-century English literature because I believe that we are at a similar cultural juncture. And I'm a poet who is prone to think in symbols and microcosms.
I imagine our country as a microcosm, a single colony of disparate but interconnected individuals existing in a fragile and destructible world where the violent results of unquenchable rage can damage and eventually un-tune the whole friggin’ spheres.
That's the Holocaust. That's Revelations.
My objection to the total elimination of the death penalty has nothing to do with revenge or the cost-to-profit ratio of the appeals process versus permanent incarceration, or the quest to understand what brain or hormonal or emotional abnormality destroys the human component of the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world.
Instead, I worry about the potential Machiavelli or Hitler in the rest of us. I worry that the risk a torturer’s potential escape poses to our society, the potential havoc he can wreak on our fragile connections, on our faith, is too great a threat for us to allow for that possibility.
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